coffee grounds

My past is a foreign country

It starts with fruit cake, because everyone can understand fruit cake.

Before I went "home" to New Zealand for the first time, after 3.5 years away I had a little crisis of confidence about what I'd confidently been telling Americans, that fruit cake was the Christmas and wedding cake of choice in Australasia (and Britain), and that it was wildly popular. (The secret is the alcohol, as the Temperance Union sort of knew.) Then as the departure date approached I wondered ... what if it had just been my family? what if my memory was misleading me? what if people didn't really eat it so much?

Three and a half years is not exactly a long time away from home, but it's long enough that you can start to forget what things were like, and lose touch. It was enough to make me see why some countries restrict their diplomats to being away for no longer than four years, except in special circumstances. How can you credibly represent a country you've really only vacationed in during the last few years?

I was reminded of these thoughts the other day when meeting some people who were moving to Wellington (from whence I came five years ago). I expounded rather confidently on what the city was like. The weather has likely not changed much, nor the steep topography, but the music scene? the restaurants? Well, it sure used to be good! Perhaps it still is. I will remember it that way until I next live there for a while.

One of the points that David Lowenthal makes in his book, or at least that I took from his book, The Past is a Foreign Country is that living in a place now doesn't privilege your understanding of the history of the place. America in 1920 is pretty much as foreign to most Americans as it is to me.

The converse is also true; after you've lived somewhere and moved away you're always carrying around a somewhat frozen picture of where you used to be. It amused me when I visited America around the time of the Clinton impeachment that I was occasionally asked what "the rest of the world thought about [impeachment]." That made me laugh because I didn't have much ability to speak for the Africans and the Asians and the remaining 99.95% of the world. But I would have quite confidently extrapolated my own views to what New Zealanders thought. More fool, me.

Six years on I'd hesitate a little more before I'd even generalize some things about where I grew up. The view I have of New Zealand is pretty much frozen in 2000 (last century! if you think of it like that), and will probably remain that way for a while.

While outsiders and travelers can often draw a scintillating portrait of the places they go—precisely because they are standing a little outside the society they're commenting on—I wonder if expatriates can do the same with their home country (and you can substitute far-flung states for countries, if you like). I have thought that over time it all became clearer in retrospect, the essence of the place, its mores and manners.

Now I'm not so sure that is does become clearer. If you go back you can be Tocqueville at home. But if you stay away, you're really just re-arranging your own memories of the place, and fashioning them into a seemingly more coherent story. Seeming is important, but it isn't being, and it isn't understanding. Memories can delude, until your own past life becomes nostalgia.

But I was right about the fruit cake. It really is good, and they/we really do eat it. Ain't the Empire grand?

Posted by robe0419 at August 5, 2005 02:45 PM | TrackBack