THE TRAVELER IN THE 21st CENTURY
(An excerpt from the introduction of Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley)
The plane from St. Petersburg was in a holding pattern over Moscow, reducing my already short connection time. I could not afford to miss my flight to Hong Kong because my Russian visa expired at midnight and it was already past seven in the evening. I’d read horror stories of travelers who’d overstayed their Russian visas by only a couple of hours, and who wound up not only greatly inconvenienced but in trouble. My plane to Hong Kong was due to depart at 8:15 p.m. and, in my state of panic and exasperation at 7:30 p.m. when the plane finally landed, I took every further delay as a personal affront on the part of Aeroflot and whatever bureaucratic under-demon in hell handles the flight itineraries of mortals such as myself. Another fifteen minutes passed as we filed in slow motion out of the plane and onto waiting buses to take us to the terminal. From there, I ran through a hallway that seemed to have been styled after a pneumatic tube, but with none of a pneumatic tube’s advantages of propulsion. Huffing along with a fellow passenger to the third floor and passport control—8 p.m. by this time—he remarked as we stepped on the elevator, “This always happens to me.” And I had thought it only happened to me.
After passport control, I passed another mile from terminal D to F through another human-scale pneumatic tube and acreage of duty-free shops and restaurants. By the time I reached my gate, it was 8:20 p.m., my mouth parched, my heart racing, my clothes soaked in perspiration. The door to my gate was closed, a woman on a phone chatting away as though all was right with the world. If one can forlornly brandish, then that’s how I showed her my ticket. She shrugged and pointed to her left. Behold, an open door and attendants taking such tickets, brandished by my fellow passengers in anything but a forlorn manner. The first attendant who greeted me as I stumbled aboard looked at me as though I were the last survivor of a desert caravan that had been caught in a windstorm and brought me a glass of water.
I collapsed in my seat and thought that my leave-taking of Russia felt under the circumstances more like an escape. Coincidentally, as I was making my way to Hong Kong and then to my new home of Singapore, where I’d recently accepted a new job, Edward Snowden was heading to Moscow from Hong Kong. Perhaps we’d pass within miles of one another in the air. Snowden, the infamous, at times celebrated, former nsa employee who had embarrassed the U.S. with allegations of mass spying by the government on millions of Americans as well as allied world leaders, was truly escaping the U.S. He’d spent the last several weeks hiding out in Hong Kong, trying to find a country to take him in while the U.S. pressured Beijing and Hong Kong to hand him over. Public sentiment in both places strongly favored Snowden and so he made good his escape.
Well, Snowden had his life to live and I had mine. We were headed in opposite directions, but we were both turning our backs on our country, though he more dramatically than myself. Putin didn’t really want him and kept him holed up in a waiting area of the Moscow airport for weeks before finally welcoming him with folded arms.
The man seated beside me on the plane to Hong Kong, muscular and compactly built, noticed my passport, which I had placed for a moment on my food tray.
“You American?” he asked. “You patriot?”
This is a question that no one had ever asked me before, and I was taken aback. He saw my hesitation and answered first.
“Me, no, not patriot of Ukraine. Bad president, bad police, bad schools. People good. Scenery good. You patriot?” he asked again.
Truthfully and in hindsight, I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m not un-American, but I’m not jingoistic by a long shot. I’m not even sure what “American” means anymore. The more I travel, the more I have identity questions, starting with: how American am I? It seemed to me that America and I were both undergoing prolonged identity crises, and now I was moving away, and America, too, seemed to be drifting.
“I guess,” I said.
“Passport please,” he said as though he were a border guard.
I gave him my passport and asked for his Ukrainian passport. I liked its bright red cover.
“Not so interesting,” he said as he handed it over. “Your passport, interesting.” As he flipped through my passport, he started to hum “The Star-Spangled Banner,” soon rising to a crescendo and looking up with glee from my passport, waving his finger conductor style. “da da da da da that our flag da da da.”
I introduced myself in a gambit to curtail further singing, if possible. He stopped and said he was Alex from Kiev. Soon, I learned more than I cared to know, in the way that you sometimes do on planes. He loved Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president who insisted the Holocaust never happened, and he disliked Obama because he was “African, not American.” He liked Putin.
Happily, after our initial conversation, my Ukrainian friend Alex lost interest in me after he discovered that his favorite movie, Once Upon a Time in America, could be viewed on his personal screen. While he watched the movie, I pondered Alex’s question more intently than he might have imagined.
What other travelers meditate on is their business, but in my case, the questions I’ve sought to understand if not fully answer are those surrounding nationalism, patriotism, and the almost universal need that people have to belong to some collective or another. I’m in agreement with Hannah Arendt when she writes, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.” Like Arendt, I was born without the patriot gene, at least where the loyalty is to a country or an institution. My loyalties are multiple. There are few places I have ventured that I dislike and few people I’ve met from whom I cannot learn something. I am the person who will gladly talk to my seatmate on a plane (in most cases). I’m interested in your beliefs as long as you don’t foist them upon me. I’m curious about what you can tell me about your blind spots and more interested in what you can tell me about my own.
Personally, I like the way the Acadians think of national identity. The Acadians are the descendants of the French settlers in Canada who were ethnically cleansed by the British in the 1700s, the forbearers of today’s Louisiana Cajuns. I met an Acadian author, Francoise Enguehard, on Bastille Day on the island of St. Pierre in the North Atlantic, France’s last possession in North America. The Acadians no longer have a homeland, but they have everything else that goes with nationality. Enguehard explained to me that “Acady is an imaginary country that you make up in your heart every day. Not a nationhood of geography and frontiers but of genealogy and common purpose. By being that way, you understand everything that’s wrong with nationalism. We have a flag. We have a national anthem. We sing it and we’re happy as clams. We have rallied around the symbols of nationhood but we don’t have a territory to fight over. It’s wonderful. It’s freeing. People without a state have something to offer, the higher sense of who we are without all the bullshit.” Perhaps the “bullshit” that Enguehard refers to is the notion that any modern nation is more than something imagined every day by its inhabitants, whether in their hearts, their minds, or their land holdings. In 1982, Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, wrote about the ways in which nations pretend to be ancient, looking towards antiquity for their raison d’etre, while actually being quite recent inventions. Nations are imagined and reimagined every day.
On March 11, 1882, a century before Benedict Anderson weighed in on the matter, French philosopher Ernest Renan delivered to a conference at the Sorbonne an essay titled, “What is a nation?” In some ways, it seems like a simple question, but it’s a question that has perplexed and intrigued people since Renan asked it. A hundred years later, Hugh Seton-Watson, the British historian and political scientist, still couldn’t answer Renan’s question. “I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised,” he wrote, “yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.”
If we look at a world map of 1882 we see how different the nations of today look from the days of Renan. In 1882, Germany was eleven years old, Italy twenty-one years old, and India was a compilation of almost six hundred princely states. Australia wouldn’t be an independent nation for another nineteen years. Simply put, Renan saw himself ultimately as part of a larger community. “We must not abandon this fundamental principle,” he wrote, “that man is a reasonable and moral being before he is penned up in this or that language, a member of this or that race, or a participant in this or that culture. Before French, German, or Italian culture is the culture of mankind.”
Given that nations, as we know them today, are something rather new in history, my questions are: What is the nation from which we travel and what is the nation to which we travel? Who are the twenty-first century travelers and how will they record their travels? Some of them are as well-heeled as any traveler in the past, but some of them are refugees. For me, the complexity of the relationship of the citizen to his or her own nation is the big question of the twenty-first century. Where do we travel simply by consenting to be citizens of the places of our birth? And how do these countries travel beyond us, writing their own travel narratives that bring us along or leave us behind, with or without our consent?
Consent is important here—the consent of one country to receive the traveler, the consent of the traveler to return home, and the consent of his home country to allow him to return. For Renan, the members of a nation, in a metaphorical sense, have a daily plebiscite in which they reaffirm belonging to the nation. Renan knew he was being idealistic when he suggested that land disputes be settled by the inhabitants of those disputed areas. Still, I’m attracted naively to this notion of a citizenry’s consent. Is consent something the travel writer should consider writing about? How freely she moves between borders? How difficult it is for the people whose country she visits to travel in the other direction?
The traveler in the twenty-first century might do well to observe the swirl of history and geographies around her, might do well to consider the fragility and complexity of national identity, like Pico Iyer staked out at the international exit of Los Angeles International Airport, observing the homecomings and first visits to the United States of the travelers pouring out the doors, in this way, traveling alongside them, if only for an instant. Granted, Pico Iyer wrote his lax essay before the twenty-first century, and perhaps the travelers he’d glimpse now would be different, more furtive, warier, more exhausted, or perhaps that’s just me projecting my own furtiveness on these hypothetical twenty-first century travelers.