national identity 'n' me
I'm dead on my feet but for some reason I have this in me and I thought I'd start. Listening to Tim Hus 'So Long Saskachewan' and thinking, as I seem to be doing a lot of late, about national identity. My own is both complex and thin if you look at in the usual way.
In this song Tim sings about leaving Saskachewan with the knowledge that the way of life is changing there (it seems that that is the reason for the leaving in the song, I don't know) so it's a double-leaving, and it always is - I don't know why I didn't realise this before - it's always a double leaving, things are never the same when you go back, a way of life is always over when you leave. Anyway, he sings about all those things that you know about a place when you live there - "29 fence-posts to the mail box". And how even these things can change too. When I go back to Dublin these days so much has changed, is gone, has been added. The pier at Dun Laoghaire where I walked as a child is still there, and so is (I think) the bandstand. But there's a huge fancy new development around it and a bunch of coffee shops and restaurants that were never there before. There's a multi-screen cinema right there when we used to have to walk to The Forum in Glasthule where they had an interval long after they were fashionable. I'm being nostalgic aren't I? But this nostalgia is the closest thing I have to a sense of national identity I think. And I have it about multiple places. I have it about Ireland, both Dublin and the South-East where my mother lives now. I have it about England, though in a less specific way. I don't have it about Australia but I do about Taiwan. Big time. I still think about those cool tiles under my hot feet. Like the farming community of Tim Hus' Saskachewan, the English teaching community I knew isn't there anymore. A typhoon destroyed our old favourite camping spot in the mountains a couple of years ago. The beach LJ and I spent so many blissful days lounging on is no longer the swimming spot of choice apparantly. The Dublin of my childhood and early adulthood is a very different place these days too. But I still have some of it in me, and I want to call it a connection to the land which is certainly a connection to the land in its earthy, peaty sense but also a connection to the less pastoral - to the smell of Cho Dofu and exhaust at a nightmarket, to the electric water-heater in (yes in) my shower, to the laughs of my girlfriends after a few glasses of wine. And of course there are the many many shades of green that have such particular significances. So these connections are the things that make me Irish but also English and a little bit Taiwanese too. This is the best way I can find to make sense of my nationality. The 'traditional' definitions, like size-three shoes, just don't fit me.
I wonder will I add 'Canadian' to the mix down the road?
In this song Tim sings about leaving Saskachewan with the knowledge that the way of life is changing there (it seems that that is the reason for the leaving in the song, I don't know) so it's a double-leaving, and it always is - I don't know why I didn't realise this before - it's always a double leaving, things are never the same when you go back, a way of life is always over when you leave. Anyway, he sings about all those things that you know about a place when you live there - "29 fence-posts to the mail box". And how even these things can change too. When I go back to Dublin these days so much has changed, is gone, has been added. The pier at Dun Laoghaire where I walked as a child is still there, and so is (I think) the bandstand. But there's a huge fancy new development around it and a bunch of coffee shops and restaurants that were never there before. There's a multi-screen cinema right there when we used to have to walk to The Forum in Glasthule where they had an interval long after they were fashionable. I'm being nostalgic aren't I? But this nostalgia is the closest thing I have to a sense of national identity I think. And I have it about multiple places. I have it about Ireland, both Dublin and the South-East where my mother lives now. I have it about England, though in a less specific way. I don't have it about Australia but I do about Taiwan. Big time. I still think about those cool tiles under my hot feet. Like the farming community of Tim Hus' Saskachewan, the English teaching community I knew isn't there anymore. A typhoon destroyed our old favourite camping spot in the mountains a couple of years ago. The beach LJ and I spent so many blissful days lounging on is no longer the swimming spot of choice apparantly. The Dublin of my childhood and early adulthood is a very different place these days too. But I still have some of it in me, and I want to call it a connection to the land which is certainly a connection to the land in its earthy, peaty sense but also a connection to the less pastoral - to the smell of Cho Dofu and exhaust at a nightmarket, to the electric water-heater in (yes in) my shower, to the laughs of my girlfriends after a few glasses of wine. And of course there are the many many shades of green that have such particular significances. So these connections are the things that make me Irish but also English and a little bit Taiwanese too. This is the best way I can find to make sense of my nationality. The 'traditional' definitions, like size-three shoes, just don't fit me.
I wonder will I add 'Canadian' to the mix down the road?
