It seems logical--and fair--to give our parents (or families) a lot of credit for providing us with roots. After all, they provide nourishment, and certainly are the cause of our being around in the first place. If we are lucky, they not only bring us into existence, but continue to foster our blooming throughout the years.
One of the traits I have my father to thank for cultivating is my love of music that might broadly be classified as Americana. I don't know how a professional musicologist would describe Americana, but my definition includes folk music (from Cajun to Appalachian), bluegrass, and blues. As might be guessed from the general theme of this post, I would also call this genre American "roots" music. I suppose one reason we sometimes think of folk music as a root of our culture has to do with its going back a long way--it's an old tradition, and if we trace our folk music's roots, we would eventually end up at the origins of music from all over the world (we know, for example, that a lot of our music has been influenced by African traditional music, which was introduced by African slaves forced to come here). Paradoxically, although folk music generally does go a long way back, the United States has not existed for all that long. It's a difficult country to describe or pin down because of its short history and its melting pot qualities. (A student once told me I didn't "look American." "What," I asked him, "does an American look like?") Perhaps part of our interest in our history stems from the fact that it is so short, and maybe this explains our desire to pinpoint cultural roots and influences. Unlike some other cultures, which can trace their origins a millennium or two back and often have multiple founding mythologies, the United States culture is pretty murky. (Of course, Native Americans are the original Americans, but it's tragically undeniable that the settlers' abuses of them diminished their influence on what is now American culture).
I think a lot of this rootlessness that is inherently American is part of what draws me to American folk music. I am constantly trying to find common themes running through these songs, searching for what makes them still appealing today, hoping to recognize prototypes. What is about the fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar that lends itself so easily to certain chord progressions and narratives? How did some of these songs provide comfort or entertainment for such different eras?
Although it would be nice and intellectual of me to suggest my interest in this music is the result of some great desire to help America create an origin story out of songs, I think it's much more my own sense of rootlessness that repeatedly pulls me toward American folk music.
* * *
I think it's safe to say that many people who live in California do not come from families that have always lived in California. My parents, of course, hail from Mississippi and Poland. My mother's closest friend from college, my ciocia Magda, ended up in the same city, while her husband comes from New England (and, before that, Taiwan). Another pair of my parents' closest friends were from Utah, while still others came from Germany, Michigan, and Georgia. Instead of celebrating holidays with extended family, we celebrated with other wanderers who had made their way to California serendipitously or accidentally. Growing up, some of my friends hoped to live in California forever, but many others assumed they would one day live elsewhere. California was just a stepping stone. My parents, although attached to their friends and our house and some other aspects of California life (like fresh produce year-round), always hoped they'd one day go elsewhere. I, too, felt that something more glamorous must lie in store for me.
But it was more than not being crazy about the town in which I was growing up. I felt very alienated from other kids my age. Looking back, I realize there were a lot of different factors that played into my being a bit of an oddball, but at the time, it seemed easiest to blame it on being Polish. These days, people are often surprised by the extent to which I identify as Polish, given that a good 70% of my life has been spent on American soil. But as a child, the only difference I could discern between myself and others was the fact that I had a strange Polish name and always spent my summers in Poland. Countless children at my schools had parents who were immigrants, but I was the only half-Polish student in my classes, and so instead of seeing that we were all from part-immigrant families, I focused on being the sole Pole in the group. Initially, I was resentful of my Polishness. I would go up to substitute teachers before they called roll and insist they call me "Tosha," not Antonina, not anything else. I would hiss at my mom if she tried to speak to me in Polish in public. I practiced my American accent until it became second nature.
Later, though, I defiantly decided to be proud of my Polish heritage. I practiced reading to my mom out loud in Polish, played Chopin on the piano, and wrote to my cousin every few months. I would brag to anybody who cared (or who didn't) about being fluent in two languages.
Then again, when I went to summer camp for the first time (in Poland), I realized I wasn't really Polish, after all. The kids there wanted to hear all about California. One girl would routinely stroke my hair, pleased that I was blonde, like all California girls should be (I'm not sure what she made of my brunette sister). If I made a grammar mistake, everyone was very happy to point it out and correct me, all the while reassuring me that I had the best Polish of any American they'd met.
So I was not Polish, after all.
But I never felt as American as when I was abroad, either.
And my sense of home has only become more complicated as I've gotten older. When I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy, I was delighted to see a Polish stall set up at the Christmas market in Santa Croce. I went to speak to the gentleman working at the booth in Polish. I was so happy to find someone who spoke Polish that I stayed for an hour chatting to him. My roommates were all American. But it took speaking to someone in Polish to make me feel both homesick and comforted. The next semester, I studied abroad in Krakow (a city I'd been to two or three times since my parents bought an apartment there). I lived with two flatmates on the opposite side of town, and Krakow never felt that familiar to me. Sometimes I would go to the wonderful farmers' market near my parents' apartment, but there were few places that I felt attached to. (After all, I'd only ever been there with my parents). The closest to comfort I could find was the lovely bookstore Massolit, which we always visited in the summer, and which in 2008 was quite different from what it is now.
While I loved my study abroad experiences, I was relieved to return to Irvine for my senior year of college. I was overjoyed to see my friends again, to visit my favorite parts of the campus, to walk in the foothills early in the morning, to go to the beach for bonfires, to drive into LA to go dancing. It was all so beautifully familiar, especially after I'd been away.
In a writing seminar I took in my last quarter, structured around the themes of transnational identities, we read two texts that struck a chord with me. One was Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I have to confess to having disliked Smith's book, but I appreciated the struggles each character faced in trying to establish themselves within one cultural context or another. More poignant for me was Edward Said's essay "Between Worlds." I felt a physical shock of recognition as I read. In the essay, he describes feeling torn between two cultures, and thus never firmly grounded in either. I think it was at this point that I realized my mother felt this way, too, much more strongly than I did.
I am not an immigrant, although I lived in Poland for three years. But for some inexplicable reason, I don't feel firmly cemented into any one culture. There are so many things about me that are American, in the deepest sense of the word. My whole consciousness is American. My way of thinking is the product of American culture and education. My expectations of society are American. These are undeniable facts of who I am.
But in a more definite way, it's difficult for me to feel like I am American. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm now living in Boston, which is as foreign a city to me as Zurich might be. Boston is in America, but it's worlds away from Irvine or Fresno. It's often described as the "most European American city," but very little about it reminds me of any European cities I've been to. I feel more at home in the South, where I've visited dozens of time, than on the East coast. But I'm not southern, and it's not only my accent that makes me stick out. I was born in North Carolina, but have visited only once since I was a baby. I haven't lived in California in five years, and if I moved back now, nobody in my family would be there. Part of my rootlessness may have a lot to do with this figurative homelessness.
* * *
I'm slowly coming to accept that I may never feel entirely at home anywhere. Conveniently, my husband is similar in this regard, having grown up in two different cities in South Africa, then having lived and studied in England, Poland, and now the United States. His family, like mine, has moved all over the world and currently also lives spread out. It seems more than enough to be happy together, with our two cats, wherever we are living and wherever our families are living.
I know I don't want to live in Boston forever. Of all the places I've lived, it feels the least like home to me. It's not easy to say where the most like home might be, however. Most days, I think I can wait to find out.
In the meantime, looking for those moments that make me feel that flash of recognition Edward Said's essay did is a good way to get by. Memories can make you feel at home. Anytime I smell a tomato fresh off the vine, I'm reminded of visits to my Mississippi grandfather's garden, where he would proudly show me the huge tomatoes he was growing and let me pick one if I was lucky. The taste of raspberries reminds me of walking through the Mazurian forests with my mom in the summer. The smell of the ocean--whatever ocean it is--reminds me of cool afternoons spent on the California coast with my family. My childhood books remind me of the hundreds of different settings I've read in, safe in the knowledge that my family was nearby. Beautiful cozy cafes make me recall my first real winter, spent living alone in Krakow. And bluegrass and folk music--the first kind of music I remember having ever listened to, in the car with my dad, driving through the underpass onto Wishon in Fresno--has been an unchanging constant in my life. It will forever remind me of every home, everywhere.
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| Alison Krauss (my favorite singer) with Dan Tyminski and Jeff White at the Copley Arts Festival, summer 2013 |
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