Bridges

There is a Swahili proverb that says, “A bridge is not where you dwell[i].” 

It’s good advice.  But some of us try anyways. 

In the liminal walkway between places, the “Wood Between the Worlds”[ii], the place that is neither here nor there, we try to pitch our tents. 

I used to have both feet firmly rooted in one place.  The tan, sandy soils of decomposed limestone flavored with sage and old oaks gave me a solid place to stand, all in one, small, somehow comprehensible world. 

Now I look back over my shoulder and see dusty footprints leading back miles and miles away from where I once was to where I now am. 

I knew when I married my husband that I was not only marrying him, I was marrying the Alur culture, his extended family, his social network in Uganda, and the unique cultural context that created the spectacular being that is my husband. 

He knew when he married me that he was not only marrying me, but marrying the complicated red, white, and blue mess that is my American background and history, my messy family of origin, my social network sprawled across the concrete rivers of Los Angeles, and the unique cultural context that somehow forged me into being.  

But neither of us really knew what we were marrying into. 

It is impossible to walk through the fires of culture shock completely unscourged.  When uprooted and unanchored from all the myriad of relationships, symbols, and places that made you into who you are as a person and violently submerged into an alien world, one’s sense of self must be changed.  It has to.  And there is no way to predict who will come out of the other end. 

Our combined experiences taught us how to be Ugandan and how to be American.  Neither of our combined experiences prepared us for being Ugandan in America. 

It’s not the same thing…and my cultural context prefers Ugandans to stay in Uganda. 

Our marriage lashed two worlds together, but our nest making has added two more.  And we have both experienced the never ending, continually reoccurring cycles of culture shock.

 As the emotions ebb and flow, I am reminded again and again how similar the stages of culture shock are to the stages of grief-the denial, the anger, the grief, the depression, the small adjustments that can be made to accommodate one’s new reality. 

In a lot of ways, culture shock is a grief.  It’s learning to mourn for the loss of one’s world-physical and social, and the loss of one’s place in the world.  It’s learning to grieve that one’s natal identity and the deep, internal sense of self that has been buried in one’s native soil, to be reincarnated as something new and somehow both familiar and foreign.  That person who once was is no longer and will never fully be again.  They’ve been unworlded, unmade, untethered, uprooted, and cast adrift on the transnational reality that never quite feels like reality.  

“A bird may love a fish, but where will they live?”

 “Then we shall have to build you wings.[iii]” 

It’s not enough.  The bird also needs scuba gear.  And their children will need to be ducks or flying fish-creatures capable of traversing worlds and changing their identities with the same flurry of a two year old changing clothes.

But those are the ones who understand bridge-building-those who live it out on a daily basis.  They are intimately acquainted with the challenges of forging distinct elements into steel in the high heated pressure of daily life.[iv]  The end result is stronger than the original materials, but only after passing through the inferno.  And nobody likes to be burned and melted.  

Where would the world be without bridges?  They unite peoples and create vulnerable spaces for attack.  They are dangerous and they are powerful, as all liminal stages[v] and things are. 

It’s learning to live between worlds, belonging neither here nor there, and yet everywhere.  It’s trying to build one’s house on a bridge.  And there’s not a lot of other houses there. 

I would not exchange my small, comprehensible, hand-held world for this expanded, shattered, byzantine version.  Sometimes, brokenness is a gift.  

“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9

The bridge builders between God and people, people and each other, those who actively seek “shalom” or God’s full, holistic, all-encompassing kind of peace-these ones will always have a place of belonging. They are blessed even in their isolation from their worlds and when they make people crazy in their cries for the dissolution of injustice and conflict. They are claimed by God as His own. I find that comforting.

God knew a lot about bridges…and pitching of tents[vi] between worlds and peoples and the challenges of being both/and.

Sometimes, I look over the edge of the bridge on which I dwell and wonder what it would be like if I still lived in one place, with my sandaled feet all on one side.  Yet, here on my bridge, I can look out and see the waters beneath me glisten and reflect the sun’s golden rays in their turquoise depths.  My eyes can look to either side and show me the paths my footprints have taken me and the incredible views that can only be seen by someone who has decided to build a house on a bridge. 

So, I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and thank God again for the liminal space He’s currently called me to pitch my tent, with my feet stretched worlds. 

---

[i] Daraja si maskani

[ii] C.S. Lewis, the Magician’s Nephew

[iii] Lines from the movie Ever After-scene where “Cinderella” and Leonardo Da Vinci are discussing bringing her to the ball to meet the prince. 

[iv] Thanks to the Novo prophetic prayer team for the concept of bridges and steel and peacemaking.  It resonated. 

[v] The concept of liminality comes from anthropologist Victor Turner in his brilliant work on stages of ritual. 

[vi][vi] Incarnation-“taking on flesh” or “pitched his tent and dwelt among us”-the word choice is seen throughout the Bible.

The Skin, The History, and the Stereotype: Translating Identity Across Cultures

Boot and bonnet.  Chemist.  Trolley.  Nappie.  Serviette.  Centre.  Saviour.  Aeroplane. 

 

One thing I learned in East Africa is that I not only had to learn functional Kiswahili but I also needed to learn English.  Sure, I spoke English, but I spoke American English.  I spoke too fast, didn’t pronounce my letters properly, and I didn’t even know the right words or how to spell.  I needed to learn British English.  I needed to slow down my flow of words and actually pronounce the letters that are in the words (ki-tt-en not ki-in, wa-T-er not wadder) or I would not be understood.  My audience would struggle to understand me, not because they were not capable of speaking English, but because I spoke a “different” English.    

I quickly learned it wasn’t only my language that needed to be translated.  It was me, my self, my body, what I represent through my biologically embodied representation of my particular slice of humanity.

Growing up, I didn’t think too much stereotypes, especially not my own.  I struggled to understand my identity as Tara, as myself as an individual, but I didn’t spend an ounce of energy trying to understand my ethnic identity, racial identity, collective identity, or the identity that others see what they look at me. When I looked in a mirror, I didn’t think about the layers of history written in my genetic code.  I just saw me and my immediate family (i.e. my aunt’s jaw, my grandmother’s nose, my mother’s curl, my dad’s hair) but not traits that said “Swedish,” “Dutch,” “German,” and “English”.  But then again, I never had to.  I’d never been looked down upon or insulted because of the labels of identity that people attribute to me when they see me. 

My first weeks in Kenya, I quickly learned I had acquired new labels.  

Mzungu.

“Mzungu” (plural wazungu) now branded me.  I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that I was no longer invisible.  I couldn’t pass down the street unnoticed or be seen as “normal” but I stood out like a scarlet macaw in a flock of penguins.  My appearance branded me as “other” and I found myself wading through a sludge of symbols so deep I couldn’t lift a tennis shoe without finding myself dripping with the expectations of those around me.

I didn’t understand my interpretation.  Kenyans saw me and labeled me in their framework, reading symbols that I did not know were there, let alone their meaning.  And I discovered I needed to translate what my appearance communicated in my new context.  I needed to understand what it meant to be “me” in their worldview.   

Mzungu comes from the same Kiswahili root word as the words kizunguzungu ( dizziness) and kuzunguka (to turn around in a circle).  It basically means “a person who wanders aimlessly” or “one who is lost” (coined by Swahili inhabitants of the first European explorers based on the actions of the Europeans wandering around “discovering” things the natives already knew were there).  (check it out on Wikipedia for more details).

The term has changed in meaning over time and has history has unfurled.  It can be a noun or an adjective.  It can describe a person, an object, or a behavior.  Still, the overall ideas that emerge from the term are something wealthy, powerful, and/or foreign.  It is often used to describe something (or someone) of European descent and takes on the racial undertone of whiteness (which in the East African historical framework are inextricably interwoven with concepts of power, wealth, beauty, and status). 

Wazungu are never poor and wazungu are always “other”. 

I quickly learned that my appearance led to being given the best place in church, on the bus, and in the line at the bank.  It meant the marriage proposals, dinner invitations, ministry opportunities, and business partnerships sought me out faster than the mosquitos.   I didn’t have to prove my qualifications or my worthiness.  People automatically presumed my competence based on my physical appearance.

This also meant I was a walking target.  It meant I was robbed by those I’d never met and those I considered my closest friends.  It meant being sought because of what I represented and not who I was.  Everyone wanted a piece of my pie and tried to convince me to support their cause, their need, their ministry, or their business.  My power and wealth were contagious to those in my sphere of relationships (and so I was uninvited from certain ministries and relationships because I would lead to heightened expectations and "scare away" potential donors).   

Adding the label of “female” made me even more complicated.  I represented free sex (thanks to globalized porn industry) and access to status.  I could give visas, job opportunities, cash, cars, and “add value” to those around me.  I was a free ticket to the “heaven” that is the mzungu world.  I represented the colonizer who could be colonized and the unattainable brought within grasp.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype.  

Hood and trunk.  Pharmacist.  Cart.  Diaper.  Napkin.  Center.  Savior.  Airplane. 

When my husband came to the U.S. from Uganda, he also had to adjust his English.  He’s tried to slur certain words, force his “r” in words like dirt, bird, and water, and not pronounce all the letters in mosquito, leopard, and juice.  His English has had to adjust to include more American slang and idioms.  It’s been part of the process of helping his audience understand him and not consider his fluent English as "broken".

He’s also had to relearn what it means to be him.  He has always experienced people interpreting his appearance.  It happened all the time back home.  Other Ugandans, at one glance, read the tall, lean frame and  deep fudge-colored skin and immediately labeled him as “northern Ugandan” or “Nilotic” as opposed to “Bantu”.  These labels carried an army of stereotypes that he shed like a snake sheds skin when he landed in the U.S. he was interpreted according to those stereotypes.  

African.

It didn’t take a week in the U.S. before Ivan found himself mired in a swamp of symbols he didn’t understand.  In the American context, he has been forced to translate his appearance into the American labels of “Black” and “African” and renegotiate what it means to be him based on how he is interpreted. 

“Black” does not refer to a physical description of aesthetic appearance, but a long, complicated racial history that puts people on a ladder from least desirable to most desirable based on a socially constructed idea of immutable origins.  His skin means he is called n****r, slave, dangerous, and dirty. 

People read his appearance and cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking too close.  The police follow him in their police car and frisk him just to make sure he isn’t causing problems.  His appearance means people interpret his “standing politely and listening” as “threatening” them and will report him to his supervisors for hostility.

Yet his label of “Black” is sometimes countered with “African”.  He is often rejected by African Americans as being “not Black” and told to go back to where he is from.  His status as “African” also means he is exotic and is sought out by “White” Americans to share about what it’s like to be African and poor. 

Africans are always poor and Africans are always “other”.    

Ivan thought he was Ugandan and from the “Pearl of Africa,” the “Source of the Nile,” and he came proud of his heritage.  He quickly learned he should say he is Jamaican.  African is associated with deranged dictators, child soldiers, famine, civil war, AIDS, and poverty.  To be African means to be incompetent and inferior to an American in all things.  To be African means he must have lived with a pet lion, hunted with a spear, clothed in a loin cloth, and only experienced literacy, English, electricity, and automobiles upon U.S. soil.  He is congratulated on finally making it to the "heaven" that is America and freed from the "hell" of Africa.

As an African in America, he learned it means he is wrong.  His English is wrong, his education is wrong, his job experiences are wrong, and his culture is wrong.  He needs to go back to zero, relearn everything, redo everything until he can be reborn “American” and know how to do things “right”.  Until he throws off everything “African” about him, he will just be another “unskilled worker from a s***hole country”(source), no matter how many skills, degrees, and doctorates he possesses.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.  A jug labeled milk will be treated differently than a jug labeled paint, regardless of contents.  

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype. 

We were born into bodies that we did not choose, into ethnicities we did not intend, and into nationalities that were chosen for us.  Yet these markers of identity still communicate to our audience deeply powerful symbols that influence how we are understood and perceived.  

In cross-cultural interactions, it’s not only the language we speak and way we greet that needs to be translated.  There’s a long process of renegotiating identity: who am I?  Who do other people think I am?  What does it mean to be me?  How do I interact with the world around me based on how this world understands me? Who should I become in future? 

Sometimes we do not know what we communicate through perceptions of our skin, history, or stereotype.  And sometimes we are forced to learn, unlearn, and relearn our own embodied symbols in order to understand how our identity translates across cultures.  

Diaspora

Diaspora

Alien, stranger in this world, Other

We left our home but our home has not left us. 

Home

Place of our dreams, place of our Selves, place of our blood.

That place which brands us, marks us, delineates us.

A pastiche of memories and meanings,

Constantly changing while remaining unchanged.

Home

That place we belong to which we no longer belong.

Our roots, our bondage, our past, our future.

It haunts our dreams and taints our tongues.

It shapes our souls and our social introductions.

“Where are you from?”

            The Dark Continent, The Motherland

            The place you do not know and have not known.

            Hidden in mists and misconceptions, 

            Ignored in ignorance, exoticized in effigy. 

Where are we from?

         Do you really want to know?

         Should we really tell you?

         How can you begin to understand?

         How can we begin to understand?

Where is Home?

         We knew once.  Then we left.

         Chasing dreams or chased from dreams.

         Seeking greener pastures, expelled from natal pastures.

         Pushed or pulled, drawn or compelled.

Where is Home?

           Both here and there.

          Neither here nor there.

          In the home of our birth, we have become Other.

           In our adopted home, we remain Other.

Where do we belong?   

      Everywhere.  Nowhere.  Anywhere.

      In a land not our home, in a land not our own.

      A land of aliens, strangers, and others

      In a land where we have become the alien, the stranger, the Other.

We are Diaspora