rm | hyphenated me

We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us, me, and you
Is if the Russians love their children too.

It's a testament both to my age and what a weird news week this has been (Russian spies???!) that I'm starting this entry with a quote from a Sting song I used to sing a lot when I was a teen, mainly because it's a nice fit for my voice, and because I grew up at the tail end of the secret nuclear club.

The funny thing about this song, even though it's all about peace, is that it's actually a bit offensive if you think about it. Of course the Russians love their children too. That's the funny thing about people, they're pretty much the same wherever you go, which is why I get a little bit cranky when people start talking about "The American Dream" like no one ever looked up at the stars or decided whoever dies with the most toys wins before Europeans got to this chunk of this continent.

I'm a hyphenated-American. The short versions of that include Italian- or Sicilian-American depending on whom I'm speaking to (I'll unpack that mess for you another time), Jewish-American, Eastern-European American and Queer-American. The long list could include a bunch more things because my family history is pretty complicated, but I usually stick to those because they're the dominant things that impact how I live every day.

Yeah. Really. Every day. They're why I call pasta sauce "gravy" or sometimes keep being tempted to call Patty shaina punim. They're also why I sometimes get embarrassed when my father asks me to "shut the light" or "if I brushed my tooth" eventhough his first and only language is English (I wish he was better at code-switching) or why I always, always think twice before I pick up money, even if it's my own I dropped, lying in the street.

All the time, I get asked where I'm from. Maybe that's a New York thing, like asking people how much their rent is. But on a pretty regular basis I get mistaken for a long list of things including Middle Eastern, French and Spanish. People tell me they know I'm a Jew because of my nose; sometimes it's affectionate, sometimes not. My nose, btw, isn't from that side of the family.

Once while traveling a San Francisco bookshop a clerk asked me if I was Sicilian. "Well, my family is," I told her.

"I knew!" she said. "I never see anyone here that looks like me. It's good you're visiting."

In Italy when people ask, I say my family comes from there (again with the Sicilian or Italian depending on locale, long story), but I'm from the States. In other countries I say New York or the States. Easy enough.

But here, in NYC, I'm Sicilian and Eastern European. I explain that Latvia and Lithuania are two different countries. I wind up answering quiet questions about what happened to my mother's family in the War. And the reason I'm those things here isn't because I'm not proud to be from the here or want to be cool and exotic, but because those markers are how I'm from here. They inform the way and nature of my Americanism.

My national experience, despite being second-generation and then some, is absolutely colored by the fact that my father's family came here through Ellis Island, that my grandmother had nothing more than a third grade education, that my father's father was a shoemaker, and my mother's grandfather a tailor. These facts are in, not just my family, but in my memory and my flesh (and not just because I also happen to have a genetic illness that correlates with my ancestry); they inform my gender, my faith and the way in which I try to build community around me. If you'd ever seen me sit alone and tend to clothes or construct mournful tunes or random syllables as I walk from the subway to my house, you would know, and you would ask, where are you from?

My life has also been shaped by the hyphenations of those around me -- from food to meeting parents to stories about how folks came to be here; their families got here on planes! which is hard for me to imagine. And then there are all the Indian folks in my life who spent the back-end of 2001 explaining that they weren't terrorists and the Muslim folks in my life explaining that not all Muslims share the same skin color or clothing choices.

So when people tell me I should drop my hyphenations because they're just about hating America or refusing to assimilate, I am confused. It is like asking me to observe, but never write, or telling me that it's somehow inappropriate for me to use each of the senses I've been given. My sense of America and its promise is less without my hyphenations. My hyphenations are an act of love.

America¹ isn't, and can't, be one thing. Even if I dropped all my hyphenations, odds are my experience of American culture would be really different from a lot of people's. I've never driven a car. Or been to a football game. My high school didn't have a homecoming dance. I never learned to ride a bike. I grew up eating pizza with a knife and fork. Dinner was more often at 8 than 6. I never went to religious services for anything other than transition rituals. I never had a yard.

But here's the thing, I am sick of being told -- whether it's by political factions in this country or The Brady Bunch -- that I'm doing it wrong. I'm sick of being told that America values individuality, only to be told in the next breath I'm not really from here because I'm from New York or of the wrong faith or fuck in ways you deem too dirty to be called love.

I am also sick of being told that we're all equal here so I better act like I'm on the damn team already when my inheritance, marriage and employment rights (to name just a few) are different than yours; when people are still stopped for driving while black or flying while brown; when women are paid $.78 on the dollar to a man, when the surest way to make the value of a profession go down is to make it appealing to women or racial and ethnic minorities, and when Arizona is outlawing education about anything other than dead white guys and assuming that all Latinos are illegal.

And I'm sick of being told that this country, my country, has a monopoly on ambition, like no one else ever wanted to change the world or like ambition is the best of all virtues; let me tell you, just from living with myself and my desires that both those things are lies.

When I was a kid I gave a speech on "What's Right About America" in the Miss New York National Teenager Pageant 1987, a pageant I entered because I was trying to be American in a way that our wacked out culture had me convinced I couldn't be living in New York.² I wasn't normal. I wasn't, I feared, American. I thought, I'll show people! Even if I did say during the interview portion of the competition that the famous person I most wanted to meet was Soviet dissident and scientist Andrei Sakarov, because I was too embarrassed to admit that really, I wanted to say David Bowie.³

I didn't win the speech category or the pageant, but my speech was about how America allows us to talk about her, refine her, criticize her and fix her. Our Constitution is a living, shifting document. And you can't have that sort of life and evolution without discussion and without multiple viewpoints.

Our virtue as a nation is a simple one. We're people, just like people anywhere. And we the people everywhere love our children. We want comfortable homes and good food. We want to get through the night. We want people to like us. We want to be happy. We want to change the world. We want to learn things. We want to do stuff just because someone told us we couldn't. We want our parents to be proud of us. We want to be free.

And, in addition to all of that, whether by choice or fate or by theft and viciousness (by which I mean the slave trade that brought people here, for those not quite following along), we're bound up with a whole hell of a lot of other people in this cruel, brilliant, silly and sublime nation of colonizers and the colonized, where we often must desperately hope, at least if you have certain hyphenations that necessitate such hope and fear, that our neighbors, no matter what their hyphenations are, are on the same page as us.

Our history may be unique but every country's is, and people are people. Just like the Russians, who yes, Sting, do love their children too. Or the Moroccans. Or the Ghanaians, or the Dutch, or the Argentinians, or the Japanese or the Czech, or the Sudanese, or the Kenyans or any of the dozens of other countries I could name here (if I could remember them all -- Patty can, she plays a neato geography game to practice, but I'm not as good).

So don't tell me only Americans are exceptional. And don't tell me the only way to be American is to forget.⁴

¹ Calling the US "America" as shorthand is basically shit. Lots of other countries in America, and I'm doing it here in part out of a bad habit I'm still working on and in part because of the LJ post this was written in response too. Additionally, sometimes in addressing the Myth of America, one has to talk to it on its terms, no matter how problematic.
² The parts of the country that revile me for being queer, for being Jewish, for being not white enough, for having a certain education, and for living in New York never treated me like an American until 9/11. Now wars, one of which has had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 have been fought in my name. I am sick of my city being used and abused for the sake of politics and quasi-national racial and religious anxieties I don't share.
³ Who I did actually meet briefly years later.
⁴ Seriously, did you miss that part about being of Eastern European Jewish descent?