by Peter Wells
Well, I’ve looked at David Goodhart’s book (The Road to Somewhere – The New Tribes Shaping British Politics: 2017) and I’m obviously an Anywhere. [All quotes are from the Kindle edition]. “They tend to do well at school [Well, reasonably], then usually move from home to a residential university in their late teens [Yes] and on to a career in the professions [Teaching] that might take them to London or even abroad [Yes, indeed] for a year or two [or eighteen!]. Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people [Generally!].”
My father was lifted out of the conservative background of his family by several years of residential higher education, had a job which caused us to move every three or four years, and wired the house to broadcast BBC Radio 4 (or its predecessor, the Home Service) to every room. My infant toys included female as well as male dolls, and, what’s more, one of the females was a little black girl! (Don’t be condescending – we’re talking the late 40s!) The first black person I met was an African student on homestay with us, who shed light for me on the mysteries of Latin grammar (I returned the compliment by teaching Latin to Zimbabweans five years later!). (Sorry! I meant well!)
So I pass Goodhart’s worldview test: “This [sc. Anywhereism] is a worldview for more or less successful individuals [Check, though rather less than more!] who also care about society [Check]. It places a high value on autonomy, mobility and novelty [Check] and a much lower value on group identity, tradition and national social contracts (faith, flag and family) [Check]. Most Anywheres are comfortable with immigration, European integration and the spread of human rights legislation [Check]. They … see themselves as citizens of the world [Check 110%!].”
The privileges opened up to me by this certification were immense. Repeatedly during my career I was able to enter the ‘alien’ environments of foreign countries, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East – not as a tourist but as a resident, worker, colleague, neighbour and friend. Seeing how people of a different culture live, think, laugh, learn, befriend, commute, pay, greet, and grieve, enabled me to put my own attitudes and presuppositions into perspective. I realised that what had looked to me like a central and obvious norm was just the point of view that I happened to have been brought up with. My wife and I were offered a glimpse of at least five very distinctive ways to live, instead of the sole option that most people are granted. More than anything else, this is what makes working abroad a joy and delight. The elusive quality of a national culture defies stereotyping. Like the flavour of a loved one’s cooking, it is itself. Africans, Arabs, Japanese are not reducible to epithets: they are what they are. A spouse who has had the same experience will know what you mean when you say, “That’s just like Oman / Malawi / Japan, isn’t it.” Our friends have no idea what we are talking about! You can, of course, obtain a similar experience by visiting a different part of your own country, or even someone else’s house, but for the full culture shock you need to change countries! Read more »
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Individual poems by Vilariño have occasionally appeared in anthologies of Latin American poetry in the United States, but not until now, more than a decade after her death and in the centennial year of her birth, has one of her books appeared in English translation. Unsurprisingly, it is her best-known work, Poemas de amor / Love Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), in a translation by the poet Jesse Lee Kercheval. The literary scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Yale professor who wrote influential treatises on 
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