Reflections on Exile in My Endles New York

"We are experiencing the decline of the American age. But how does national or imperial decay influence the lifecycle of a world city?"

My Endless New York, By Tony Judt, New York Times Nov. 7th, 2010

Imperial decay as seen through the eyes of the cultural elite, whether it be New York, Paris or London has never been my thing. I love New York, am fascinated by its streets, the faces on the subway, the determination to get where you need to go. Since moving to California, I am removed from its beehive activity, and watch from a place removed. I am of it, always returning to it, but not in it. A world city is a city of exiles, and the true exile experience is not the fashionable streets of Soho, its not an art or a theatre scene, though nothing stimulates creativity like dislocation. The exile is lost, neither here nor there, not American and no longer Ghanaian, or Colombian, or Korean. Not from the South or North alone, but a piece of all places, at home in some, a stranger to others.

As an Anglo Rican, a mestizo Puerto Rican, who's grandparents arrived in NY in 1927 from a small island conquered by the U.S. after being conquered by Spain, a banana republic in a beautiful sea. NY to me is the African and the Taino, mixed with the Italian, the Irish, the German, and Jew. It is my family born in Spanish Harlem, moved to Union Ave and 161st, and the success of constant movement, from the Bronx to Westchester to whereever the heart and mind and hands can take you. It is the marriage of my father to my mother, the city cat and the country mouse, and the strength it takes to raise a family in this crazy world. It is as the Ric Burns documentary embues so well, a city for reinventing yourself.

I'm less concerned with the tassels and bows of world class city status, the cultural chic who jet set for shopping and parties, or even the intellectuals who once used to crowd City College or take center stage like Baldwin and Mailer. The cultural or intellectual center of an age, the New York centric focus of an early day, is pretty to read about in books but it denies too much lived experience. Our problem is the narrow focus of our humanity, our unwillingness to embrace the complexity of the exile.

I have a problem with Europeans in New York. They love the un-Americaness of the city. They love to shop and buy Manhattan apartments. They feed off of the world culture produced by its inhabitants while only skimming the surface of reality, never having to fear the loss of self. One of the problems with being rich, is you never have to belong to the places you go. You travel without adapting, without embracing, without ever getting lost.

I love the exile, and people who can express it. When I was younger I loved George Orwell's essays, and his "tourism among the dogs". I also loved V.S. Naipul's novels and the cross roads he describes in the West Indies and East Africa. But no one disrobes them quite like Edward W. Said, the Palestinian literary critic when he writes about Orwell:

"In Down and Out he makes a revealing admission about the nature of the worry that plagued him. Once you hit absolute bottom, he says, there comes a sense that "you have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety." Not standing it- "it" being the psycho-moral strain of falling apart completely, losing your identity as defined for you by where you come from and where most of the time you know you can return. Surely the removal of this last option causes the peculiar dread experienced by Winston Smith during his final ordeal in 1984, the more so after having lost the cosy sanctuary he shared with Julia above Mr. Carrington's shop. Just as surely, the off-stage presence of home and the possibility of a phone call for money to Eric Blair's (aka G. Orwell) Aunt Nellie constitute the narrator's bad faith when he was a plongeur in Paris or a tramp in England."

Reflections on Exile, by Edward W. Said "Toursims Among the Dogs" p. 95

Like Thoreau getting a weekly pie from his mother during his solitude at Walden Pond or having his taxes paid by friends after one night of prison, Orwell is too addicted to comfort to know what it is to hit bottom. We live in an age where the prestige of eradicating poverty is moving mountains, but institutions like UC Berkeley ignore East Oakland, 96th Street on the East side still divides the rich from the projects of Harlem, and the privileged are voyeurs but not participants in a faceless world.