My favorite word used to onomatopoeia. It flows and has lots of vowels and I love to share examples of it with my English classes. “Slurp” and “bang,” “splash” and “baptismo” (thank you Roger for sticking that forever in my brain).
But I think my new favorite word is “expatriate.” Is there any other word that is so pretentious yet so shallow and empty? The word is very much Hemmingway’s. Like the romantic idea of Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, it presents the image of having given up something or having given up on something. This is a word that should only be spoken if you regularly discuss bullfights and safaris over drinks while watching the sun set over Kilimanjaro.
It’s true some of the expats I know here are lost. Is there a well adjusted member of the Foreign Service who chooses this assignment? Some of the foreigners here don’t really identify with Africa or home. I know a lady who was here when the British were still in charge and can’t imagine going back. Others have their satellite dishes and access to the embassy’s regular imports of Chips Ahoy and Twinkies or they take an occasional dip in the diplomatic pouch. They send there kids to the American school and eat at the foreign restaurants. They manage to take a bubble of America with them wherever they go. There are the Peace Corps/VSO workers who have run out of things to protest in the US so they had to travel here to find new cause worth fighting for. Some of us must be CIA or MI6 or whatever the Canadian equivalent is for no other reason than there is no other reason for bringing a family here. We all must be lost or else why would we have ended up here. (This of course ignores nearly perfect weather, low crime, inexpensive cost of living, beautiful people, great food and a laid-back culture.)
Maybe we’re here as tour guides, to show others the way.
There are other words I could use to describe myself. Here I am forengi (like those big eared, big nosed traders on Star Trek). But I am also Italiano (all white people, naturally, come from Italy). It’s curious how rarely I am American. If I was from Ethiopia, I would be amache (named after an auto assembly plant). Sudanese? You’re a lorry like the big trucks that trek back and forth from there. But all of us living away from home are expats – once part of something else, now removed.
I must end this. I have lions to hunt, wine to drink and Gatsby to read. Nick Adams calls.
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I recently had a good dose of Hemingway and Gertrude's "expat-ness" in a book I read called, "The Paris Pilgrims." What a bunch those people were. It's a fictionalized account of when that whole group lived in Paris, when Hemingway was trying to get something, anything published. Good read. Some definite word pictures I wish I could erase from my mind . . .interesting nonetheless.
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