By Sarita Writes
Among the many wonderful things I recall about my mother, Emily Allen Orick, are her quotes, most of which were borrowed from people she admired. The majority of hers come from writers, given that she, too, was one. Of course this one is attributed to Elie Wiesel. A gem of a man, along with authoring some 50+ books, he is a Holocaust survivor (Auschwitz and Buchenwald) and a Nobel Laureate. Apart from being a writer, something else both my mother and I had in common is that we loved our politics and arguing them. This might be among the many things that endeared her to Wiesel, who can add political activism to his resume.
I haven’t been able to write for either of my blogs, SaritaWrites or Formidable Females, for something going on two months. I can ‘blame’ this on the fact that I have been too busy writing for others. After all, I do work 6-7 days a week, writing articles, books and blogs. At a time when many are out of work and struggling, I am fortunate to be able to say that I am too busy to write for my own blogs. But I miss them! And so with a lull in work (whilst clients are with their families for the holidays), rather than clean my house or help Paul on the farm, I am once again sitting on my ever widening ass and doing what I apparently love doing – writing.
It’s well timed, this lull, that is. The last few weeks some things have changed in my life such that something that used to be a driving force in it, has, and without my prodding or influence, managed to lose its importance. It’s a confluence of things; I am sure and can’t be attributable to any one event.
I think I was born with a mouth and whole lot of chutzpah! As the saying goes, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” First there was my mother. Mom spent her entire life facing adversity (the daughter of a Black mother and a Japanese father), she was raised in a predominantly White area during the 1930s and 40s. Oh you can well imagine the fun she experienced. Rocks and bricks through her windows, broken noses (yes plural) and burning crosses and flags on her front lawn. Some of you may be reading this and thinking the story sounds familiar, given that your parents went through something similar. Others might be reading in disbelief. Others might say things have changed little. Hmmmm. Depending upon your reality, all are true!
Wanting to escape her racist upstate, New York town, she doubled up on all her classes and graduated from high school at 15, speaking fluently German, Latin and French. She scored 1560 on the SATs, 1600 was perfect in those days, and a full scholarship to Barnard College, the (then) all-girl college attached to Columbia University. She entered Barnard in the fall of 1948 at the age of 15. She was among a handful of minorities admitted, scholarship assisted or not.
It was during college that she met my father, and oh boy, look out! My mother’s method of dealing with adversity was to shut the world out, excel, read and gain more knowledge and keep a close-knit circle of friends. Unlike her daughter, rarely did she seek out attention and again, unlike me, she was a woman of few words (unless she got onto a topic that interested her). Talk about polar opposites. My father was brash, bordering on rude and obnoxious, extremely extroverted, White and angry for the way she’d been treated her whole life and boy was she happy to marry a man who would be her mouthpiece. And then they had kids! Some might be inclined to say that I am like my father. That’s okay, I’ll accept that.
We grew up in a very political household. After all, when they got married in 1960, only two states allowed them to marry legally – Iowa and New York. Fed up with racism, they moved to Lagos, Nigeria. My father owned a chicken farm and eventually as the Biafran Civil War broke out, he worked for Unicef and the US State Department. We may have missed the tumultuous 60s in the US, but living in war torn Nigeria hardly left us longing for the protests back home. It was genuinely unsafe at times for both Nigerians (hey it’s a civil war) and the many British and Americans who called Lagos home.
We returned to the states and my father continued ‘being political’ when he took a job as Robert Kennedy’s speechwriter. Boy how our lives would have been different had he not been assassinated and he been elected to the White House.
So, these are my parents and the reason why when I open my mouth, I piss off someone whose belief system is not nearly as liberal as mine. I have a knack for this. I have not only seen a lot, I was raised by two very bright, very intellectual and very outspoken political people. As I have gotten older, I have not mellowed.
I married a man who is much like my mother in many respects. Equally bright, quite the introvert, unless you get him going on a topic that interests him and highly political, I met my match, that’s for certain. Like my mother though, unless he’s comfortable with you, he’s not apt to share his disgust for the racism and direction we both see the US headed. As you might imagine, like my mother did with my father, Paul shares most of his opinions with me. And at times when I speak about a topic that in particular has me angered, I can be talking for both Paul and me.
So, there was a point to all this and how it ties into the title, which was stolen by Wiesel. Although I can’t point to one single event that is the cause for this, I have, of late, become indifferent toward American politics. If there were one thing you could always count on, apart from rain, a fluctuating dollar and poorly written English by Tea Party members, was me to offer an opinion about just about anything.
Why the indifference? I have been struggling the last year trying to move away from ghostwriting and to writing under my own name. I make a good living as a ghostwriter. Myriad clients are all too happy to pay me to write for them and slap their name on my writing – whether it’s a bunch of travel articles, product reviews for something I have never used, sarcastic blogs about highly entitled jerks, biographies about everyone from up and coming cardboard artists to the most famous runners in the world to musicians who have played in Jazz venues. Again, I am not complaining. But I started wanting to do something a little different. I wanted to start publishing in my own name.
As Oprah Winfrey says, “You don’t get what you don’t ask for.” I asked for it and suddenly clients started saying, “I love what you wrote, I want to put your name on that!” Wow! Thank you! First it was an article about lingerie, then it was a bunch of product reviews for benches I have never sat on, then it was a book on Witchcraft. I got a co-author credit on that one.
The publisher for the witchcraft book then approached me to write a book about relocating to a new country. Over the course of the last few months, I have gotten to know him and his spouse and we have shared lots about our lives, including much about our move from the US to Puerto Rico. He asked me to write about this experience. We decided together to make this into an anthology and so I am in the process of getting people to contribute their stories for the book.
Well, so I digress, but there’s a purpose to all this. As I am writing the questionnaire for the book (to send to contributors), I begin to resonate with a question I came up with.
This is the question: Do you still vote in your old country?
All the questions leading up to this one have had to do with assimilation. Do you speak the language of your new country? Do you feel integrated into your community, why or why not? And then this one, do you still vote in your old country? Well, in my case the answer is no. I stopped voting the year Barack Obama was elected. Indeed I delayed getting my driver’s license in Puerto Rico so I could vote in the last election, as it was important to me to ensure McPain/Caribou Barbie weren’t voted in. It’s as if I were giving one parting gift to my fellow friends by voting, even if the outcome didn’t affect me.
Then I got very involved in our new community and was one day startled to see all this hoopla about the Tea Party movement. I think this was sometime early in 2010 or late in 2009, I am unsure. Ah, such a visceral reaction to having voted in the country’s first Black president. Is he is citizen if he were born in Hawaii, which I was taught was a state, and myriad other questions designed to discredit this immensely capable and intelligent man.
But one day I asked myself, why do I give a shit? Little that President Obama, the House or the Senate do has impact on my life. Arguing for or against Nationalized health care, it might affect me, but only on a trickle down basis. Puerto Rico is kind of like a stepchild to the US; you know, Cinderella, an after thought. Illegal immigration? It annoys me no end that this erupts every so often. I did find myself involved in many a discussion about SB 1070 and I ask myself why? Apart from the fact that many of these things are non-issues on our enchanted island, it’s a non-topic. The US has no intentions on doing anything about it. Every administration knows full well the economy would go bust if it were to remove every single illegal immigrant. The discussions and hoopla are simply designed to cause further divisiveness between the conservatives and the liberals. Beyond that, even Clown Bush knew that as long as the big CEOs benefited from having undocumented workers on their payroll, which helps fuel their profits, they were not going to push for legislation to remove them. States can do all they want to make a stink and it might solve things on a case-by-case basis, but rid the country of all undocumented workers en masse? Please! It ain’t gonna happen, conservatives. Give it up or be willing to pay $3.00 per strawberry.
But again, why do I give a shit? By continuing the fight with conservatives who are hell bent on getting rid of the gays, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans or anyone who looks dark enough to be one, was taking up a lot of energy. And this energy was seemingly wasted on issues that have no effect on my life. I realized by fighting these battles I was keeping one foot in the US. How could I truly assimilate in my new country (commonwealth is just a political technicality for Puerto Rico, believe me, Puerto Ricans don’t feel part of the US culturally), if I don’t let it all go?
Then something very interesting happened. Thanksgiving rolled around, as it does every year. Americans get all Ga Ga over a holiday that has long epitomized something that was a sticking point for me. July 4th, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving represent much of the ugliness of America and its brutal and ugly origins. Columbus no more discovered America than he did the Caribbean! The notion of glorifying this man and the subsequent assholes to follow who enslaved and brutalized Taino and American Indians is not a holiday I want to celebrate. Of course after killing off the Indigenous peoples, they were left with a problem. How on earth were they going to do the work that the Indians were doing? They weren’t really going to work, so it was logical to ‘import’ slaves. Assholes!
July 4th? Need I remind you that not everyone is of European descent and therefore celebrating Independence from the British is another one of those “I don’t give a shit” things! My people, at least on my Mom’s side, were among those ‘imported’ for slavery and so fuck all that. My people, when they could finally celebrate independence, it was from those assholes who enslaved them. When I say this stuff, I am accused of being a racist. Hold on there, I am half White, so don’t start that. Just because I don’t want any part of it, doesn’t mean I am a racist. I happen to love everyone, until they give me a good reason not to.
Founding fathers? Another set of assholes I can’t glorify. Yeah, I said, they’re assholes who owned slaves and George Washington repeatedly flogged his. He was the biggest asshole of them all! I have no interesting in returning to a time of the glory days of the founding fathers and the ideals that helped author the Constitution. That’s lovely for someone, for me, screw that!
This left me with Thanksgiving. This is now my third on Puerto Rico. Paul went back home the first year (2008), so this was his second. My first one I spent with other Americans, so I didn’t really get the Puerto Rican experience. Last year we spent it with good friends. One of them is a woman I have become very close to and it was her birthday. I think it was more a birthday party than it was Thanksgiving.
This year however things were different. We were invited to spend the holiday with the same woman whose birthday it was last year. But the difference was that now she was invited to spend it at her brother’s home (within walking distance to her), with his family and some other people. Although the turkey was recognizable, the other food was hardly American. But something struck Paul and me as we’re eating and enjoying ourselves. We were the only non-family members at this gathering. Our friend Ada has 8 brothers and sisters; the majority of them were in attendance, as well as some of their kids and two or three cousins. Although we weren’t related to anyone, we were treated as if we were. We knew 90% of the people at this intimate family dinner and at no time did we feel like outsiders. In fact, one of the cousins kept saying, “Are you sure you’re not Puerto Rican? You both look Boriqua!” Even when we told her we were American and of our racial make up, she just responded with, “Well, you’re Puerto Rican now!” She lived for many years in the neighborhood I grew up in, in New York City. She is 100% bilingual.
Hiram and his wife Rosemary, the hosts, took us around their farm, showed us the entire thing and gave us lots of tips on planting and keeping animals. They have one horse, three ponies, a few goats, a couple of Vietnamese pigs, several hens and roosters and palomas. Oh they also have a ton of guinea pigs. Que lindo!
As Paul and I drove home, we couldn’t help but take notice of the fact that at some point we had truly integrated into our community. We moved to our small farming area in September 2008, knowing just the people whose house we rented. Leo and Alba lived in New York City for 40 years and retired in Puerto Rico ten years ago. The fact that they speak English helped us tremendously as we navigated our way around our new country. Drivers’ licenses, insurances for us, the farm and cars and finding doctors, the list was endless. But one day we did notice a shift. As we needed them less, we of course maintained our friendship with them, we began to branch out and make more friends.
Many things have happened to bring us to the point where we feel 100% assimilated into our no-longer-so-new surroundings. A week after moving into our new home on New Year’s Eve 2009 (which we had built and was a long, sorted and expensive story), the road outside our house gave in, thanks to all the rain it sees annually. The city shut off the water for nearly a month while they fixed the pipes that broke as a result. Ordinarily this is not a big deal for people around here. We may as well live in a developing country when we consider how unreliable services are at times.
Most people have a ‘caja de agua’ on their roofs, which is essentially a cistern. In the ‘campo’, which is the countryside, many people use well water. They’re hardly affected by water shut offs. Having just moved in, we’d not cleaned our caja de agua and so we had no running water, period! Our neighbors, who live about a mile up the road from us, let us take showers and siphon water from their wells. Norberto and his wife Sandra were letting us come by daily and fill up several five-gallon jugs of water. Olga and her brother Mickey let us take showers as often as we wanted. They even gave us a key to their house when they weren’t home. Prior to moving to the farming community, we knew these people only in passing. And yet, they didn’t treat us like outsiders. To this day we call them friends. We play dominoes with them once weekly and we allow Olga, whose personality is rather extroverted to dominate the conversation all the time. Hey, we have learned a lot of Spanish from listening and being unable to speak! ☺
Today is Saturday; two days after Thanksgiving and Olga just called and asked if we could change our usual Sunday dominoes game to today. Why? Mickey, her brother (neither never married and live in the house their father willed to them), has his daughter and her husband coming from Bayamon, which is semi close to San Juan, for Thanksgiving dinner. They’ve invited us over. It’s likely Norberto, his wife Sandra and their daughter Nory will be there. Sandra is Olga’s niece. Again, we’ll be the only non-family members there and we are honored to be asked.
So what has this entire monologue been about? It is impossible for me not to have one foot in the US. I am writer and the majority of my clients are in the US. Our families still reside in the US. Most of our friends, I am proud to boast, live all over the world. But we are Puerto Rican in our hearts and rarely do we correct people for assuming that we are Puerto Rican. We feel less and less American by the day. As our Spanish improves, we see little need to correct people, in all honesty.
Ironically, for all of our assimilation, we are quite the exceptions. Americans are not regarded well in this part of the island. I can sure see why. They come in, treat people not so kindly and are arrogant and don’t make any efforts to assimilate. The few who live in our small town don’t speak the language and have, even after 10 years of living in the area, made few Puerto Rican friends. Our friends never speak ill of these people, Gringos, they are called, but when asked about so and so, all they’ll say is, “oh them, yes, they’ve never made any effort to get to know us, like you.” One thing I have learned is that it does start with us, not them. It was up to Paul and me to make the effort and we did. Most haven’t who moved here. That is rather sad. They are missing out!
While this may have seemed like a long-winded stream of consciousness, it isn’t. It’s my way of saying that I am no longer as passionate about American politics. All the reasons that lead us to moving to Puerto Rico still very much exist. If anything, many have gotten worse. We no longer feel welcome in the country we were raised in and that Paul was born in. The racism, sexism, intolerance toward everyone from Black to Jewish to Muslims to Latinos to Gays and anyone different from themselves is excruciatingly sad. But we left that country for a reason and the more we are welcomed into Puerto Rico and not seen as outsiders, the more this underscores our reasons for moving in the first place.
We are home and now I can consider arguing politics on a more local level. I am not entirely out of the game, I love a good fight, but as Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.” I love where I live and am simply indifferent toward the hostility I left behind.
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