Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had myself a lagan love, a fair darling girl descended from Charlemagne and many Earls and Dukes besides, and cheeks rosy as the spring, a neck white like apple blossoms, eyes like lilacs. And as all loves which are ill-starred grow, bloom, and die, so too did this one. And many months later, upon happening to see her, my old Amelia, she told me that she had gone out "on a few dates" (microbrewery tastings? Food carts with gourmet yams for only $17.50 in Davis Square? Ice-cream made from civet shit?) with a guy who was from the Town of N______, nearby, but who wasn't like me, was "a real South Shore guy."
--- Meaning what, I asked.
--- You know, more the preppy, SUV, soccer-playing type of guy.
--- I see. I don't know that that's what constitutes the real South Shore, I said, in a rare bit of tact.
What I ought to have said was:
"What do you, a mere transplant, a veritable nomad of the American upper middle class, beholden to no place and loving no place deeply and knowing no place deeply -- what do you know of the true South Shore, the place that was created over centuries by eyes both Wampanoag and English, Irish and Brazilian? What do you know of the pines and the ponds, the marshes and the swamps, the way the ice washing ashore makes a strange sighing in darkest winter? Why, you don't know it, you don't know it at all! Not at all! Mark ye this: the Yuppie invasion, and colonisation of all things -- an invasion of which you are part -- has come to this shore, too; and this invasion, this human red tide, has washed up soccer-playing preppie SUV d-bags, and set them down in alien cul-de-sacs, and obscured what this land was, is, and will be. So when you speak of this infestation as more "the Real South Shore" than this eccentric Swamp Yankee scholar -- then, Madam, you show how profound is your ignorance of the lands you make a habit of colonising. Remember, every Raj has its 1857 -- and eventually, the colonised get their independence. Do you understand? Our independence!"
Welcome aboard the rollercoaster of blogging, Novanglus. I find the act of writing for an immediate audience, however small, to be katharsis from the interminable Sisyphean struggle of writing a 400-page master piece.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your sentiment in this post. But as the son of two middle class American migrants, and on my mother's side, migrants nearly each of 5 generations in America — and a migrant myself — I ask: How do we practically create a historical space and identity, when it is constantly awash in the acid tide of global capital? And how can this concept practically emerge from the gates of the museum?