Between Avenues A and B

 

Christie Orr 2189 W. Bowler St. Chicago, Illinois 60612., were the words written below Mayor Daley’s signature as I stood eyeing the security personal near the dugout. With my legs ‘at ease’, and my right arm crossed over my chest I sang; ‘Oh say can you see, by the dawns early light’, the necessary action and embodied expression of the stirring solidarity I felt towards the cohorts on the diamond around me. In that moment it was the only truthful thing to do, but it felt disloyal: my right arm, though vital and contextually justified, felt like a lie.

As a ‘legal alien’ living in America, for fear of arrest, I tended not to get involved in any sort of activism. However, the medical district were proposing to build what would likely be yet another redundant facility on the site where one of the last remaining playing fields the Near West little league had, stood. I’m no Chicagoan, but having twice accepted Bobbie Muzikowski’s offers to come out there, Chicago’s inner city kids represent some aspect of myself that belonged if not to them, than at least with them. Thus, I would have easily done much more than sign a petition and join a demonstration if it meant saving their field. But was it about them, or about my need to play savior? Was I another patronizing Florence Nightingale, romanticizing the plights of othered peoples and ‘glamorizing’ their struggles in a way that justified my taking action on their behalf—where I might not have for those at home—an injustice I find abhorrent. I’m sure I would care as much if this was Otara and not Chicago. Though its hard to ignore that I identified with these kids in a way that’s surprising, given that, superficially at least, we are so different. Arm crossed over chest or not, something that seemed valid appeared to be going on, a process that involved the fundamentals of my identity, which were more fluid and contradictory than stable and cohesive. Internally and externally, as a living metaphor for the things of old, two identities collided, each trying to occupy the same land.

As a kid I was sporty, a daydreamer, and lousy at academics. At an age when I was protected from understanding that last clause, and how it would come to inform my identity by being added to what I already knew about myself, and, while I was still unable to read the words and terms of nationhood, I was none the less extremely patriotic. This patriotism wasn’t something that was nurtured in me: from about age three I would get up on the weekends, and before the cartoons started watch the montage of New Zealand vistas set to the backdrop of our national anthem and another song—the name of which I’ve never been able to figure out. Following that, at about 5:30am, it was my custom to stand on my top bunk, the doors and windows to my room spread wide, and sing as loud as my lungs would allow these two songs. “New Zealand, Ranga Tu Tu Ru, it’s a part of me that no one else can know!”, I would yell-sing, my fist waving foot stomping pride and joy never lacking in enthusiasm. It must have been a spectacle, what with my bowl haircut and Wombles pajamas. What I never got until I was much older was why mum would come in her nighty and angrily slam my door closed. 

Like all kids, my sister and I stole each other’s toys. And, no sooner had I learnt the phrase ‘possession is nine tenths of the law’ than I enthusiastically set about putting it into practice. This had mixed results, and may partly explain why I spent so many hours up the branches of the weeping willow that lazed, spread out over our back lawn. On the rare occasion Tiffiny climbed the willow when I was already there, it never occurred to me to use my new favourite phrase: even as a child nature seemed to have a sacredness that put it beyond the reach of human ideas of entitlement; its sanctity preserving it as ‘out of bounds’ in terms of my own jurisdiction. Sure, I protected my dreamy experience within the willow’s arms, and Tiff instinctually knew that her older sister authority carried no weight whilst there, but I never felt like I owned the tree, even though I was there first, nor did Tiff, and thus a peaceful kind of truce existed there.

In New Zealand it can be argued that Maori have more legitimate rights regarding much of New Zealand’s land than New Zealanders of purely European decent. I’m slightly sympathetic to that argument, though I’m not totally clear as to why. To me it seems like colonization is not as much a matter of resources but experience: a person’s rights to their own autonomous experience, culture and identity is what’s at stake. Perhaps, rather than issues regarding land, the colonization of the mind and soul, of culture and identity is the deepest offence of colonization. Experience, though, is hard to separate from material things such as land, and maybe that is why I am sympathetic to the above proposition regarding New Zealanders and land ‘rights’. As a descendant of the colonizers of New Zealand, this places me in an awkward position. If I give up my land, and with it my makeshift, borrowed, or hybridized cultural identity to whose land and identity should I, could I, reasonably cling?

The meaning of my Hebrew name, יעל (Yael), is usually described as ‘a beautiful and gracious mountain goat’. יעל was also the name of the heroine of Shoftim (Judges IV) who rammed a tent peg into the temple of the sleeping captain of the Canaanite enemy.

Aroma Café in Soho is open 24 hours and frequented by students who are ‘pulling all-nighters’, many of whom are Jewish. Aviv, whom I met there, initially referred to himself as Jewish, but after explaining how hard life would be for him if he returned to Israel, given that he did not serve in the army at eighteen, he now describes himself to me as Israeli. I was surprised, explaining that many  New Zealanders might be more likely to connect the term ‘Israeli’ with conflict rather than with the avoidance of it. Moreover, I had to admit that growing up I had often failed to relate the terms ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jewish’ with each other. Though they see it as a promise fulfilled, Israel does not wholly belong to the Jewish people, and they have a history of being expelled from it. Yiddish, for example, which is spoken mainly in Eastern Europe, is the only language in the world not to have a specific land associated with it.

Despite feeling an affinity with the Jewish culture, I am, amongst other things, Scottish, French, Danish, and English. As such, I have a hard time excepting that the privileges of, in particular English citizenry, which it could be argued are technically as much mine as they are the Queens, should remain by law so estranged from me. Other than the fact that we pay taxes to the Crown, there’s doesn’t seem to be much common about the Commonwealth. That said, I’m not about to ask her Majesty for a plot of my own in York. Although, surely some hospitality beyond the much loved O.E. could be afforded by her to the culturally displaced. If not the rights and protections of English citizenry, then surely were I to find a decent beach in say Brighton and Hove, would it be too much to ask for the right to live and bathe there as long as my as my life and togs hold out?

Perhaps I could be accused of conflating the rights of European-New Zealanders with those of Maori-New Zealanders.  Although, while perhaps not to the same extent, surely the cultural experience of European-New Zealanders and their access to a sense of cultural identity was also compromised by the colonizing of this good land. Issues regarding resources are concerning primarily as they implicate our relationship with and experience of a place: even as the historical second comer I would like to preserve the right to dig up Tuatua’s with my feet from time to time.

Growing up I was most commonly told that ‘Pakeha’ meant ‘grey ghost’, and it never occurred to me to be offended by that, but regardless of meaning, ‘Pakeha’ is still someone else’s name for me, not my name for myself. That an unanimous decision be reached by European-New Zealanders as to what to call ourselves is unlikely to ocur and not even part of common public discourse is telling, negatively defined, we are the absence of culture, fractured units without cohesion we see ourselves as mongrels and leave it at that. It’s likely that upon arriving here, colonisers made up their own names for Maori, and sadly, due in part to ignorance, those names may well have been far more offensive than the worst interpretations of the term ‘Pakeha’. (Such acts are inherent to the colonisation of the mind as much as to culture per se). However, if I’m part of the dominant group in New Zealand’s society, the yardstick by which other cultures have had to comply, why cant I make out my own peoples voice? What land calls me its own, and to whom do I belong?

Eulalie, my first landlady in New York, was a slim Jamaican woman of eighty-nine, who lived on the bottom floor of our Harlem brownstone with her older brother Edward—who is known as Junior. On my first day there, Eulalie told me that Junior and her were the last living relatives each other had: that when Junior passed she would be completely alone. Every couple of days I would fetch two gallons of drinking water for them, and a couple of times a day I would make sure Junior was propped up in his bed because Eulalie was much too frail to do either. Despite being bedridden Junior was spirited and his white teeth shone with all the strength of a twenty-one year old Sammy Davis. He was a charmer, and I’m told a suave dancer. “I’m doing mighty fine my dear, how you doing?”, he’d wink when I greeted him, and moments  later, from the next room, Eulalie would explain to me about his pain, and that he was dying. One morning when I came downstairs to visit him, I found Junior’s bed empty. Its sheets were white and clean, tightly tucked over its mattress, as though none had ever laid on them, and during the long hot days that lead up to the funeral I began to feel guilty for feeling that part of my story had died also.

The first place I lived in New York was Apt 2A, 528 East 13^th St, between avenue’s A and B. It was Renee’s, the daughter of a family friends apartment, and I stayed there two weeks while she was away in London. When asked by an Irish friend of ours at a gig in Central Park what makes someone ‘a New Yorker’, I replied “that they come from somewhere else—unless that place is Nebraska or Florida—in which case they’re not New Yorker’s, just pains in the ass”. Us New Yorkers laughed with a knowing grunt, while the Irishman just looked bemused. Wait, you’re not a New Yorker, you might say. I’m not an American, I’m a Kiwi, but not a New Yorker? Renee was almost a New Yorker, she lived there as long, if not longer than I, but remained for the most part a Kiwi living in New York. I put this down to the scope and intensity of her interaction with the city, rather than birth rights or the duration of her stay. Some live in New York twenty years without becoming New Yorkers, others are New Yorkers after only a few months. Some of us, the lucky ones like myself, may have always been New Yorkers, but are only now ‘coming out’.

So I’m part New Yorker, so what? But that’s not the end of the story, not by a long shot, because it’s a part of my identity that has a lot less purchase now that I am back in New Zealand. About three months after I returned here I was invited to what I was told was a “Natives Party”. And, after forgiving the hosts for the horrid example of the trinketization of culture that such a party theme provokes, I decided to attend, and so began the business of imagining what kind of a native I was. I imagined Albert Park around the time of the Chinese New Year, with instead of a Lantern Festival, a ‘European New Zealanders’ festival taking place. I pictured people gaily celebrating their heritage and traditions—like the lantern folk do currently—but had difficulty imagining what such a festival in practice might look like. What would the food stalls sell? What about arts and crafts? Who would come? And why? How, if at all, would spin-doctors spin the story in the media? In the end it was just too hard, I didn’t have a kilt, a statue of Hans Christian Anderson, a beret, or time to whip up some ‘bangers and mash’. I was low on time and costume resources and the party was at a flat that I didn’t care too much about being invited back to, so I dug around in my mum’s garage and ended up going in my old St Cuths uniform, as a “Native of Remuera”. Had this been the States none would have cared, but apparently these people didn’t much care for my outfit and consequently some rather uppity comments were added to photos of me on Facebook.

‘Game Theory’ proposes a set of rules for resolving various situations and conflicts. In a ‘zero-sum’ game a win for one team represents a loss of the same amount for the other. In an increasingly multicultural world, people cannot afford to play zero-sum games: so long as each person’s experience is respected, both sisters can enjoy the willow tree. So too for identity, a win for the New Yorker in me does not necessitate a loss for my Kiwi identity. It does not follow, however, that I am merely the sum of these parts. Different identities, like cultures, rub up against each other, but rather than cancelling each other out, like iron sharpens iron, their conflict holds us accountable to resolve apparent untruths or contradictions that point to aspects of our identity which no longer ring true. Such processes refine us, tunning how we understand and relate to the world. My identity is not place specific. The world changes, I change, and few things remain concrete. We may grow together, or apart, but to remain truthful we must have the humility and insight to perpetually adjust.