Essay from The Literary Review

X-Patriate

Janet McDonald

I was made no such promises, growing up in a Brooklyn public housing project. Indeed, I came from a rather sedentary family for whom travel meant the occasional train trip down South to visit cousins and grandparents, uncles and aunts. The enlisted males of the family had done short stints overseas on military bases so culturally ghettoized it was as though they’d never left home. Otherwise, none of us had ever set foot outside the continental United States when I announced that I wanted to spend an entire year in France on my college’s study abroad program. Not surprisingly, there was consternation. Why would I want to do something as extravagant as leave the neighborhood? There were frenzied attempts at dissuasion. Had I heard on the news about this or that plane crash, hotel collapse, hostage crisis? When you’re just out of your teens, there is no better barometer of the right choice than a parent’s resistance. France became the promise I made myself. One that I fought to keep. I was a French literature major, I argued, I had to go. Besides, Vassar sent students overseas all the time who returned safely. What I didn’t mention was the closing of my throat, the pressure on my chest, the tight fit of the life that lay before me into which I was squeezing. I didn’t say that I could no longer breathe at home, in New York, in my country. I needed out.
          My college years are long behind me. Paris has been my home for close to a decade. I am called an expatriate. As if I have scrawled an X on my patria, my fatherland, and moved on. I prefer to think of myself as a Y-patriate. Why? was my parents’ fundamental question. Why leave here? Why go there? Why move away from home and culture, from one’s very language? What makes one person sit and the other wander? Why, in the same atmosphere, can some breathe and others not? I arrived in Paris without expectations because I didn’t know enough about the place to even have any. My French was formal and bookish and my accent brought me great shame. The background in French literature I was fortunate enough to have gave me a general, albeit literary, frame of reference for my new home but like many of my compatriots, most of my knowledge of French history came from pocket-sized guide books. It didn’t matter.
          What I only now realize is that I came here not to learn about la belle France but about myself, la barbare Brooklynite. France stripped me bare of the identity I had blindly donned back home and gave me the freedom first to ask why, and then to adorn myself in a style that reflected the answers I found. Why did I have to accept racial identity as the primary defining characteristic of a person just because America revolves around race? I didn’t. Here, I am first and foremost American. Why was it necessary for me to pursue at my emotional peril status and income and ownership of things because those are the ways in which America defines success? It wasn’t. I am paid and possess much less as a lawyer in Paris than my American counterparts but have a life and no psychotherapy bills. Why could I not live fully the masculine and feminine sides of my nature and follow my attractions where they led because in puritanical America such expression is verboten? I could. The French appreciate the complexity of human relations, and among them I live what I choose.
          The expatriate life is a voyage that has taken me home, a place whose locus is not geographic but visceral. Paris brought me home to myself, and this I live daily as an inner experience of liberation and joy. The irony is inescapable, of the stranger finding connection in her very separation from others. Yet that is precisely what removing oneself from the familiar mores and easy cultural indicia of one’s homeland does. Back in Brooklyn, my appearance, for example, is instantly read, analyzed and categorized. The length and texture of my hair, the kind of footwear I have—sneakers or heels, the presence or absence of make-up, my clothing. We are socialized to recognize and assess each other’s signs and symbols, from which we draw conclusions. All societies, including French, teach their members this information, as indeed they should.
          What freedom, what liberation, to approach on the street a stranger who has been trained in an entirely different cultural language and simply be seen. Not sized up, evaluated and judged. The ultimate freedom is to remain unknown, in a sense to be invisible. When I am in the States, my fellow New Yorkers receive me in function of what they have been taught to know of my external presentation. Accordingly, some take a step backwards when I approach to ask directions. Others smile and touch my arm as they point the way. Men wink and grin from their cars. Others curse the bounce in my walk. All of them know me. And I am confined and ultimately oppressed by that knowing.
          This is not a revelation. The Brits know each other by the ring of their accents. To my untrained ear, they sound the same to me, and even when they sound different, I have no idea what the meaning of that difference is. Africans know each other by the pattern and flair of their native dress. I see beautiful prints and brilliant colors and nothing more. On the streets of Brooklyn my fine-tuned eye knows the project girl by her weave and the college girl by her perm, the dangerous homeboy by his gait and the harmless wannabe by his tidy haircut. I have no doubt that on many occasions I am as wrong about others as they are about me, but such is the social compact of home. We know each other, sometimes to the point where breathing becomes impossible. Then we leave and land in places where our hair is simply hair. Half the time, my French friends can’t even tell whether my hair is combed or not, which frees me up from the pressure of the daily coiffure. The beneficial effect goes beyond my ability to revel in sloth, however. What I love about the expatriate’s freedom is that it give us all the possibility of discovery—of ourselves and of one another, and this applies to the ex-pat in any foreign country. But I did not choose just any foreign country. I chose France, a place of magic so renowned it has become cliché but nonetheless true. I was born in Brooklyn and came to life in Paris.
          Fluent in the French language, I am as integrated into French society as a foreigner can get. The close friendships I have developed over the years run the gamut from store cashiers and building supers to discreet aristocrats and personal friends of the President. I’ve had many incarnations during my life in Paris—an intimidated student, a partying, blocked writer, a métro-boulot-dodo lawyer, an unemployed professional, a successful author. I’ve hated it here and threatened many times to pack my bags and repatriate. The French administration can be a good trial run for Hell, be it renewing a carte de séjour, negotiating a payment plan with the tax collector or something as simple as returning merchandise to a store. Parisians can be annoying in their haughty superiority and obsession with artifice and façade. Politically, France struggles still, and not always successfully, to integrate its varied ethnic and religious groups while maintaining the ideal of a national collective. Where that effort has failed leaving far too many feeling marginalized, we who live here have paid the price—in social instability and delinquence, anti-semitism and anti-Americanism.
          Yet, when I have been away for too long I fold over, fetal, my arms around clutching emptied self, and I yearn as if for a lover, flawed and perfect. There is, of course, the physical beauty of the city’s winding river, dramatic bridges, regal architecture and black, ornate wrought-iron balconies. There is the physical beauty of the Parisians themselves with their narrow hips and full lips, the hard lines of gender softened just enough around the edges to give them all a collective sex appeal. There is food so exquisite its mere contemplation waters the mouth and wines so rich that even the strictest teetotaler eventually succumbs. A look beneath these Epicurean surfaces reveals even greater riches, the whispered poetries that seduce and charm. I speak of the very culture itself, and the values it holds. No one is deprived of health care because she lacks money. Striking workers consistently enjoy broad support from even the most inconvenienced general population. Personal privacy and individual liberty is treasured. Literature and art are staples of popular culture. Intimacy is slowly cultivated with time and trust, not a quick fix of blabbed personal details. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The pressures and stresses wreaking havoc around our the globe are not unfelt here but still France holds her course, shields her values, provides a home for my heart.
          That is why.