Beyond exile - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Christine Zorzi
EXILE IS A RELATIONSHIP TO PEOPLE AND PLACE. It's a two-way street. Each culture responds in its own way to those who leave the fold. I was surprised on my visit to Italy to learn how easy it would be for me to gain Italian citizenship. They seemed delighted that I might want to identify as Italian. In contrast, Japan does not forgive her prodigal children. During the Olympics some years ago, an American-born skier of Japanese descent had her name "Yamaguchi" spelled out, in a deliberate slight, in katakana – the alphabet used for foreign words, rather than the kanji reserved for "truly Japanese" names. America, a land of immigrants whose mosaic plurality accommodates the complexity of its history, is wholly neutral to its expatriates. They can come and go as they like.
One might imagine Australians would have a particular understanding of what it means to be far from home. But historically, perhaps because of our isolation, the Australian who leaves is gone and all but forgotten. The revenant is considered interesting for about a minute. Australia has, until now, had a strained relationship with her expatriates.
Ironically, as a country principally peopled by immigrants, Australia has not looked kindly on people who leave and is, at best, indifferent to the repatriated. The Australian artist David Rankin (now resident in New York) commented at a gathering: "There are only two countries which consider you a traitor if you don't go home: Israel and Australia."
Art critic Robert Hughes, on returning to Australia, drove on the wrong side of a country road, had a terrible accident and was badly injured. He reacted defensively and was roundly vilified by the press. Could there be a more poignant metaphor for the disorientation of the repatriate, and the resentment of those who never left home?
The first generation, and some of the best known of our expats, including writers such as Hughes and Germaine Greer, judged Australian society harshly when they left and in turn were very harshly judged. Like the painful end to a love affair, separation was marked by passions and recrimination on both sides.
They bemoaned the confines of Australian culture, as much as they celebrated the opportunities of their adopted homelands. They took issue with our sports-mad national character, our cultural cringe and ethnocentrism, perhaps in the hope of change. Like early activists in a social movement, they used sharp tools and harsh words to cut a swathe through complacency and shine some clarity on the morass of emotion and circumstance around the "cultural refugee" and their relationship to home. In the process of pointing out the flaws in the Australian national character that drove them away, they became somewhat alienated.
We come after this first generation of expatriates. They named names and now we have a conceptual vocabulary to use more quietly at the negotiating table. Our generation, like latter-day feminists who have returned to a reinvented institution of marriage as well as the six-centimetre stiletto, can embrace a more complex relationship with home. As the benefactors of their bravery and belligerence, we can see what hurtful parting words should not be said for the risk of regret. Their pioneering has left us with the gift of hindsight and a valuable opportunity to keep the patriotism in the expatriate.
Having said that, we should still have the courage to talk candidly about why we went away. The pull of New York is well known. The push from Australia is less openly discussed. Cultural cringe is an issue on the wane, I think. Our food, literature and design flourish at the highest levels of artistry and industry. But, for many women (and some men) I know, the push from Australia still has much to do with gender. Australia – our gulag in paradise – remains in some respects an English prison culture where men cling together in their exile and women are neither familiar nor welcome. This is by no means the universal experience of Queensland women. But I would live in Brisbane right now if it had not been mine.
Come, come, return; return, thou wandering lord:
Charles and the rest will take thee in their arms.
– Shakespeare
HISTORICALLY, EXILE ENDS WITH THE RETURN HOME. Dorothy clicks her heels and is reunited with a teary Aunty Em. The prodigal son returns to the fattened calf. The challenge for my generation of Australians, whether the scattered among us return home, orbit or stay away, is to put an end to exile no matter where we might be. To fracture the connection – so fundamental to Australia's history– between geography and exclusion. If not physically reunited, Australia and her departed citizens must at least be reconciled. The clock should not start on your Australian-ness the moment your foot leaves Australian soil. Something more than technology is needed.
Having your feet in Oz and your heart in Kansas; to be an Australian in New York requires feats of illogic, leaps of faith and a healthy dose of poetry. To maintain cultural identity and loyalty while embracing a new place and people is not an easy challenge. It is a parallel universe, a pluralist life. It will take resources, resolve and imagination to carry it off. Let's hope we can find solutions to the tyranny of distance that will open Australia to the world, and the world to Australia, through her own people. That will allow a new conception of citizenship, one that is connected and responsible, bonded to place but not wholly contingent on domicile.
The journey of my grandfather was at once a painful and permanent wrenching away. He left Veneto – and his sister – never to see them again. He could not afford the luxury of looking back and so Italy remained an unspoken sadness his entire life. The next generation of my family came and went in fifteen-year cycles, moving linearly from one country to the other. Mine is the first generation with the opportunity to transcend the constraints of national borders. For all but the exceedingly wealthy, the idea of bi-continentalism was unimaginable until very recently. But my cohorts and I can imagine, and are working to realise, a life where we are citizens of the City State of New York and the Country of Australia. The relationship between Australia and her people abroad is in flux and it is only if we keep talking to each other that we can ensure it gets stronger as it gets more complex.
It is a huge leap to envisage oneself not as merely adrift, but as a fully formed bi-continental Australian. We need, and are trying to build, a matrix of technologies, resources, networks, states of mind and habits of being that will allow us to be wholly Australian, firmly rooted in Australian soil, regardless of where we live. We are reading, observing, thinking, talking, dreaming and organising, investing a large portion of our resources and energy trying to reimagine our character and obligations as Australians in orbit. We are busting a boiler to stay connected. Now all we need is word from home. ♦