Attack of the Nacirema II: The Nacirema Wed

For nearly two years, I have lived a world away from the Nacirema, that cult of American culture from which I have so thoroughly defamiliarized myself. Now duty was calling me home to the tanindrazana, land of my ancestors.  The Nacirema were to wed and my presence was required, to hold the bride’s “bouquet” at rehearsal (her “bouquet” was alcoholic; so was mine), to “fluff” her train at the altar (I received specific instructions), and to kindly request at the reception that my older sister return that young man’s outfit and take back her cocktail dress. Two things were apparent about this wedding, I was going to be indispensable and it was going to be open bar.

Crossing the world is no small venture. It required four flights, no fewer than ten take-offs and landings, five airplane meals, twelve visits from the beverage cart, 38 hours and one loop around a hurricane. That is airport to airport and just one way,  though I understand the hurricane was a bit exceptional.  Traveling is its own peculiar form of disconnect: lost in time zones, sharing a half a day with a stranger, setting up camp in airports.

Then suddenly, I am walking out into America, the climate-control kingdom, the land of packaging within packaging, the hungry, why wait? world.  All at once I have regained my personal telephone booth of space; lines are orderly and exchanges efficient; people are, gasp, polite.  Everyone is extraordinarily clean and, yes, well-fed.  My skin color is no longer my defining feature and, until I spot the Lemur Lovin’ poster and a gaggle of greeters, I am anonymous.

Now I, master of the third-world squat, must return to the first-world I once thought comple. I must reabsorb these truths, these standards and structures of my native society. It is not an easy task to relearn much of what I had diligently unlearned. Sleeping without a mosquito net felt dangerously exposed; drinking out of the tap reeked of an invitation to doom; ice cubes popped out of the refrigerator door and I nearly had a heart attack. I could barely eat (but so valiantly I tried!) and it took more than a week for me to get up the nerve to drive a car. I dumped the entire contents of my suitcase into the washing machine: a symbolic readjustment of my definition of clean.

These things, the physical aspects of America that failed to correspond with my world away, turned out to be the easy part. Within a week, the feeling that I was treading an alien landscape had passed. Like riding a bicycle (or more pertinently, driving that car) I fell with surprising ease back into the physical grooves of my life before. It was in many ways an elaborate muscle memory test.

But I learned slowly and somewhat painfully that these grooves, while physically adequate, were maladjusted to the real stuff of life: family, friends, the people we love and care for; their dynamics and relationships; their passions and the direction of their lives.

In Madagascar, we toss around a term, “same same but different,” to describe the general state of stagnation. Surprisingly, and somewhat paradoxically, I found no other term more applicable to what awaited me in America. The country itself, embroiled in political conflict, struggling through financial woes, was not all that different from the one I knew in Fall 2009. Many of the people I care for I found fundamentally the same, yet dramatically changed, grown and adapted to new places and situations. I often felt lost in a swirl of dynamics I could not understand, my navigational system two years outdated. The back-stories lost to me forever, I realized just how I can never relive the events of my absence.

Similarly, I am changed, “same same but different,” but few seemed to have noticed. Time and again I was told, “I expected you to be different,” and I don’t know whether to be flattered or appalled. I feel nothing the same but the changes occurred a world away. And Madagascar does not exist to America as anything but that- somewhere far, beyond, removed, apart. I struggled again and again to make my experience accessible- to open a little hole to that world- but I failed.

I thought that I might have some trouble reconciling my two worlds. I have found them instead to be utterly incompatible, equally unable to conceive of the other. It was fitting that days of travel were required to reach my hometown from my village, because my mind cannot comprehend a planet on which both the United States and Madagascar exist simultaneously.

It is a sort of cognitive dissonance, this tug between worlds, uncomfortable but also liberating. If they are irreconcilable than so am I.