Quandaries of Belonging: Notes on Home, from Abroad

By Michael Jackson

Those who leave their homelands, either under duress or by design, will see them in a different light than those who have stayed put. Michael Jackson argues that the perspective of the expatriate may be compared with what ethnographers call ‘stranger value’. In moving between detachment and deep immersion, this bifocal perspective implicates a bicultural one, which is why Jackson has recourse to Māori traditional knowledge, not in order to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on them, but to show how cross-cultural conversations and interactions can promote new forms of sociality and coexistence. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785276439

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is Senior Research Fellow in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Book preview

Quandaries of Belonging

Quandaries of Belonging

Notes on Home, from Abroad

Michael Jackson

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.unionbridgebooks.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by UNION BRIDGE BOOKS

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Copyright © Michael Jackson 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949109

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-641-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-641-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to others is part of the dialogue of understanding for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers. Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only in so far as our understanding reaches.

—Hannah Arendt

CONTENTS

Preface

1.Taranaki

2.Neither Here nor There

3.Being Out of Place

4.The Pare Revisited

5.Talking with Te Pakaka

6.The Road to Karuna Falls

7.The Social Life of Stories

8.A Landscape with Too Few Lovers

9.Distance Looks Our Way

10.At Home in the World

11.Fires of No Return

12.Critique of Colonial Reason

Coda

Acknowledgments, Epigraphs, and Sources

Index

PREFACE

Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt

(They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean)

—Horace

Although we are all occasionally haunted by the past, for some of us the past is not so much another time as another country. And while many people yearn to be young again, others long to return to the places where they were young and the landscapes of their most formative years.

Whether experiencing nostalgia for a lost time, a distant place, or an absent loved one, it sometimes seems that human beings seldom feel completely at home with themselves or at home in the world. The grass may appear greener on the other side, but no sooner have we crossed the bridge to those more promising pastures than the paddocks we abandoned lure us back. Even when we return to the land we deserted, we often find it difficult to resettle or reconnect. Our erstwhile selves have become frozen in time like the spellbound characters in a fairytale. Our lives have morphed into myth or history.

Yet stasis is an illusion. We are always in movement, if not from place to place then from one relationship to another, or from one phase of life to another, and our moods, emotions, and thoughts are in continual flux. Accordingly, leaving one’s native land, leaving one’s parental home, and losing touch with ancestral places and ways of life may inspire hope for a more fulfilling future or cause deep disorientation and distress.

Over the past 20 years, I have been recording the life stories of migrants and refugees in Aotearoa New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.¹ While my expatriate status undoubtedly explains the kinship I feel for many of the migrants I have come to know, I would not wish to play down the differences between the violent and irreversible circumstances endured by many of them and the relatively comfortable situations of most expatriates. What I do claim, however, is that those who leave their homelands, either under duress or by design, will see them in a different light than those who have stayed put. I hope to show, moreover, that the perspective of the expatriate, exile, or conscious pariah is analogous to what ethnographers call stranger value and implies a more subjective approach to understanding than the traditional scientific invocation of detachment and neutrality, the so-called view from afar.

In my case, this bifocal perspective entails a bicultural one in which I have recourse to Māori traditions of sociality and knowing, not to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on them but to show how cross-cultural conversations and interactions can transform our assumptions about the human condition.

A lot of contemporary discourse, both in the academy and beyond, is predicated on essentialized notions of gender, class, and ethnic identity. In critiquing the either–or polarizations that characterize identity thinking, I hope to emphasize human plurality as entailing both difference and identity. The assumption here is that, as a species, human beings share the same evolutionary history and confront similar existential dilemmas, yet no two individuals are alike, and very different adaptive strategies and worldviews have emerged in the course of human history. To speak of the human condition, therefore, is to imply that existence is not only replete with contradiction and conflict but also characterized by ongoing struggles to resolve, accept, or overcome them.²

The chapters of this book touch on a variety of issues, including the ambiguity of belonging, the struggle for indigenous rights, expatriate experience, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiments in communal living, and intercultural dialogue. These issues have both local and global relevance, and I address them as an expatriate and an ethnographer who has discovered that the anxiety that springs from being an outsider is often compensated for by an ability to see the world from a novel point of view. Moreover, as an outsider, one is sometimes consoled to find that one’s dilemmas are not unique. While one may be struggling to adapt to new customs, learn a new language, or cope with bizarre customs and inhospitable surroundings, one’s new neighbors may be suffering social exclusion, embroiled in family feuds, fighting prejudice, or coming to terms with the effects of a pandemic, climate change, or economic collapse. Indeed, it is often through such critical experiences that people from diverse backgrounds come to realize that they share a common world.

One in six New Zealanders lives abroad, making our diaspora the second highest in the developed world.³ Yet little has been written about these expatriates and their relations with the country they left in search of work or wider horizons. One notable exception is Martin Edmond’s The Expatriates,⁴ in which the author, himself an expatriate, chronicles the lives of four New Zealanders who achieved renown in Europe only to be forgotten at home.⁵ Their life stories suggest that expatriates, like exiles, émigrés, and orphans, never fully reconcile themselves to being cut off from their places of origin and seldom feel completely at home in their countries of adoption. Their unsettled states of mind reflect not only geographical distance but also insurmountable class and cultural barriers. Edmond’s subjects were sons of coal miners, bootmakers, grocery warehousemen, and garment workers whose social conscience was formed in a world of egalitarian values, and they often recoiled from the elitism and pretentiousness of the societies in which they wound up.

Successive generations of New Zealand writers have wrestled with the geographical remoteness, political marginality, and colonial legacy of their homeland. Those born and bred in England suffered what Vincent O’Sullivan calls a colonial neurosis—an obsession with a nation in which they no longer lived and a self-consciousness about what they regarded as New Zealand’s lack of a cultural heritage.⁶ By the 1930s, a preoccupation with a defining national consciousness pervades the work of many writers, but it was not until the 1960s that one begins to see a more confident identification with American and European authors, a diversification of literary styles, and the beginnings of an engagement with Māori points of view. This break with parochialism is partly enabled by a shift from identity thinking to a more eclectic and open-minded attitude in which one’s sense of self is never fixed or final but susceptible to one’s changing interests and varied experiences. This was brought home to me on a recent visit to Auckland during which Brian Boyd introduced me to Fiona Pardington’s high-resolution photographs of the wings of Nabokov’s butterflies. As Brian described his collaboration with Pardington, and the way her bicultural heritage found expression in the diversity and ingenuity of her creative projects (recovering dead material for contemporary reflection, from plaster casts of Māori heads, to birds, mushrooms, and bottles), I was struck by the vital cosmopolitanism of her work and the close connection between creativity and double consciousness.

For Hannah Arendt, critical thinking is possible only when one’s own thought is open to the thought of others. Even when one is alone, the presence of others impinges on one’s consciousness. But one is unlikely to move far beyond one’s habitual position and comfort zone unless circumstances compel one to do so. This is why some form of displacement and emotional discomfort is a precondition for thinking with an enlarged mentality.⁷ When John Rangihau, a Tūhoe kaumātua, delivered a talk on race relations at Massey University in the 1970s he asked his largely Pākeha audience to stand. Following his instructions, we were required to perform a waiata with appropriate movements of the body, arms, and hands. For some of the audience, their awkwardness brought home to them what it meant to move in a world where many of the dominant culture’s ways of thinking and behaving not only felt unnatural but made one feel ashamed (whakamā) and diminished.

Understanding others requires more than an empathic movement from one’s own position to theirs; it demands physical upheaval, psychological turmoil, and moral confusion. This is why suffering is an inescapable concomitant of understanding—the loss of the illusion that one’s own particular worldview is universally tenable, the pain of seeing in the face and gestures of a stranger the invalidation of oneself. And it is precisely because such hazards and symbolic deaths are the cost of going beyond the borders of the local world that we complacently regard as a measure of the world that most human beings resist seeking to know others as they know themselves. By this same token, we find the most compelling examples of how human beings suffer and struggle with the project of enlarging their understanding in those parts of the world where openness has become an unavoidable condition of everyday life.

Go far enough back in time, and everyone’s lineage has been fractured by displacement and diaspora. Whether forced to abandon their homelands because of war, poverty, overpopulation, or natural disasters, our forebears sometimes had no option but to go in search of a place where life promised greater security and satisfaction. About 800 years ago, many of the inhabitants of Central Polynesia were suffering the impact of overpopulation and competition for scarce resources. Using extensive knowledge of subtropical weather systems, star constellations, and ocean currents, some of these people sailed southward and made landfall in Aotearoa.⁸ Over the ensuing centuries, the same problems that precipitated the exodus from Hawaiki beset the coastal settlements in Aotearoa and led to a series of new migrations into less hospitable regions inland or further south. Māori canoe traditions fuse memories of the ocean voyages from Hawaiki with these more recent migrations within and between the islands of Aotearoa.⁹ British colonization and musket warfare in the nineteenth century once again displaced people from their traditional lands, and in the years after World War II a new Māori migration began from impoverished rural communities to urban centers. Known as the people of the four winds (Nga iwi a nga hau o whā), these migrants added another chapter to a long history of deracination and dispersal on the islands of Aotearoa.¹⁰

Though one should not lose sight of the tragic repercussions of the colonial period, it is important to recognize that the same emotional elements oppress all displaced people, regardless of the legal, moral, and political rights and wrongs of the situations they have endured.¹¹ A sense of grief and grievance spreads like a stain through the psyche —an indelible sense of shame and inferiority. And like the lingering moral injury of the adopted child or orphan, the migrant often feels abandoned by the motherland and never ceases to crave its recognition. Such was the case with my maternal grandmother, who emigrated from England to New Zealand in 1906 to marry my grandfather. She pined for her Yorkshire family and landscapes and, like thousands of other migrants from the British Isles, spoke longingly of England as home. Homesickness ate away at her soul and contributed to the mental illness for which she was treated in her declining years. Ironically, when I went to the Congo in 1964, my repining for New Zealand found expression in recurring dreams of her. And when, a few years later, I read the laments published by Sir Apirana Ngata in Nga Moteatea, I found the same unrequited emotions of loss and longing—for a place from which the poet has been exiled, for a friend who has died in battle, or for a lover from whom she or he has been separated.¹²

In this great longing (E kuika nei),

Is there no one who will share it? (Matua ia ra e tahuri mai?)

For there is no one more melancholy (‘Wai te mea ka rukupopo)

Than he who yearns for his own native land (Ka whakamate ki tona whenua, i).¹³

There is a Māori saying: as long as one lives on the land, a fire burns there (ahi kā), affirming one’s tūrangawaewae. But should one abandon the land, the fires die (ahi mātaotao) and one forfeits the right to call that place one’s own. There are resonances here of Thomas Wolfe’s famous phrase, You can’t go home again. Yet, despite having spent much of my professional life living and working outside my natal country, the fires have been rekindled in my creative writing, as well as in periodic returns home. Rather than construe my relationship with home as either fidelity or betrayal, I see it as a continual dialectic between feelings of attachment and loss.

There are echoes here of the Māori notion of the interplay of tupu (coming into existence) and mate (passing away). One’s sense of existence, like one’s sense of mana, is subject to continuous fluctuation¹⁴ and may be likened to the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebb and flow of the tide, or the lighting and dying of a fire. What is foreground one moment fades into the background the next. What is now present is soon absent, though the absence is never permanent, for what is momentarily lost to sight or mind will inevitably make its presence felt again. In traditional thought, the loss of a loved one does not signal the death of one’s relationship with him or her but a transfiguration in which the relationship will be periodically resuscitated in ritual reenactments, in recycling the names of the dead, and in offering gifts to one’s ancestors. By analogy, leaving one’s homeland for a life abroad does not extinguish one’s toi whenua, for one’s birthright is sustained in memory, embodied in remittances, recalled in correspondence, recovered in dreams, and revived in return journeys. Even more dramatically, perhaps, these primary attachments may irrupt into consciousness through social media and breaking news.

On March 15, 2019, a total of 51 worshippers in two Christchurch mosques were murdered by a self-styled white supremacist. As I watched the New Zealand prime minister address the nation, heard the harrowing stories of those who had lost loved ones, and was stirred by the spontaneous haka, I felt contending emotions of anger, grief, and solidarity. Unable to focus on my work, I remembered a passage I had recently read in Jung’s introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching where Jung speaks of the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.¹⁵ What subconscious preoccupations were welling up in me as I followed news of these violent events in my homeland?

That evening, I happened to watch a documentary on Netflix called Jane Fonda in Five Acts that helped me find words for some of the feeling that were engulfing me.

In 1968, living in France, pregnant, and attuned to be receptive to the ether, not just around me but in the world, Fonda is watching newsreel footage of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the violent police response to antiwar protesters in Chicago when suddenly she feels more than I ever had, American and realizes her country has taken the wrong path and [that she] wanted to be with her people, in her country, to try to make things right.

I paused the video to take notes. I now knew that my country was in me, although I was out of it, and I needed to be there, not here—in its landscapes, with its loneliness, its lostness, its history.

When, seven years earlier, I showed one of my Harvard classes a video of soldiers at Burnham Military Camp in Christchurch performing a haka in tribute to fallen comrades in Afghanistan, my students needed no commentary from me to intuitively understand what they were witnessing. The moment was a powerful demonstration of how we can connect to one another through our shared humanity and spontaneously transcend the national, cultural, or ethnic identifications that divide us.

A similar epiphany occurred in January 2016 when a young New Zealand couple, Aaliyah and Benjamin Armstrong, posted online their wedding video for friends and family. The video went viral, moving millions of viewers around the world, many of whom knew nothing of Māori culture or the tika tonu haka¹⁶ organized by Benjamin’s brother and best man for the occasion. If the haka was emotionally charged for the friends, family, and strangers who watched it and shared it via international social media, its impact was even more powerful for the groom and his bride. Explaining later why she was moved to respond, Aaliyah said, I felt the need to show love and respect back. As for Benjamin, after having stood