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3. Naturalization
- University of Wisconsin Press
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51 3 Nat u ral iza tion I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Ac ci dent has cast them amid strang ers in their birth place, and the leafy lanes they have known from child hood re main but a place of pas sage. They may spend their whole lives ali ens among their kin dred and re main aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Per haps it is this sense of strange ness that sends men far and wide in the search for some thing per ma nent, to which they may at tach them selves. . . . Some times a man hits upon a place to which he mys ter i ously feels that he be longs. Here is the home he sought, and he will set tle amid scenes that he has never seen be fore, among men he has never known, as though they were fa mil iar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. W. Som er set Maug ham, The Moon and Six pence, 1919 Som er set Maugham’s words aptly de scribe those of us who leave home lands in search of more fa mil iar places. It is a search not wholly driven by fi nan cial need. Am bi tion alone can not ex plain it. There is more to it. Some thing else an i mates the im pulse, some thing about our lives back home feels mis placed, slanted. We can not ex plain the strange ness of our birth places, nor ac count for the fa mil iar feel of our des ti na tions. Our fam i lies do not under stand it. That we do not fully be long to our own be fud dles friends and ac quain tances, peo ple quite com fort able with their sur round ings. But we know bet ter. We sense that there is an other place else where, be yond what we have ex pe ri enced so far, where we will at last find our rest. I have wit nessed such con vic tion be fore—in the eyes of my Scot tish pas tor, dur ing col lege days. He ar rived in Bra zil soon after his or di na tion and never looked back. Decades later, at the end of his ca reer, home was the warm trop ics, among a peo ple who could not be more dif fer ent 52 Naturalization from his Gaelic roots. That same in stinct drove an Ital ian anthro pol ogy pro fes sor to find his place in the co lo nial city of Sal va dor, Bra zil, amid de scen dants of African slaves. Meet ing him at a lec ture here in the United States, I had to mar vel at how more Bra zil ian he was than I. Then there was the Ger man semi nary pro fes sor in Re cife, who left his coun try to es cape Hit ler. Bra zil was not just a point of des ti na tion; it be came his true home land. Per egrines all, they came seek ing a birth place among other tribes. I re mem ber well the first time that sense of the fa mil iar over took me. Climb ing down from an air plane onto the hot New Mex i can tar mac as a high school foreign ex change stu dent, I was sur prised by how things fi nally made sense, how life was fi nally fit ting, and how right it felt to be in that place. It is an eerie feel ing. I knew no one yet, had found no shel ter in this alien plot of land, and there were no as su rances that things would work out, that the whole ex pe ri ence might be en joy able. But I found I could nav i gate the place as if I had been born and raised in it. Some how there was some thing in this so ci ety that felt com pletely nat u ral, as tound ingly “fa mil iar.” The same sense of fa mil iar ity would re turn when I made my way back to the United States for grad u ate stud ies. My ar ri val in Louis ville, Ken tucky, in 1981 felt like a home...