EMMA'S EXILE

I watched an American Experience programme on the radical Emma Goldman. It was very interesting because I know scant about worker movements in America besides the devastating horrors of child labor and heroes like Jane Adams of Hull House. She's my secular saint. I have read more about British reform in the Victorian era then that of the United States.

However, the programme was fascinating and, in a nice surprise that I didn't expect, the writer Andrei Codrescu was one of the commentators.* What was truly meaningful to me was Emma Goldman's exile from America in San Pedro. Like Goldman I feel divorced from my country, that it is a stranger to me. This is hard for someone whose ancestors were Native American and for a descendant of a Revolutionary War hero.

As an ex-pat in Canada, I am more akin to the values of this secular country than to the religious nation that America has become. I left America emotionally when I lived in a suburb heavily populated with Republicans. There was the constant batter of religion and xenophobic nationalism. I did not find any friends. I became depressed and lonely at the Whiteness of it all, in the schools and on the street. Now, I hardly look mixed-race and the Native American blood is rather dilute in my veins, but it is part of me that was angry when I heard people use terms like "wild Indian" to describe rowdy children. Those were my people: the Yakima, the Chinook, the Iroquois, and possibly Ojibwa who are a part of my heritage like my European ancestors.

I already felt in exile in America while I was there. I could not accept the racism and the theological bent to politics of where I lived. In Canada I think of America not as Emma Goldman did, with longing for the country as hers,but as an entity that has become foreign to me in its empirical wars and its theological tyrannies. I think I will not return to the States because America will not come back to me as the country that I remember.

Technorati Tags: emma goldman, andrei codrescu

*NOTE: No, this blog will not become the girl's guide to intellectual men, but I do enjoy posting about some of those I consider tops , like Alan Rickman et alius.