Grace A. Bickers

I recently got back from a visit home to East Tennessee, and after a week of feeling a bit grumpy at being away from my routines and out of my element, I suddenly found myself deeply touched and inspired by the people and community I encountered there. Ever since I first came to New York as an undergrad, I have always struggled to make sense of my relationship to both places. When I moved home after my divorce a couple years ago, I felt as if I was able to reconnect with a long neglected part of my identity. Like a sentimental gift from a distant friend, I had packed up and carried this piece of myself through all of the moving and traveling, never quite knowing where to put it or how it fit it into a new space. Back in the city, I now feel more at home here than I ever have — my life is here, and it is a life I have worked hard to build — even as I’m less shy about sharing my inner hillbilly. But being from somewhere just isn’t the same as still belonging there. Knoxville isn’t just my past, it is a part of my present, or at least I want it to be, though I am as confused as ever about how to live in two places and cultures at once.

And they do really feel like two different cultures (she says, very American, very white). Even Tajikistan felt more similar to Tennessee than New York does, the values and expectations, the ways of being in the world and among others. For the nearly 15 years I have been away from home, I have been obsessed with ideas of community and identity and belonging, fangirling over Mira Nair’s films and South Side Chicago mutual aid organizations while geeking out on the history of Black Muslim jazz and hip hop. Only recently have I realized how central these concepts are to the questions that motivate what always seemed like very disparate academic interests. But for someone so invested in thinking about community, I’ve been very bad at actually building it.

In Mana Kia’s thoughtful study of premodern Persian identity, language plays a primary role in connecting people and ideas across political borders. Even more than Marshall Hodgson, who also recognized the importance of language in delineating cultural boundaries, Kia emphasizes the concept of adab, “the proper form of things and of being in the world…of proper aesthetic and ethical forms, of thinking, acting, and speaking, and thus of perceiving, desiring, and experiencing…the coherent logic of being Persian.”¹ Beyond the literal language of Persian, then, adab was (and still is) the shared medium through which people might recognize themselves in each other, articulate their similarities, and make sense of their differences. It enables an act of translation, allowing particularities of time and place and person to be made coherent and generalized, thus rendering the foreign familiar and accessible.

I think part of the difficulty of understanding myself as belonging to both Tennessee and New York has to do with the lack of a shared language between the two locales. Obviously I don’t mean an actual language, and one of the strength’s of Kia’s book is its illustration of the limitations that ideas associated with nationalism place on our self-understanding. To identify as religious, or as Christian, or as Protestant, and the significance of each of those modifiers, means something very different in each location. The expectations of what it means to be “good” differ wildly, too, what acceptable behavior looks like, the sort of stuff that puts you on the inside or outside of respectable society, as well as what is considered socially valuable and the ways of determining that value. Despite my fluency in both cultures, I have never fully understood how to translate between them; I can code-switch, but not exist in both at once.

One of the experiences that made this recent visit so special was witnessing the surprisingly vibrant social dance community in Knoxville. I was struck by how many people I met were also from East Tennessee, had left, and come back, and might leave again, but seemingly never lost their welcome no matter the years that past or the changes that accrued over that time. I guess that’s what home is, really, the place where you belong without question, where you can be seen as yourself — who you were and are and want to be — without having to prove your membership. What a relief to not have to perform an identity all of the time, to let go of control over our self-presentation and just be the messy, contradictory person we are and still find meaning, still understand ourselves in part through the people who make us feel like we belong. Maybe this is what the act of translation (and dancing, for that matter) really entails: putting one’s Self in conversation with another, accessing the vulnerability required to open oneself up to read and be read by another in order to find common ground.

Perhaps in all of these years of trying to fit in wherever I found myself, I have been too concerned with being understood and not enough with the process of understanding, too scared of the necessary imperfection and mutuality of that process. As the quote on my homepage says, “to translate from one time and place to another requires more than a good grammar book and a good dictionary…”² — as I’m finally learning, it requires trust, and patience, and grace, too.