Where I'm Coming From - Guest Post by Kent MacCarter [21.07.2010]

Where are you from? How can you tell? You have to be from somewhere, don’t you? So, where are you from? What? Huh?

These are questions I am confronted with quite often in Australia, as I am sure they are inquired of everybody who has relocated here as an adult and has stayed long enough to forget that they are the ones who sound funny (unless you’re from Adelaide, but that’s a story for another post).

Australians are an inquisitive brood and I applaud this. Now, more often than not, I field the polite query of, “So, where in Canada are you from?” The slope of my accent clearly triggers two immediate possibilities of what nation the answer might be. My ‘fromness factor’, as I hereby dub it, is a little murky. Typically, I reply with, “No, just south of there” or, in more persnickety moods, “Nup, the other, eviler one”.

I am never offended at these guesses of Canadian ‘fromness’ (fromosity? Not a word, but ought be) because they not only prove the curiosity of the enquirer, but instantly entertain a possible answer. And that’s an engagement, if a perpetually incorrect one, that intrigues me. The capacity that ‘from’ holds is both huge and ephemeral. It’s never static. It’s flawed.

An example of from’s evasiveness:

Where are Cheezels® from? Cheezels® come from a box. Oh? No, wait. They come from the supermarket and handy milk bars when you’re legless. Really? That’s it then? Okay. Even that’s not accurate. Cheezels® come from the Snack Foods Limited company. But that company is in South Australia? Ah yes. Cheezels® must come from South Australia. My mistake.

Wow? That’s a monumentally dull conclusion, isn’t it? And likely not even accurate.

I think the truest answer to where Cheezels® come from is, quite simply, irrelevant. Thankfully, they exist. They are Australian and a miniscule part of the home I feel here. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Okay. So. I am from America. But which part? That’s a difficult question. I do not have a pinpointed, geographic ‘from’. I’ve lived all over. Is birthplace the true answer of where you’re from? Codswallop. Of course not. But if ‘from’ is so fleeting, then from what previously existing fixture, point, state of being or shutter click can from’s reference be contrasted against? At what point after? What do you grab a hold of, keep and make into you? If I were to answer the standard ‘from’ inquisition with, “I am from the marriage of my wife and me,” I’d surely solicit bemused stares. And maybe a poke in the chops. But why? It is a much more accurate answer than Lakeville, Minnesota, USA nowadays in my life, even if I was born there and do have a stoically Lutheran sense of timid pride that I was so. Yes. I am aware that most people assume a geographical starting point will be included in an answer. And this is an inherent flaw in ‘from’.

The better question is this – where’s home? Humans have the capacity to provide a sense of home. As do states of being. Once again, now we’re getting somewhere.

I think about this often and my thoughts generally careen off into un-winnable debates with myself about where lines can be drawn and exactly what utility pole I’ll smash the bumper of my reasoning into. What about the two whingeing cats I live with and dearly love? My favourite collection of August Kleinzahler poetry? My Galaxie 500 records? Tacos? Can they individually provide ‘home’? Or are they merely parts that make up a whole essence? One must respect the bigness that ‘home’ feels and clearly is. I am not sure a pet, a book or a plate of rigatoni can instill ‘home’ by themselves, even if they echo it in perfect science.

Here’s a quote from Michael Ondaatje:

A marriage exists in the space between two people – and that can be a part of the home too, but you carry it with you like a snail carries a shell.

And this from W.H. Auden in his poem ‘War Time’:

When no one whom we need is looking, Home
A sort of honour, not a building site,
Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might
Be somewhere else, yet trust that we have chosen right.

Spot on. I would argue that a marriage, a state of being, can BE the home, not just a part of it.

See? This icy reasoning easily slides off into identity, nation building, politics, etc. Lately, all this has got me to thinking about how home, its possible abstractions and the entities that home inhabits are presented in writing from authors who no longer reside in their original geographic place of birth.

I recently attended the launch of Emmett Stinson’s short story collection, Known Unknowns. As a fellow expatriate, I was very drawn to these words in his speech that night:

The last word in Known Unknowns is the word ‘home’, and to me it’s an important word both for me and for this book. Calling someplace home doesn’t just mean that it’s where you come from; calling someplace ‘home’ also means that you’ve invested yourself in it, that you care about it and recognise a set of responsibilities and obligations to it. Calling a place home means caring about something bigger than yourself.

Bingo. I asked a few other expat writers about their take on home. Here are their replies.

Friend, colleague, master chef of both words and food in her own right (long before the show, folks) and the freshly minted Curriculum Officer at the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, Bev Laing, answered:

Home is that little bit of you that remains the same, no matter where you are in the world or what language you are operating in. It’s the kernel that survives all change, grows with growth, is the voice you had when you were a kid.

Interesting. I’m buying that. Now we have the kernel of ‘voice’ as home in the foray from none other than the reincarnation of M.F.K. Fisher herself! She knew a thing or two about home and hearth, as does Laing. Hyperbole aside, nothing in Laing’s response is fettered to a singular spot on Earth. Home’s moveable, ephemeral. It remembered to pack a towel in its suitcase. And a wine corkscrew.

Kiwi novelist, Julian Novitz, had this to say about his fromness factor:

I spent my childhood constantly being asked where I was from … I was raised with a greater awareness of what was going on in the rest of the world than the other kids I knew. The world outside of New Zealand was just much more of a focus in our household, and our parents encouraged us from quite an early age to think about living in other places, not limiting our sense of opportunity to one country. It’s probably wrong to say that it didn’t feel like home, but New Zealand and being a New Zealander seemed like it was a less important facet of my identity than it was to the New Zealanders I grew up with and still encounter.

OK. So here’s a reply that’s an outright rejection of one’s native geological space defining the sense of ‘home’. Let’s go back to my question then: where’s home for Novitz? His home lies in the potential of ‘other places’ as opposed to the ‘limiting sense of one country’. That may or may not be true for Novitz – that’s my assessment – but I would like to think (and do think) that the essence of home or feeling at home can be expressed abstractly in humans. Possibly feeling at home in worldliness versus myopia (self-imposed or not)?

I’ll wager this is exponentially truer in authors. I am linking to various authors’ laurels and details because I fancy my wager is an awfully, awfully safe bet. I don’t have the answer to why that is, other than my own experiences, but it intrigues me immensely.

Plus, this is a blog. They’re good writers. Read about ’em.

Finally, another expat writer’s crack at home’s truth according to her. This one from 2009 Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer prize winner, Amy Espeseth:

Home for me is Wisconsin, but I am occasionally confused between my actual hometown of Barron and my fictional hometown of Failing. I spent my first eighteen years living in that real place, but I’ve spent the rest creating a shadow world for my characters. In some ways, I’ve lived in Failing much more than I ever lived in Barron; I pay more attention in fiction.

This seals the deal on my earlier bet. I win. But so do you. It also adds another intriguing layer: is home a capacious state entirely of an experiencer’s making? Can it be damned well whatever you want it to be, even if that semblance of home is a 100% netherworld concocted in your own head and spilled out onto paper? Why not.

Two Americans, a Canadian and a New Zealander – like me, all now permanently living and writing in Australia. Here’s my tale on how I got here (issue 40 of Gangway ,the story I read at Dog’s Bar Storytelling event). Veering off a bit again, I argue that these nations are ‘easy’ locations to be from, call home, attest something in between or be in rebellion of. In all four spots, there is common language, identical pursuits of stuff and prefab allegiances to help you along the way.

Problems with ‘from’ exacerbate when gulfs of language churn into the mix … but that doesn’t affect ‘home’ at all, does it? Veering further, is home’s potential to be felt strictly via mental state(s) its only saving, accurate grace against it being as equally flawed as ‘from’ if, say, you’ve been in prison for 30 years? Denuded of place variety? Melbourne PEN’s Writers from Prison program is something I need to know more about.

I’ve lobbed questions in this post left, right and kitty-corner. I’m not an admiral in a boatload of answers. Who is? And what is her or his fromosity?

Home is alive, well and collecting its 9% superannuation from all of us nicely, thankyouverymuch. From? From … panhandles. Both have been written about for eons and will be for more no matter where you started and moved on to or remained. What writers put in to ‘home’ in waking life, we later extract in attempts toward a smattering of paragraphs that run, not walk. And when you look back down through that palimpsest of lines, it’s shape, their symbols, you discover that it spells your name.

Kent MacCarter studied writing at University of Chicago and University of Melbourne. An expatriate of various places in Minnesota, Montana and New Mexico, he is now a permanent resident in Melbourne, Australia. His first collection of poetry, In the Hungry Middle of Here, was published by Transit Lounge Press in 2009. He is currently on the executive board of SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) as Treasurer.

His poetry collection, In the Hungry Middle of Here is available from Transit Lounge, and he is appearing at Debut Mondays on August 2nd.

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