by Richard Farr
In 2001, in order to become an American citizen, I had to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”
Abjure. Prince. Potentate. That this vocabulary from the 1790s persisted as a vehicle for solemnity was appropriate, no doubt. It also struck me as droll, in the circumstances: it was so stereotypically English. And the abjuration itself was a shame because up to then I’d always found Queen Elizabeth (or Mrs Windsor, as we liked to call her) an unfailingly pleasant and undemanding potentate. But for the sake of George II — the American potentate at the time, from whom I received a very nice letter of welcome — abjure I must.
Or perhaps in one sense I could not? For there was a detail I neglected to disclose, or couldn’t find the words to disclose, at my citizenship interview. I had lived in the United States for nearly twenty years at that point. I had acquired an American wife and American sons, and been called out by my sister on the inevitable accent shift: “You’ve started to say ‘pay-us the buddr.’”
Yet I felt as English as the day I arrived.
I wrote a poem about that first day. It being tolerably short and piercingly relevant — and because the 40th anniversary bears down apace — I’m going to subject you to it:
New World (August 12, 1984)
That first hot morning in America,
I wandered the hills of a college town,
looking for a new life’s rented room,
reeling like a dancer from the jetlag.
I remember steep streets, Kojak cars, and
a shirt that clung to my back like a child;
the foreignness of gardens without flowers,
and the strange politeness of strangers.
But memory captures clearest what at first
I couldn’t parse: the bottle-openers.
Galvanized. Gray. One nailed to every porch—
yet why so large, so strange, so oddly placed?
At one house (no one there) I crossed the grass,
approached the painted steps, and peered behind
a shrub; could see the owner, in my mind,
leaning out to crack a frosted Bud.
I found no confirmation in the weeds,
no rusting midden of discarded caps.
What could these odd devices really be?
Was this new country truly so obscure?
I walked a block, defeated in the heat.
Then the wind rose to cool my dripping back, and
Across the street, on someone else’s porch,
a striped flag, chuckling, showed me my mistake.
Like me, most people who come to live in the United States remain foreigners for years—aliens, in the humiliating local style. But sooner or later immigrants are expected to do their bit for the Ellis Island mythology. They stand before a judge, wear their new national pride like a boxy jacket they plan to grow into, and pledge themselves to a new identity. Afterwards, paradoxically, tradition demands that they do their bit for the glory of the Republic by becoming so garishly Irish-American or Italian-American or Montenegrin-American that people in the Old Country are embarrassed to death by the spectacle.
When I showed up for my interview over 100 people from 23 countries were waiting to become hyphenated Americans. No doubt many of them were feeling nervous or joyful or both. But the Ellis Island business didn’t translate well into my native language. I hadn’t flown west to escape anything except perhaps Margaret Thatcher. I came to get a degree; got a job; got married. The existential epiphany was missing, and it was missing in part because the whole idea of an “English-American” was absurd. What traditional costume could I possibly wear? At what drunken commemoration could I throw up on it? The truth was this: I did not have it in me to perform the switch. I could not become an American of even a hyphenated kind. And this was — but how could I explain this? — absolutely not because I was ungrateful for the opportunity to assume the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, much less because of a lingering secret allegiance to (as we also called her) Muriel. It was because the metamorphosis (the point of the exercise, or so I assumed) was not in my power.
I had grasped this years earlier, near the end of a two-thousand mile drive. We’d decided to move back to my wife’s hometown. While she flew ahead with the baby I would haul our stuff westward. Or Westward. I would cross the continent in a covered wagon of sorts. And this long-distance migration was surely the mythopoeic national ritual that would turn me into an American at last? I grasped at the cultural straw.
We were young and not rich, but our houseful of accumulated crap ran well beyond an iron skillet and a bedroll. I’ve seen those covered wagons, so much frailer and smaller and more pitiful in fact than anything we can now easily imagine. Our belongings would have overwhelmed a train of them. In addition to the small mountain of books, clothes, and cheap particleboard furniture, we owned several metric tons of baby paraphernalia. And this being the late 1990s: a slow cooker, a set of three Motorola cordless telephones, an answering machine, a little-used NordicTrack, a Marantz five-disk CD changer, three big boxes of CDs, black plastic racks for the CDs from K-Mart, piles of yellow Kodak envelopes filled with baby snapshots and their negatives, huge teetering stacks of National Geographic and Gourmet and Scientific American, a desktop brontosaurus from COMPAQ with floppies for yet again reinstalling Windows 3.1.
I rented a 24-foot diesel behemoth the color of old lemon peel. A GMC TopKick LoPro: it sounded like advice in an invented language from an Anthony Burgess novel to combine violence with cunning. I backed it up to the house and managed, barely, to stuff everything in. Higgins, our golden retriever, climbed up and sat next to me in the cab. I considered renaming him Blue, or Rover, but didn’t. I hit I-90 with a light heart, high as a kite on Country.
Crossing the flat Mid we encountered tumbleweeds for the first time; a couple of days later, in low gear and generating smoke like an ocean liner, we dropped to 10 mph to climb the passes of the madly buckled West. We left the freeway for cross-country detours whenever it even half made sense. We stopped for pee breaks in Montana towns I’d heard of only in old cowboy movies.
It was this last phenomenon — the exotic hidden in the ordinary, like Dom Perignon in the Gatorade bottle — that gave the game away. I had wanted to see if I could become an American. In order to succeed I would have to start finding ordinary America ordinary. In fact though, the longer I lived in America the more delightfully foreign its ordinary things became.
The endless refills of coffee. The political system, the educational system, and the electrical system. The politeness, the cheerfulness, the brashness, and the optimism. The twangy, doleful, oppressively benign music. The Fourth of July barbecues and Thanksgiving pies. The very concept of a hometown. Across the vastness of the plains — “the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name” — anvil-shaped thunderheads being towed into place by the wind like giant painted stage flats on invisible wheels. People going to school at a college. Ordinary words with an antique ring like automobile and beverage. The sports jargon, too: such a pity, I always think, that real Americans can never experience the visceral thrill of the foreign in expressions like southpaw, bunt, and wide receiver.
There was a deeper problem though. The very idea of acquiring a new identity was another item on the list — was itself quintessentially American.
It wasn’t that I was homesick for the English newspapers or felt the urge to seek out other people with wonky teeth so that we could exchange royal family gossip and complain to one another about how badly Americans made tea. The U.S. was lousy with people like that. They were always called Nigel or Cynthia, referred to themselves as “expats,” and half-wished they weren’t here. I’ve always avoided them. No no: I loved the Americanness of America. But I was forced to love it from the outside because my Englishness was a brute fact — an indelible genetic accident like my prematurely gray hair or my love of rural silences and large breakfasts. I didn’t mind being English any more than I would have minded not being English, if such a thing were imaginable, but it wasn’t imaginable and anyway it was beyond my control. To be either proud or ashamed of it, and to think of it as something you could choose to discard or renounce or abjure, seemed absurd, a kind of category mistake.
Once, talking to one of the Nigels, I let slip that I wasn’t up on the latest developments in a cricket match between England and India. “You don’t keep up with cricket and you call yourself an Englishman?” he cried, in only partly-mock horror. Ah, I wanted to say: no, that’s exactly the point. I don’t ‘call myself an Englishman.’ I am English. I’m even prepared to say I love England too, if experiencing certain emotions in medieval parish churches and down-at-heel country pubs is qualification enough. But I don’t call myself an Englishman. People who are highly conscious of their Englishness in that way puzzle me, trouble me, faintly repel me. Worse than that: those people always seem to me to have got it wrong in some key way about how to be genuinely English. They are performing their Englishness, like bad actors in bowler hats. How can I put this politely? You just don’t do it that way. It’s naff.
When the time came these attitudes or prejudices about identity caused me to worry that my reasons for becoming a U.S. citizen were unacceptably prosaic. My Green Card was about to expire. I needed to replace it at some expense or else apply for citizenship at some expense. Why not be done with the shadow of the immigration bureaucracy — with which I’d had at least one creepily unpleasant run-in? Why not accept after so many years that the move was permanent? Get to vote? Go the whole hog?
I studied hard for the citizenship interview because it would have been embarrassing for a professor of political philosophy to fail a civics test. I took care to master both the facts that Americans learn in utero (“Who wrote The Star Spangled Banner?”) and the ones that few can ever quite bring to mind (“Who are your State Representatives?”)
It was wasted effort.
The man who interviewed me reminded me strongly of Harry Belafonte. He had a courtly, old-fashioned manner, but was also visibly bored. Feet propped on a radiator, he looked out at the rain, looked at his screen, and lobbed me a series of feeble softballs.
“Who was President during the Civil War?”
Oh come on! I wanted to protest. At least ask me who was Secretary of State during the Civil War. Or the President’s wife. Or Confederate President. At least give me that much opportunity to show off my earnest, high-grade history-buffery.
“Lincoln,” I said.
He glanced sideways at me.
“Abraham Lincoln.”
Thwack. Goodbye Mr. Spalding!
Too easy by far — but there were other matters to worry about, not least a slightly surreal background checklist. I have never been a Communist and yet the question gave me cause for unease. Just how long were the arms of the federal government? Would this man produce from beneath his desk a photocopy of my Ph.D. thesis, with Post-Its sprouting in all directions and an attached report from the FBI on my far from critical references to the witty, rude, polemical and brilliantly insightful writings of a twenty-something Rhenish journalist called K.H. Marx? Communist sympathies? As I say, scarcely at all your Honor. But how then to explain these three hundred pages of enthusiastically footnoted interest? Would they smell attitude? Would they sense that Big Karl’s critique of nationalism as a form of ideology — his distrust of the near-universal assumption that what we are essentially is English or Irish or Russian or American — was one of the things I found most palatable in him, most liberating, most worth trying to get people to think harder about?
The list went on. Had I ever been subject to deportation? No. Charged for illegal gambling? No. Arrested for gross indecency? Not so far. Been a member of the Nazi Party? At that point I remember being distracted by my own speculations about where these concerns came from, how they made sense, how they were categorized. I assumed that “gross indecency” was supposed to cover things like public nudity. But surely membership of the Nazi Party didn’t need a separate category? Wasn’t membership of the Nazi Party as perfect an example of gross indecency as you could get? I found myself wanting to say this aloud, be a little strident about it even, in the hope that a tone of perish-the-thought woundedness might influence the calculation of my worth.
A rubber stamp. A short but heartfelt ceremony. It was over. Now a new and equally unsettling stage began. My friends kept slapping me on the back, taking me out to lunch, buying me Stars-and-Stripes coffee mugs, and congratulating me on what they referred to as my “decision.” As if I really had undergone a sort of conversion. As if I had been (as Peter Quince says when he encounters Bottom turned into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) “translated.” As if I had changed within me that numinous thing, so troublesome to philosophers: my identity.
How could I explain it? My allegiance had never been to England exactly, much less Great Britain and certainly not the House of Saxe-Coburg (sorry, Windsor); neither was it now to the United States. It was rather to certain ideas and ideals that both my countries seemed to share at least as much in the breach as in the observance. I appreciate the surprisingly different set of ideas, emotions and attitudes that are celebrated as “freedom” in Britain and America; I despise the arrogance and weakness that is constantly revealed in each by the habit of exaggerating the extent of that freedom and speaking of it as if it’s a thing people in lesser countries don’t have and can scarcely imagine. I love both my countries’ histories of (fitful) openness to immigrants, and hate their histories of vicious and whitewashed racism about both immigrants and indeed all those who must surely want to immigrate. I love the twin histories of heroic aid to others in peril, and look with horror on the (it seems to me) richer annals of smug, violent imposition. I’ve always thought it ignorant to be proud of your country unless you are in equal part ashamed; I’ve always thought it saner still to be neither, because a country’s history is what it is and the only country whose character depends on us is the future.
To speak truthfully about all this would have been churlish, so I kept quiet. But that only increased the feeling that I was a sort of imposter.
In England Your England, Orwell tells the English that “the suet pudding and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul.” Nobody eats suet pudding any more and the time when pillar-boxes (“mail boxes”) were a feature of the national iconography are long gone. But I know what he means. After decades more of accent slippage, strangers in England can no longer quite place me and sooner or later they ask if I’m Canadian. I will never be able to reply “No. I’m American.” Branded at birth and lacking the talent for metamorphosis, I remain forever English.
Ironically, a key part of my own sense of being English is the hope that being English is not, and will not be considered by others, an important fact about me.
There’s a final irony: in England now, half a lifetime gone, I have to work out the things that tourists have to work out. How do you buy a train ticket? How do you hold a fork? Could someone please explain to me the political system, the educational system, and the electrical system?
I’m an alien there too.
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