What makes one an outsider? I have a friend who despite growing up in and inhabiting a middle class milieu confessed she's felt like a refugee her entire life. How did that happen?
For many years my own feelings of being an outsider carried a touch of resentment. Another friend commented that I didn't look any different from him and therefore, couldn't be different. My response was I grew up speaking a different language, eating different food, and never quite understanding all the rules of the world outside my home. But yes, I look like I do fit in.
These days I listen to the drawl around me and realize, just as if I were in a foreign country, I am an outsider here in the South. I don't have the same history, the same connection to the red earth or the sad past. Surprisingly enough, I don't have that sensation when I'm the minority on all the buses and trains I take. I have the sense all of us are in the same day to day struggle. Perhaps I have a privilege of race, but not of sex or social class.
Is that still important in America? Judging from the election campaign, race, sex, and social class are bigger than ever and most likely, will determine the outcome.
Here's one of my poems on the theme.
Immigration
I come to Bilbao in
self-exile,
no romance circa Paris 1930.
I am at my best
in new cities.
Smokestacks, black suits,
men on every corner staring
across the river
the city demands
to span time, give meaning.
The faces of unsettled conflicts
here in the modern dream
of a homeland.
The farm floats in the
distance,
the place in all our pasts
competes with the cave,
from which we emerged,
to the weak sunlight
of a winter.
I return
with the accent
of a stranger
Circle completed,
You came here,
I go there
But not so close
I can´t breathe.
I choose a strong tongue
that shakes,
where the stranger
who arrived through
centuries,
mixed and forgotten,
peers through blue eyes
in the marketplace.
