Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels..
Samuel Johnson, English writer and thinker, 18th century
With the passing of time, I have noticed that after two or three years living in a country - and I have lived in quite a few by now - I feel an increasing desire to criticize it pitilessly. I cannot hold back my comments, I mutter insults under my breath and in general pester all those around me. This reaction of mine, of which I became aware quite a few years ago, began to worry me, since I felt that there might be something negative in my personality that enjoyed finding faults in everything around me, wherever I might be.
I have found among my papers little essays I wrote many years ago, criticizing an endless number of things about the USA, where I lived at the time. Afterwards, articles about Sweden that would have enraged any Swede reading them. Later on, I remember my untiring comments about Spain (because the fact that I was born there does not soften in any way my reactions), comments that I did not refrain from making just because I happened to live in Spain at the time and that, probably, made many a Spaniard take a dislike to me. And now that I live in England I make pejorative remarks whenever I see things and attitudes that I do not like, something that happens with a surprising frequency.
As a matter of fact I do not even have to live in a specific country in order to criticize it: It is enough to be well acquainted with that country or, even better, to find myself living in that country’s cultural environment. Having been married to a Frenchwoman, which means that I lived for years in a French atmosphere, with most of my social life taking place at that time among and with people from that country, France has also became one of the targets for my comments.
One day, turning all of this in my head, I began to think about my early travels: when I was seven years old I moved - or rather, my parents moved with me - to Argentina. I began to go to school there, acquired a remarkable Buenos Aires accent, learned the lyrics of a lot of tangos and, with the flexibility of my tender age, I accepted unquestioningly that country as the place where fate had decreed I should live. However, when I was eleven or so, we moved to Brazil and I became conscious of something quite strange. Let me explain: Argentina and Brazil had a war in the 19th century, to decide who was going to be in control of a third country, Uruguay. I had studied all about that war at my Argentinian school but when I started studying in Brazil I discovered that what I was told at my new school was quite different. The bad guys has become the good guys and vice versa. At the age of eleven it was quite a shock to realize that such a serious thing as history could be totally different depending upon who was telling it. My faith in grown-ups took a serious beating. Logically enough, I came to the conclusion that it would be very silly to rely on anything explained by the natives of any country, because all of them rearranged things to make their country look good. That was the seed which started the development of the attitude I adopted later on.
With the passing of time and after living in many countries, that attitude took shape, little by little, and became well defined, something that happened on its own, without my being really aware of it. And very slowly I began to acquire my current perspective: the most important thing for a person is not to be European or American, or Christian or Muslim. What really defines you is whether you have spent all your life in just one country - or one culture - absorbing its ideas and attitudes without ever looking at them with a critical eye, as opposed to having lived and worked in many countries, developing a sort of cultural relativism and - at least I think so - a clearer, sharper view of things. If you’ve always lived in one country, you’re a “native”, while if you’ve moved around you’re an “expat” or (somewhat fancier) a “citizen of the world”.
Very slowly I have come to understand that an expat born in Poland, for example, is closer to me and easier to understand than a native Spaniard, in spite of the fact that I don’t speak a word of Polish, was born in Spain and have relatives there. There is a sort of complicity between expats, born from the fact that they have had very similar experiences, that makes it easy for them to understand each other. To live in a different country, to learn another language, to feel oneself outside the system, to look at things with a different perspective, to enjoy the good things that every country offers while rejecting the bad ones, to put on a poker face when natives talk about songs, TV programs or events that are part of their shared past but not of yours, are commonplace events for expats.
As an expat you don’t take long to learn how to ignore many of the things that natives say. The natives of practically every country are convinced that they have the most beautiful women, the most admirable culture, the most remarkable history and the bravest men. Not to mention the sweetest melons, the best cuisine and the cows - or goats, or sheep or kangaroos - with the best meat. It is like a repetitive mantra that becomes an acoustic backdrop, one that with time you learn not to hear, just as after a time you don’t hear the cars, motorcycles and buses that pass by if you live on a busy street.
And what has all of this got to do with my criticism of the countries in which I live? Well, it means that in fact I have nothing against those countries: it’s just that the attitudes of natives, which are the same in every country, bother me. Because, paradoxically enough, natives are terribly international: they’re all the same, regardless of their countries of birth. It’s not that I think that Americans are this or that way, or that the Spanish or the British have this or that defect. I just react against the “native” environment, against the endless pats on the back that they give each other while tirelessly chatting about how very lucky they are to have been born in Chicago, Montpellier or Geneva, instead of having been born in some horrid foreign place. I become fed up with the smug, self-satisfied atmosphere cultivated by natives, with their short-sightedness and their narrow horizons, their chauvinism and their mindless appreciation of the bit of land where they happen to have been born, their offended rejection of any criticism and their shock if anybody suggests in front of them that some foreign ways might possibly be better than their own.
That’s perhaps the reason why my writings and my comments about the countries where I have lived tend to be negative. It’s just a reaction against the tidal wave of silly satisfaction created by natives, an attempt to deflate a little bit their balloon of chauvinism. It’s obvious that there are many wonderful, admirable and brilliant things in the countries in which I have lived. But in general I don’t mention those: the natives of those countries take care of that job, endlessly and to the point of utter boredom. And I suppose that my reaction is an unconscious desire to act as a counterweight, telling them that their idols have a little bit of clay in their feet. I fear, however, that this is a hopeless task and my only reward is to observe the rage that this provokes in natives. Still, being a bit of an optimist, I allow myself to think that perhaps that rage may lead them, once they calm down, to broaden their perspectives. Hasn’t happened, so far, but you never know.
