Resonance and Identity

"When the wind blows to the south / hear it sing of the flat land that is mine"

Some more philosophizing, my favorite and most essential hobby:

I can't identify as a Latino, nor as an Asian person.  While I have met and eaten with Italians and with Berbers, I can't call myself one.  But I feel more completely a whole person nose because I can identify with those people.  100% of me is not much to brag about.  I am only multi-racial in the sense that I am part Anglo and part Saxon.  But I feel truly that I am greater than the sum of my parts because I have a special resonance beyond what the limits of my genetic structure attribute to me. 

I can thank Peace Corps and the many people in Candelaria for opening their homes to me during my eight months an Incan/Quechua town in Bolivia.  And the resonance of that experience was internalized in me and makes up a part of my identity.  

Likewise, my Colombian friend Cristina and my role model Shakira opened the greatest nation on the planet to me (notice here I differentiate between government and nation, as in the narrow sense 'people').  While I don't believe it's so dangerous as many people think, the biggest threat from it became true: while I was allowed to leave, my heart was kidnapped by these people.  But it was those in Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Nuevo Colon that showed me the place it had been taken to.  Going and knowing it was the ransom I had to pay to get that privilege back.

When my guitar professor took me to a party 2 miles from my home, I discovered a gathering of 30 joyous Iranian people.   They wined and dined me and taught me the numerals in Farsi.  Now I have this piece of me that is optimistic the two countries can reconcile their differences.  

Similarly, the presidency of Barack Obama is more than just a victory for the African-American community, but a badge of pride for those in my generation, where the idea of a minority President is not such a big deal at all.  Going to college, I lived with a Mexican guy, and another guy who was half-Japanese and half-Mexican.  The only white guy besides me was one that spoke Japanese!  The parties at our house attracted people from all stripes, but luckily no world war began there. And the great part was how revolutionary it wasn't. No big deal!

I can't help but listen to Jacques Brel sing 'le plat pays' (the flat country) and think of eating gaufres, waffles with chocolate, with my Italian love Serena in the square in Brugges.  I don't consider myself Flemish or Salentino. But the song still resonates all the more deeply despite that, as it is something inside me that responds to the lyrics and not any birthright that one has to be given. While that is maybe not the label that I am allowed to write when I fill out a job application, it is rather something I identify with, and that's a lot more valuable.  

So when I listen to a good chanson, or just el son cubano, something inside of me is transported back to the wonderment of those diverse places. For a little while I am more than a WASP*.   Maybe a little bit Colombian, a little bit Brazilian and a little bit North African. And so I start to wonder whether I really ever was just that, anyway.

OK! Time to go cook some waffles and eat them, remembering Serena, my Piccolina.

*white anglo-saxon protestant