Thunder

It is a horrible sound. Every now and then they do a very low tour of our valley. I am grateful we are not at present on a regular training route.

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I live in Japan. Japan is one of America’s subjects when it comes to military bases. About 40 kilometers from where I live lies Atsugi Air Base. My apartment lies right in the path of the incoming and outgoing fighters, bombers, military helicopters, cargo planes, and what not. Ever since the New York tragedy the air traffic has filled the air daily, both with the traffic from the American Air Force and the Japanese Self-Defence Force, I guess partly for training, and partly for the manuevers preparing for an attack from and on North Korea. There is a thunderous helicoptor that batters the air many afternoons for about three hours, not too far from my apartment. The noise is so loud I can’t hear my TV or speak to people on my telephone. All of this is a daily reminder of the madness building up around the world.

Thinking about race… well, that certainly is a difficult question. It’s something I’ve thought of all my life, but most especially after my father revealed to me at 21 that my grandmother was black (which made me Filipino. German, American Black- with Chinese, Danish, Jewish thrown in from various relatives in the family’s past). Somehow the sudden sharing of that information as if it were something to be ashamed of or feared worked its way into my heart like a slow poison. It forced me to start looking over my shoulder and wondering what other people might be thinking of me. I began to be acutely aware of the differences between people like me and others, especially whites and people who live in homogenous societies. I haven’t gotten paranoid or intolerant towards people who live more privaleged lives, but I am very careful about how certain people might act toward me now; I have no patience or tolerance any more for those who would look down upon me or any one else, even if they themselves are not aware that they are doing it. What is so disheartening and depressing is that there are so many white people (and of course others in societies where they themselves are the norm) who haven’t got a clue that they might actually carry the seeds of arrogance towards other races. It is very often hard to perceive it unless you actually experience it yourself.

Like you I have lived between cultures all my life. When I’m in one place I miss the other, criticize the other. It’s either Japan, Germany, or the States. The grass is always greener… But I wonder if really people like you and me are not the advance guard for a new development in the human story… people displaced from the traditional enclave and forced to see the world anew. It’s people like us who are going to understand the new problems facing the world’s populations today, because we have had to thinkseriously about them. The world is no longer the British or the Americans or the Israelis or the Palestinians. That’s what everyone fails to understand. The problems are something new… a hybridization of the human population, undetermined purely by ecological selection. And at the same time we are the forerunners of are purely, worldwide homogeneity. All the diversity packaged as something heretofore not known.

You are a bridge, Madame Butterfly, a step betwen America and Nigeria. Of both but now neither, too. It is only natural I think that you want both the richness of Nigerian culture and the comforts of American bourgeoisie. Who doesn’t want richness and familiarity and comfort and education all? Bring them together and create something new. That’s the only choice we have, I guess.

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I have read and re read this post and each time wished to express the chill of recognition and the trembling of my heart and found that I didn’t have the words for a place where I feel thought and words are tended with care and consideration.

 I will be honest and say I feel less than adequate in trying to respond to most of your posts Miguel because you write so beautifully, thoughtfully and with such heart that I am left oft times with such deep thought and emotion that it takes me many days if not weeks to find words to express some of what I would wish to respond with and then I feel that I have missed the moment and you are already two three or more posts along. I felt I wanted to try and say something and have tried a few times and each time it felt less than adequate, here I am trying again and this time I will ‘comment’ come what may.

 I live in a very small country within another small country, Wales is my home country and the United Kingdom the ‘country’ that houses it. To many people across the border in England this is not seen as a different place and to be brutally honest the English have persevered over many years to stamp out any difference.  The Welsh are well aware of what it is like to be colonised and be part of the spoils of an Empire, to find their valuable resources both mineral and man being shipped out and used up without backward glance. To have their language outlawed and their culture ridiculed and marginalised.

 The Welsh have always prided themselves on their egalitarian, internationalist perspective on the world but that pride has been corrupted and now we who have been subjugated begin to feed into the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, plain brutishness and reaction rather than construction that seeps into all the nooks and crannies of our nearest and farthest neighbours dealings with others.

 Having lived in places far from this land and found myself the alien, the outsider, the face to be stared at or spat upon I know a smidgen of what it feels like to be ‘outsider’ but I also know that I am insider by dint of birth and colour of my skin in some of the most powerful countries in the world or I would be if I were able to get through immigration :0).  For though I am white western woman, educated and schooled in the ways of being acceptable, the prescribed medication I take, the places I have lived and have stamped in my passport, the friends I have, the subjects I have raised my voice about make me unacceptable visitor in many places in the world.

So, today I find myself at home in a country I call my own but feeling less and less at home with the sense that genocide continues in this country and in so many others not in ways of bullet and blows but in the overpowering insistence that the way is to be like each other not to celebrate difference and diversity, not to consider the way attitude and understanding are bound together so closely that it is in the examination of ones heart that true revolution begins and is sustained.

It is not the low flying jets that buzz the valley or the huge American stealth bombers that practice their low flying manoeuvres over my shaking chimney pot that chills and annoys me – though I do not care for the fact that the UK is one of USA’s warships with enough USA controlled land and military here to not just make one pause for thought but realise that an island is just so much useful military hardware to certain ‘gentlemen.’

 What I am troubled about and try to look at myself for is the steady insistent death that is happening here and in so many other places around the world.  It is death not by exploding bomb or axe handle bludgeon it is death by assimilation. That death which requires one way to express culture, one way to express, spirituality, one way to express political process etc etc.

I have no answers save that I know I must start somewhere so I endeavour to start with me. “

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