As a footnote to my earlier blog about belonging to a place, I wanted to offer Rex Murphy’s take on the matter. Recently he voiced some profoundly poignant words in an editorial about Michael Ignatieff and his 30 year absence. As always, Mr. Murphy has found a way to say it far more elegantly than I ever could. He writes:
Idle moments teach and mould us in their way even more than crises. We grow into our real knowledge of a place and a people through the thousand unmarked interactions of the everyday and the commonplace. The sense of belonging is an accumulation of ordinary experiences not marked as they pass. Who we are with and where we are with them is very much who we are.
There is a kind of knowledge about a people and a country that depends on continuity of encounter that is more a reflex of sensibility than an acquisition. Being away so long, does he (Ignatieff) have that reflex? For it is a knowledge that cannot be strapped on - to be acquired, it must be lived. Knowledge is second-hand, meaning is experienced. Living shared experience is the absolute DNA of full citizenship.
I like so much of this. The notion of being shaped by the “everyday”. The idea that continuity has something to do with knowing and understanding – perhaps fully. The brilliant point that “meaning is experienced” and knowledge often comes to us “second-hand”. These very quotable and apt observations on the subject of citizenship not only bring Ignatieff’s qualifications into a vague sort of question, but they also make more sense of our experiences in this year abroad.
And if I admit to agreeing with Rex’s ideas, as I do, then I would also have to admit that though we are more comfortable now in Australia than we were two, three or even six months ago, we are still only scratching the surface in terms of accumulating our local “DNA”. It’s not enough to share one season, one event, one game. In order to really know a culture or understand a people you need to live and breathe the many and various ebbs and flows of life over a much longer period of time.
Interestingly, an editorial in today’s local paper makes this same observation in relation to the recent accusations of racism directed at pockets within Australian society. The article documents the Australian “whites only” immigration policy that in its own proper historical context represents so much more than what is at first glance an outrageous and extremist piece of public policy. Without context and a connection to why this policy originally existed and its relatively laudable intentions, then I would never be able to understand the current state of society with anything more than complete contempt. But we need to know what we do not know so that we do not believe the first, the superficial, or the one most repeated to be the only version of the truth; a trap into which any temporary resident might fall.
We are now citizen enough to know that Australia is more than an Opera House, a big red rock or the Wiggles. We have seen enough and read enough to know why things are the way they are, right now, but we continue to lack the base, the foundation of a deeper understanding, because as Rex has said, those are the things that cannot simply be “strapped on”. Alas, we are leaving now and that knowledge has not been nor can it be acquired, tucked safely into a carry on. We know what we know; no more, no less. To know more might take a lifetime. Or at least thirty years.
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