The Constant Foreigner
Istanbul, Turkey, March 22, 2011
Salaroche

A French-speaking Turkish woman I met the other night at an Istanbul jazz bar, who enjoyed hearing me speak Italian and also knew that I spoke Spanish, asked me in English the next morning how did I really feel like? Did I feel Italian? French? American? What?

She said that after living for three years in France and for seven years in London*, she now felt like a foreigner in her own city of Istanbul. She said she felt so estranged and disconnected from Turkish society that she was now reading books on how to regain her national identity, hoping that one day she might feel once again at home in her own country.

Out of sheer personal experience, I told her that there was probably no possible turning back for her. I told her it would be practically impossible for her to unlearn what she had already learnt about herself and the rest of the world. "Once you know something", I told her, "there's no way to voluntarily go back to not knowing it".

I also told her that in searching to regain her national identity she might be choosing exactly the opposite of the path I had chosen almost two decades ago: The path of non-attachment to anything, including countries.

It is true that, because of my present profession as English teacher, I have to emphasize my American citizenship wherever I go. But whenever I go back to Europe or whenever I submit an application for a teaching job there, it is my French citizenship the one I have to emphasize.

In a similar way, every time I correspond with any friends from El Salvador, I'm banking on the fact that they share their Salvadoran citizenship with me and I'm even banking on the fact that some of them know I'm a Nicaraguan national as well.

But, do I really feel like a true national of any of those countries? Do I ever feel like I really belong in any of them? Not really, although I have to clarify that the land that I've felt is the closest thing to a home for me is California. It is in California where I experienced some of the most significant moments of my life and it is there where some of the best friends I'll ever have still live as well.

My Turkish woman-friend went on to say that, according to a book she had recently read, "every time you acquire a new nationality you acquire a new identity". "Not true", I kindly replied, adding that I have four nationalities and I still feel like the same guy I've always been.

But the fact is that the book my friend was citing is probably right. People do change whenever they live for long periods of time in foreign countries. And some of those changes may come in the form of new traits we ascribe to ourselves, which may result in new ways to auto-perceive ourselves, which in turn may be the equivalent of acquiring a modified new identity.

It is also a fact, however, that my particular case is clearly unlike that of most other people I know. Most people grow up in the country where they were born, but not me. I didn't grow up in my country of birth, which means that I've always been a foreigner wherever I've been, including whenever I've been back to the country where I first saw the light of day.

In other words, I've been a "constant foreigner" all my life.

There are two opposite sides to my continuing condition of constant foreigner. The bright side is my relative immunity to those identity fluctuations that my Turkish friend said affected most people who live in foreign countries for long periods of time.

The down side is that I've never felt like I fully belonged in any of the countries where I've lived. To be a constant foreigner is to be a constant alien, and to be a constant alien basically means not having any real roots anywhere.

Fortunately, the down side of this issue also turned out to be a good thing for me, as not having deep roots anywhere translates into not having any strong nationalist identity either, which turns out to be a very convenient starting point for anyone interested in practicing the discipline of Jnana Yoga. I guess we could say that a few things in life happen for transcendental reasons.

I haven't seen my tri-lingual Turkish friend again yet, but from what she told me about herself the other night, I gather that her case is not a typical one either. To begin with, she looks rather Nordic to me. With her fair skin, reddish hair and grayish eyes, she looks more like a Canadian or a German woman than like a typical Turkish one. That fact by itself must have set her apart from her Turkish peers as she was growing up.

Then there's the question of her friendly personality. She's a very trusting woman, perhaps too trusting even for western societies, not to mention a society where the role of women is still a subject of controversy. No wonder she feels like an oddball everywhere she goes.

There's much more I could say about her than I consider fit to write here, but suffice it to say that it takes one constant foreigner to recognize another and she definitely looks like one to me. In my view, however, she's dreaming if she thinks she will ever adapt to Turkish society the way she was adapted in the past, if in fact she was ever as adapted as she would now like to be.

There's really no turning back after living abroad for long periods of time. Once you have uprooted yourself from your original grounds you're no longer the same person you used to be. And in some cases, like in mine for example, you may even get to feel like you're a small sailboat floating on the high seas, constantly driven here and there by the winds of fate.

Still, my friend has more roots in Turkey than I'll ever have in all the countries I'm a national of combined. For example, she owns an apartment in this part of Istanbul and some of her childhood friends still live in Istanbul as well. My sense of belonging anywhere is much more superficial than hers.

My deepest sense of belonging resides in the friendship I still have with a very small number of people in California, followed by some correspondence I occasionally have over the Internet with some people I met during my childhood and my teenagehood and more recently during my travels in Asia, people who happen to be scattered across a few countries and across three different continents.

But different people may interpret similar experiences in very different ways. Apparently, my Turkish friend is trying to do the opposite of what I've been doing for most of my life, most particularly over the past seven years. Apparently, she's trying to narrow her vision of herself and of the world down to the mainstream Turkish vision of themselves and of the world. I, on the other hand, have hardly ever been able to adopt the mainstream view of any of the societies where I have lived.

In my view, what my friend would need to do is to be a bit more tolerant and accepting of herself within the context of the experiences she has accumulated in the foreign countries she has lived in. For better or worse, she no longer fits the mold of a mainstream Turkish person, if she ever did, and she cannot force herself to fit that mold by trying to reprogram her mind using whatever psychological means she thinks are available and relevant to her case.

When we were children we wore children's clothes that fit us well, but when we grew up we also outgrew those clothes and now there's no way we'll be able to wear them again. Similarly, when we identified ourselves with the only society that we knew, that identity fit us well, but once we outgrew that identity there's no way that we'll fit well within it ever again.

And if you have never been able to identify yourself entirely with any particular society you might have lived in, then you probably have always been a constant foreigner too. If such is your case, welcome to the group.

Salaroche

*Correction: She actually lived 7 years in France and 16 years in England.