My little sister recently moved to Berlin, inciting long phone calls on what it’s like to be an American abroad and how to understand one’s identity when away from home.
One particular subject we’ve been discussing at length is our responses to negative perceptions of both the US as a state and of Americans as a people. We both agree that there is much to be critiqued, but how should one respond to these critiques? With simple acceptance? With an in-depth conversation that invites people to look at their own context through the same lens?
My sister’s response is often quite different from mine—and it’s a good challenge. Through our calls and her asking me for advice, I’ve realized the extent to which I feel disconnected from my own identity as an American and the general defeatism I have accepted when it comes to my home country. But why, I have consequently been asking myself, do I feel this way?
I think that one essential aspect is that I understand myself and my own coming-of-age most distinctly through periods of being away from home and then experiencing the discombobulation of a return. Through a linguistic lens, I see the effect of these periods clearly. It was in Leipzig at the age of only eleven that I first began to speak without my accent, embarrassed by the laughter my “y’all”s incited from my German classmates. My vowels shifted in Grand Rapids at eighteen, becoming more nasal, until the laughter this time came from my family when I returned home to Texas for Christmas. In Brussels, I have folded in the expressions of second-language English speakers and direct French-to-English translations until my own sentences are peppered with phrases that are just slightly off but I almost do not notice any more. These are small signals of integration in response to uprootedness; I can hear my own desire to belong.
Another piece of the puzzle, I think, is that I experienced such profound shifts in American politics at a young age and a consequent disillusionment. I went from canvassing for Bernie Sanders at sixteen years old to staying up all night on November 8th, 2016, glued to the election results like a car crash. A rumor spread the next day by a girl in my class that I wasn’t in school that day because I’d stayed at home crying—how pathetic, the rumor implied, to have any notions of leftism in a town that voted 75% for Trump; how pathetic, to have been emotionally invested, to have believed that the election could have gone any other way. In fact, I was on my way to visit Calvin for the first time that day—but she was right, I was continuously crying.
Since this hometown political reckoning, I’ve lived outside of the US during both the first and second Trump administrations. At times, as one of the few Americans that someone has encountered, I have found myself the representative of a detestable government. One such time, I joined a Dutch conversation group for the first time at 10:00 on a Saturday morning, squeezed into a back room of the neighborhood library and expecting only stuttering small-talk. Instead, one man interrupted the flow of the conversation after I introduced myself to the group and mentioned where I’m from. He wanted to know my opinion on Trump, on threatened US-EU trade relations, and how and why a second Trump term was possible. My face was bright red and my Dutch horribly insufficient as I stammered out something like, “I think that it’s not good.”
But even my English is insufficient to respond. I have begun to default to a simple agreement, a “yes, I know,” a “yes, it’s terrible.” And there is so much that this response does not capture—
that I want to but cannot seem to find hope for a political change, for waking up on the morning after the Midterm Elections to the news that my absentee ballot will have been a small part of turning Texas purple.
that I know that disillusionment is a privilege and an unhelpful response.
that there is so much more to the US than its political leadership, a wealth of creativity and diversity and community and resistance.
that I want to be able to name these good things with more specificity, to name the smaller-scale things that I love about the place that I am from even though I do not love the country.
that I feel so far removed now from the US in general and from the places where I have lived specifically that I no longer feel I know it enough to do so.
that I plan to become Belgian, and have no plans to return to the US, and no idea of where I would go if I did, all my roots now shrunken away.
that I remain, despite this, incontestably American.
The limits of my response have begun to reveal themselves through these conversations with my sister. She does not concede quite so easily as me, to either defeatism or to limited conclusions. Her own approach is rooted in a deep knowledge of who she is and of home, a love of the people who compose it, an understanding of the suffering brought about by current policies, and a desire to be part of the solution. She has left, but only temporarily—she feels compelled to go back.
She does not want to accept easy answers, but wants to enter into challenging conversations on parallels. She wants to interrogate the xenophobia that she sees in Germany at the same time as the xenophobia in the US. She wants to discuss the global rise of far-right populist politics, the near-majority of the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party in Sachsen-Anhalt, and not silo the conversation to American politics.
My sister refuses to accept my hopelessness. How will the situation ever change if everyone who has a problem with it gives up? I agree with her—I do my best to apply the same conclusion to my praxis in Brussels—but I do not know that I will ever do as she has and will continue to do, and bring this praxis back to the US myself. I do want, at least, to know my home country more fully and to not simply accept the write-off of 340 million people, including of my own identity therein. I want to summon up some hope again, not in the American electoral system this time, but in the many people like my sister.
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
