CHAPTER 5

How Much Home Does a Person Need?

Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts, that it is impossible to return…because he has been so deeply changed by his emigration. It is equally impossible to return to that historical state in which every village was the center of the world. The one hope of recreating a center now is to make it the entire earth. Only worldwide solidarity can transcend modern homelessness.

—John Berger

 

 

At the heart of contemporary anthropology lies a dilemma: How can we do justice to what is at stake for people in their “local moral worlds”¹ and at the same time strive to broaden our analytical horizons to encompass the general and global conditions of human life on earth? This dilemma is at once methodological and empirical. As Michael Herzfeld has shown,² the discursive tension between a localizing ethnographic gaze and a generalizing theoretical perspective echoes the social and political tensions between societies at the margins of the modern nation-state and the centralized, bureaucratized structures of the state. Moreover, there is probably no human society in which people have not wrestled with the ethical question of how one can reconcile a sense of shared humanity with the essentialized distinctions between gender, age, birthright, caste, and class on which social structures are typically built. These questions are fundamental to existential anthropology and exercised me throughout my years in Denmark, provoked undoubtedly by the curious experience of feeling increasingly at home in a place where I was culturally, linguistically, and officially an outsider. That my reflections on the paradoxes of human plurality were inspired by Hannah Arendt's incisive comments on the ambiguity of what it means to be human may have had something to do with the fact that Arendt herself was also an expatriate,³ and that my work on the politics of storytelling⁴ evolved as a set of variations on a central theme in her book The Human Condition.

I first visited Denmark in 1969 with my first wife, Pauline, who had been learning Danish at Cambridge with Elias Bredsdorff as part of her PhD work on the Icelandic family sagas. In Copenhagen, Pauline would spend four weeks in a “language-intensive” program, improving her spoken Danish while I hung out at Bellahoj, where we were camped, writing an essay on Malcolm Lowry, whose eye for uncanny connections and natural symbols seemed to me, at the time, worth imitating as an ethnographic skill. After our month in Copenhagen we planned to drive to Paris and wait for a sailing from Le Havre to Sierra Leone, where I would begin my PhD fieldwork and put into practice the same attentiveness to detail that characterized Lowry's writing but had, ironically, brought him to the point of madness.

At Cambridge, Pauline had become good friends with Elias Bredsdorff's daughter, Kristine, and in our free time we explored Copenhagen together. Elias had been active in the wartime resistance and was editor of its underground newspaper, so the Resistance Museum was one of the first places we visited. Reading my notebook from that time, I am reminded of how preoccupied I became by the problem of trust, for under occupation one's life is often in the hands of strangers. Is it then safer to keep to oneself, to withdraw into a small circle of family and trusted friends, or does one's duty to compatriots in peril compel one to risk one's life to help them? Elias Bredsdorff ran these risks and survived the war. But within months of the war ending, he left Denmark to take up a lecturership in Danish at University of College London. Though Kristine was born in London, the family moved to Cambridge in 1949, when Elias was appointed head of the Scandinavian studies department. His magnum opus, published in 1975, was a critical biography of Hans Christian Andersen.

Kristine was also eager to have us experience the Copenhagen jazz scene, and one night she took us to the famous Jazzhus Montmartre. We probably didn't hear Ben Webster on tenor sax and Teddy Wilson on piano (they were touring in Norway that August), but I learned a little about the importance of cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Copenhagen in a global diaspora of jazz music and musicians that dated from the 1930s. By the early sixties, Copenhagen rivaled New York for its musical energy and new-wave innovations. African American expatriates and touring stars improvised with local Danish jazzmen in settings that Dexter Gordon spoke of as “conducive to [his] well-being [and] peace of mind.”⁵ In Copenhagen, he felt “relaxed and comfortable,” considering it “a second home.” Here, according to Dexter's widow Maxine, musicians could count on longer engagements and better pay than in the United States, and get informed and sympathetic reviews. But just as important as regular paid employment was the absence of racism,⁶ and many black musicians settled in Denmark for this reason, including—for various periods—Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Kenny Drew, Stuff Smith, Sahib Shihab, Idrees Sulieman, Ray Pitts, Oscar Pettiford, Duke Jordan, Mercer Ellington, Horace Parlan, Brew Moore, Albert Heath, and Ed Thigpen.

Thirty years after my first visit to Copenhagen, I returned with my second wife and our two children. Unable to find work in my own country, I had accepted a temporary appointment in the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. We ended up living in Denmark for six years, three of them in an apartment on the corner of Åhornsgade and Nørre Alle, only a few blocks from the Assistens Cemetery, where Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and several African American jazzmen—Ben Webster, Kenny Drew, and Richard B. Boone—were buried.

I visited the cemetery often. It was a quiet place to stroll or even take a picnic lunch. Whenever I passed the section reserved for the black jazzmen who had died so far from home, I would reflect on the irony that while the United States had become a tolerably better place for African Americans since the early sixties, Copenhagen had ceased to be the haven for expatriates it had been back then. Even though I was treated hospitably, I was always mindful, during my annual visit to Immigration for a new work permit, that I was more welcome than the refugees and asylum seekers among whom I waited my turn for an interview. And hardly a week passed that I was not made aware when talking to Iraqi, Somali, Palestinian, and Kurdish neighbors in Nørrebro that they felt ghettoized and stigmatized in a country that had granted them legal residency only to socially shun them.

I used to think anthropology might share the spirit of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, embracing the view that essential distinctions between different ethnicities have long been complicated and transgressed as people travelled, traded, interacted, and intermarried across the globe. More significant than the hard-line sense of difference that perpetuates racial stereotypes and prejudices are the forms of conversation, civility, and coexistence that have made hybrids of us all. While anthropology today acknowledges these global processes of transnational mobility, media dissemination, and cosmopolitanism,⁷ it continues to document the countervailing presence of local world views, nationalisms, religions, and ways of life, suggesting that no matter how universal the public sphere becomes, the private sphere is never eclipsed but, on the contrary, often works as a corrective or subversion. My own work took this thesis even further by arguing that the lived experience of any one person, though conditioned by the sociohistorical milieu in which he or she has come of age, is never reducible to that milieu, and that an indeterminate relationship exists between imperatives felt to be one's own and equally strong imperatives that are felt to be external or other. It was this relational perspective, with its emphasis on the inner life of human subjects in relation to other subjects, and not merely in relation to global spheres of climate change, market processes, genetic transfers, international politics, pandemic illnesses, communication technologies, media, migration, and mobility, that gave some of my colleagues the impression that I was out of touch with contemporary politico-economic realities and engaged in some kind of solipsistic philosophical anthropology. But I was never sure whether it was my intellectual work that made me anomalous, or my expatriate and impermanent status, my failure to acquire fluency in Danish, and my tendency to keep to myself.

Twice a year Henny Pedersen and her colleagues at the Institute would organize a mystery tour. We would meet for drinks before being ushered onto a bus and spirited to a location in the city or countryside, or along the coast, where we would visit some story-worthy site and afterward enjoy a restaurant meal in one another's company. The intimacy and conviviality of these occasions was something one rarely encounters in institutional settings outside of Denmark. Personal differences were set aside, candles lit, beer consumed, food passed around, songs sung, stories told, toasts made, bonds formed. But while the art of creating this cozy and familial ambiance (hyggeligt) impresses the outsider, it can also leave one feeling that one could never be entirely a part of it. On one excursion to an offshore island a few miles south of the city, we wandered in small groups along a rutted farm track, and thence across water meadows to a shingle beach, where we stopped for lunch. As we were unpacking our rucksacks, it began to rain. It was obvious from the bruised and lowering clouds now rolling in from the sea and the sound of distant thunder that the storm would be upon us within minutes. Though my colleagues acknowledged the dangers of being caught out in the open during an electrical storm, no one made a move. Without a second thought, I now climbed to my feet and announced that I was going to seek shelter in the farmhouse we had passed only minutes before. No one approved or disapproved my proposal, and it was with some dismay that I looked back, not long after leaving the group, to see everyone still sitting in the water meadow, as solid as stones, even though the rain was now falling heavily and lightning was tearing open the darkened sky. Ignoring a No Trespassers sign, I clambered over a padlocked gate to the farmstead, which was deserted, and took refuge in the canopied back of a cattle truck. It was only then, with torrential rain drumming on the canvas and thunder crashing around me, that I realized I had broken an unspoken rule, acting on my initiative rather than in concert with others, and that I had exposed myself as incorrigibly uhyggeligt and un-Danish. Not only had I ignored a padlocked gate and a notice declaring the farm to be private property, but I had acted alone. In due course, some of my colleagues, drenched to the skin, joined me under the leaking canopy. But most trudged back to the landing stage in the rain.

This sense of never quite fitting in made me understandably sympathetic to the African American jazzmen who had escaped the insupportable and everyday humiliations of racism on one side of the Atlantic only to find themselves experiencing the loneliness of exile on the other. Ben Webster was treated with respect, but he often missed the company of kindred spirits and American friends and drank heavily to drown his sorrows.⁸ It is not that there is no place like home but, rather, that there is nowhere one can feel entirely at home. To be cosmopolitan is supposedly to find compensation for this lack of any specific place where one truly belongs. But the word is an abstraction that does not resonate emotionally with the experience of living as an expatriate or exile. What one struggles for is not a word⁹ with which to name this condition of being a part of the world while feeling apart from it; one seeks a way of living betwixt and between.

It is the impossibility of reconciling our inward and outward senses of self that renders existence absurd. One may give one's all to others, embrace a cause, or seek fusion with a transcendent power, be it a nation, a moral principle, or a god. But the more one tries to eclipse oneself, to submerge one's passions and particularities in one's relations with others, with absolutes or something greater than the self, the more one is brought back to the indissolubly singular truth of who one is. George Orwell, borrowing a phrase from Mahatma Gandhi, referred to this as “the unregenerate part of life,” including the side of a saint's life that is suppressed, devalued, and disavowed in order to pursue a higher moral calling.¹⁰ The reverse is also true, for the more one reflects on one's individuality, the more one discovers in oneself evidence of one's ancestry, habits that reveal one's social conditioning, dispositions that reveal one's history, and intimations of one's own mortality. This is Søren Kierkegaard's “paradox of existence.”¹¹ One can no more achieve fusion with one's family, one's ethnicity, one's lover, or one's God than sustain for very long the illusion of one's own uniqueness. To sink one's consciousness in the sea or sky is perfectly possible, but sea and sky are like anesthetics from which one inevitably comes round. One may have hoped that they would bear one away, into another space, another sphere of consciousness, but they turn out to be mirrors in which you discover your own face again.

En route to South America, and with less than a year to live, Albert Camus spent hours alone gazing at the sea. In the moonlight, the ocean seemed like a summons to life, but in the tarnished darkness of its depths it was an invitation to death.¹² One night, saddened by how few stars there were in the southern sky, he found himself thinking of “our Algerian nights, swarming with stars.”¹³ The Algerian War of Independence had been raging for five years, and Camus's noncommittal public statements on where he stood no doubt reflected his inability to disentangle his political and personal thoughts. If he could see no political solution to the crisis in Algeria, it was because he could see no resolution of his own personal dilemmas—an intellectual who was skeptical of philosophical systems and political ideologies, a natural solitary who had become a celebrity. “I don't love Algeria in the same way a soldier or colonist does, but can I love it other than as a Frenchman? What most Arabs don't understand is that I love it as a Frenchman who loves Arabs and wants them to be at home in Algeria, but I don't want to feel like a foreigner there myself.”¹⁴

Camus's deepest struggle, however, was to transcend identity thinking, to live outside the terms that history dictated to him and the social contradictions into which he was born. Two months before he sailed for South America, he confided to his diary: “For years I've tried to live according to everyone else's morality and I forced myself to live like everyone else and to resemble everyone else. I said what was needed to unite people, even when I myself felt estranged from them, and in the end the catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris as an outlaw, drawn and quartered, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularities and weaknesses. And I must reconstruct a truth after having lived a sort of lie all my life.”¹⁵

Is it possible to strike a balance between being true to oneself and meeting the demands placed upon one by one's children, one's friends, one's country? The expatriate possibly feels the tug of these competing imperatives even more than the exile, for while the exile is morally recused from allegiance to the country that has forced him to live abroad, the expatriate must remain loyal to his homeland as well as conform to the rules of the country in which he lives as a resident alien. As a result, the expatriate finds fulfillment neither in his country of origin (because his life there has been placed on hold) nor in the country of adoption (because his life there lacks the depth and warmth that come from being in a familiar place). One's mind is always wandering—worrying where one properly belongs, where one really should be; wondering about the life that one passed up in order to improve one's chances elsewhere; preoccupied by what is missing in the life one has made when compared to the life one was born into.

At sea, en route to Denmark, Helga Crane is momentarily liberated from having to be the person others want her to be, from conforming to the persona that others impose upon her. Helga Crane is the key figure in Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, and it is hard not to imagine that Helga's thoughts are also the author's: “But even the two rough days found her on deck, reveling like a released bird in ehr returned feeling of happiness and freedom, that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race.”¹⁶

Larsen's mother was a Danish immigrant in the United States; her father hailed from the Danish West Indies. Did this make her a “Negro,” or was this identity foist upon her by a society so deeply divided along color lines that many people were never free to decide their identities for themselves?

Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891, at a time when the city was beginning to divide along racial lines. Her father soon disappeared from her life, and her mother married another Dane with whom she had a second daughter. Reviled by her stepfather and stepsister, Larsen also became a victim of the city's segregation laws that made it impossible for a “black” person to live in a “white” neighborhood. Destined “to live a life apart,”¹⁷ yet resisting a world premised on a crude and fundamentalist division between black and white, Larsen's life would become an unending struggle to find a place that transcended such divisions, a place between. If her fiction is anything to go by, Larsen hardly ever experienced the feeling of release that she attributes to Helga Crane. In her first few months in Copenhagen, Helga's dream is realized, of “the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings,” the kinds of things that being black in America doomed one to admire at a distance but never possess. But after two years in the Danish capital, subjected to the gaze of people for whom blacks were exotic and alluring animals, she began to wonder whether the more malign stereotypes of North America might be more bearable. It was the kind of thought that passed through the minds of some of the black jazzmen who settled in Copenhagen in the 1960s. That Danes embraced black music so enthusiastically was not only because it offered something beyond the exhausted European systems of harmony, melody, pitch, and timbre; it allegedly aroused a more libidinal, sexually energized mode of being. Ornette Coleman objected to this stereotype of the music and the musicians. James Baldwin was not surprised. Prejudice was prejudice, whether it categorized you as naturally stupid or naturally rhythmic. In 1965 he passed through Denmark on his way to Sweden and paid a visit to Hamlet's “castle” at Elsinore. In a letter to his brother, David, Baldwin mentions a pond near Elsinore, “invented” by Shakespeare. On this pond he had observed a family of black swans being “ignored” by a lone white one.¹⁸

After two years in Denmark, Helga Crane is only too glad to get back to Harlem's “dirty streets [and] “dark, gay humanity.”¹⁹ But she has discovered that race, in one form or another, will follow her wherever she goes. It is so deeply and indelibly inscribed in the consciousness of both whites and blacks that it cannot be waived or written off. Against every attempt to make yourself the person you want to be, and to find acceptance as this person, the false consciousness of essentialism does its insidious and corrosive work, reminding you that you have only created a facade, a pretense, and that beneath your sophisticated airs, stylish clothes, educated manner, and brilliant writing you remain incorrigibly Other. You are nothing but a poor copy, a plagiarized version, of an Other that is beyond you. Under all this pressure, is it any wonder that you doubt yourself, your intelligence, your writing, your determination to be more than merely black or white, or some indescribable mixture of the two? And if black intellectuals conspire to exaggerate the significance of racial identity, to inadvertently perpetuate the essentialisms that underwrote slavery and segregation by making “passing” the ultimate betrayal of one's history and identity, then you have no allies, no place to go.

Henry Louis Gates's essay on Anatole Broyard exemplifies the dilemma. His essay is a sustained condemnation of the sin of passing. Broyard's efforts to transcend his origins are seen as denials of those origins, even as Gates recognizes that Broyard's options were impossible ones—like the Scylla and

Charybdis of being true or false to one's ethnicity that made Nella Larsen's life so vexed.

So here was a man who passed for white because he wanted to be a writer, and he did not want to be a Negro writer. It is a crass disjunction, but it is not his crassness or his disjunction. His perception was perfectly correct. He would have to be a Negro writer, which was something he did not want to be. In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing?²⁰

The tension between how we think of ourselves and how others think about us is a variation on the theme of how we adjust our sense of our own projects, our own needs, our own interests, our own sense of self to the conventional ways in which our humanity is identified for us. How difficult it must be to a Muslim in a time and place that polarizes Sunni and Shia identities, making them mutually antithetical. How impossible it must be to live in countries where sectarian divisions have become so entrenched and selfperpetuating that violence is seen as the only way in which one way of life can be defended against the other. One is left with no middle ground, nowhere to stand if one refuses the dreadful logic of essentialist reason—that if you are not for us, then you are against us. Like Nella Larsen and Anatole Broyard, Zora Neale Hurston avoided harnessing her writing to an explicitly political agenda. Her priority was testifying to the “helter skelter skirmish”²¹ that was life for the people she knew best, even if this meant sharing their distance from the political agendas of black urban intellectuals. She there fore laid herself open to censure and accusations of selling out from politicized black writers like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. And it would take another generation, and the appearance of Alice Walker's notable essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,”²² before the quality of Hurston's work ceased to be measured against some ideological yardstick but recognized and celebrated as literature. By this time, Hurston, like Larsen, had died, penurious and forgotten.

Hurston once wrote: “At certain times I have no race. I am me…I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within boundaries.”²³ James Baldwin also wanted to be free to broaden his experience beyond the cage in which identity politics had confined it. Growing up, he had fought against being a figment of the white imagination.²⁴ He left the United States for France because “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.”²⁵ The trouble is that the expatriate may expand his or her horizons and even become, as Baldwin did, an internationally admired figure, but this comes at the cost of losing touch with the specific world, how ever limiting and oppressive, in which one grew up and in which one's core sense of self was formed. One cannot have it both ways. Becoming a public figure is always going to make it difficult to protect one's private life, just as going abroad is always going to estrange one from one's homeland.