A year ago, I took a friend visiting from California to a casual mixer at a rooftop bar in Athens, Greece, where I live. The mixer was arranged by the local chapter of Democrats Abroad, a get-out-the-vote organization for expat Americans in Europe. With drinks in hand and the sun setting on the Parthenon in the distance, we pushed ourselves into the knot of Americans at the far end of the patio. My friend, who is white, was immediately greeted warmly with the question: And which state do you vote in? The questions for me were voiced more skeptically: You vote? In the U.S.?
At the heart of that question—Where are you from?—is a concern with roots and the enormous value people place on the idea of being rooted.
Leaving aside whatever unadorned dumbassery persuaded me that it might be a good idea for us to spend an evening rubbing shoulders with my expat American peers, I was left with the obvious question: What else was I expecting? I’ve known for decades that to be brown and American outside the United States is to be seen as something else, and never as a bona fide Yank. Not that it matters much; any indignation I might summon would be staged. Who cares what a few expat types think I am or am not? I guess most people fail to recognize that in a country where 40 percent of the inhabitants identify as non-white, a few of such might also travel, and of those, some might come to Europe. The archetypal American abroad is still usually white, occasionally black, casually affluent in shorts and baseball cap, always inappropriately loud yet overly polite, and with an ever-present deer-in-headlights stare as they navigate the cobblestoned quaintness of ye olde Europe. Early on after I moved to Athens, when I joined some expat social media group, I echoed someone’s comment about police violence (more than once I had watched as a local gang of thugs—uh, I mean, an unerringly professional unit of the Athens police force—brutally beat up a migrant) and found myself instantly banned with the moderator attacking me as a foreign agitator masquerading as an American in Greece. To him, my name and skin color, obvious on the social media post, had pinned me as a con man. In comments on other social media platforms, he claimed to have discovered I was actually posting from India and had never once visited Greece. But even for the expats at the mixer, with their broad-shouldered embrace of their imagined Euro liberalism, my skin cast me immediately as the outsider among their ranks. Before I could be welcomed as my friend was, I was asked to explain myself.
A Citizen of Everywhere?
There’s aggression implicit in such othering, as academics call it, but equally there’s irony and not a little humor. As an American abroad, I often find myself defending my old, adopted home. It endlessly surprises me that educated Europeans, for all their self-proclaimed worldliness, are about as ignorant of American society and politics as, say, the average provincial Upper-East-Sider is of the most basic facts of European life. The sludge of half-truths, misinformation, disinformation, dark conspiracies, and outright wackiness I regularly wade through in friends’ and casual acquaintances’ comments about America leaves me in the uncomfortable position of becoming an American cheerleader and fact checker. At my old home in Brooklyn, I’d happily partake of an evening’s spirited America-bashing (one of our saintly rights and joyous holiday obligations, after all), but seeing the nation so often falsely maligned, I become protective, even missionary in my zeal. Abroad, I can transform into a proselytizer, declaiming my own Pauline epistle of what Greil Marcus once called “the old, weird America”; that borderland of hobos and beatniks, hippies and down-and-outs, bikers and average Janes, a land of the possible for the true dropouts and margin dwellers, and one that in my early years crisscrossing the desert West I often glimpsed or lived amid.
It’s hard to admit but the American in me is feeling pretty threadbare these days.
But here, in the birthplace of democracy, I am just another brown foreigner, and the question everyone wants the answer to is: No, where are you really from? I used to respond with a passive-aggressive sleight of hand: The same place as you: Africa. It never worked. Humor (and a shout-out to deep history) is lost on those of limited imagination. These days I default to my own unimaginative cop-out: It’s complicated. Because it is. My mother was born in what is now Pakistan and what was then the British Raj. She was a refugee who walked into the newly independent India, having three nationalities before the age of seven. My father was born in what is now India but was then the British Raj. When my father was born, his father was living in what was then the British Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, and is today the Republic of Kenya, where my father also lived before he moved to England (which, as we all know, has always been England, except for a while when it was also Europe). I was born in England (before it was Europe), and from a teen onward grew up in California, and have lived and worked in Arizona, Nevada, New York, Egypt, Israel, Sri Lanka, France, Vietnam, Canada, and India, and today live in Greece (thanks to rights I gained when England was so briefly part of Europe). But no one’s in search of nuance when they ask that question, or for a sense of who the person standing before them imagines themselves to be. When a white person says they’re American, no one asks where they’re really from. The assumption here is one of recognizable nationality. If you assume a true American has white genes, people like me must be from somewhere else; a product of a genetic heritage waiting to be decoded by a blinkered interlocutor.
And, of course, I am “from somewhere else”; just more recently than most German or Polish Americans. But even I wonder sometimes if I’m really just an imposter cosplaying a Yank. It’s hard to admit but the American in me is feeling pretty threadbare these days. The moribund two-party politics of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the transformation of personal engagement into a theater of outrage, and the gun-to-head hostage-taking of so much of daily life by so-called disruptor tech leaves me less and less inclined to ever return. In such a context, where much of American life seems ever more squeezed and precarious, the devastating election of Donald Trump to a second term, with GOP majorities in the House and Senate, only deepens my alienation. As I watched the red sea of MAGA hats chanting “USA! USA! USA!” during his victory night bash I couldn’t summon an iota of identification, certainly not with the triumphant supporters, but not even with the nation they claimed to celebrate.
Surfing the Algos
In my youth, the move to California from a straitjacketed England was a slow-boil revelation. Each year I felt my shoulders grow that tiny bit wider, my self-confidence and bravado expand, and the sense of what is possible in the world enlarge at times to fantastical proportions. No place is perfect, but if we judge a nation by the chances it gives a brown, working-class immigrant kid with blurry notions of an artistic vocation, the States wasn’t so bad. America was an open hand that seemed to say, just try it, see where it goes, and if you fail, try it again. I’m pretty sure that country is long gone. The soul-destroying gig and hustle culture of hyper-capitalism strangled my generation’s (OK, stupendously naive) battle cry of never sell out. (How I miss our naivete.) In retrospect, it sounds like a scratchy sentiment once recorded on a 78 or, more likely, a piano roll. (A young friend broke into peals of laughter when I mentioned that now decades-old sense of hopeful opportunity to her.) Today, to make it is to ruthlessly brand yourself, and punching through to any kind of success is not to catch the zeitgeist but to grab hold of the algorithm’s wave top and, like Major Kong at the end of Dr. Strangelove straddling the plummeting bomb to his and humanity’s mushroom cloud doom, ride it to commodification’s end.
Last year, a young Swiss man and influencer-in-training struck up a conversation at a local taverna. He was traveling the world, editing and uploading YouTube videos about his global search for what he called true love. A carafe of wine later, and onto his second, he let drop his real plan. His goal was to segue into upgrading his romantic trysts into porn shoots, with him as stud and star. Using the commercial version of ChatGPT-4, which he demonstrated on his phone, he was developing a series of AI algorithms that would take over the task of marketing by using self-generating scripts and autonomous outreach. Once up and running, he’d hardly have to do a thing except bang on camera a series of prospective great loves of his life. The monetized hits would just keep on coming.
I left the conversation dispirited about the commodification of, well, everything. But what interested me is something he said when comparing our life trajectories. Like me, the question of where he was from was complicated. Malaysia, Britain, Switzerland? I forget exactly. He was pleased to find in my story an approximate mirror of his own, and called me a fellow Third Culture Kid, or a TCK. I’d never heard the term before. Later, using decades-old technology (yes, Wikipedia) I looked it up and discovered it accurately described me: someone raised in a culture different from their parents, and living in another different, third culture or environment. I’m not one to wrap myself in other people’s definitions, especially a term, much like global citizen or digital nomad, that smacks of a marketer’s distillation, but it got me thinking about the cloak of Americanness I continue to wear, and my deep discomfort with nationalisms and borders of any kind. Perhaps the term American had become little more than a form of self-branding; an easy deflection against all those questions about who, what, and where.
Letting Go
A cheap, retro clothing store I used to frequent is located near the Athens Polytechnic, the Greek university where students famously defied the military junta in 1973 and set into motion events that eventually toppled the dictatorship. It’s run by a collective of queer punks, all tattooed, pierced, mohawked and gender-fluid, and is one of those genuinely welcoming spaces in this too often difficult city. The last time I visited, I was in pursuit of an unremarkable white cotton shirt. Like always, they had plenty. But searching the racks, I couldn’t find a single one without a prominent branding icon stitched onto its front. It was the same with all the other clothes. What happened? I asked, and the young clerk explained they’d made a business decision a few months back: no more plain shirts, or plain clothes of any kind. Everything has to be branded. It’s all anyone is willing to buy, they explained.
Cue the lengthy digression on the corporate hijacking of selfhood and the financialization of identity, and how punk became mirrorworld Punk®, its duly sponsored, and worldly successful, cousin. Nothing really new except maybe how far the tentacles of global capital have reached. I’ve never liked branded clothing—after all, to be branded is by definition to be owned, not to own—and I still wear my teenage aversion to—no, revulsion of—the Izod crocodile like a personally branded badge of honor; so I left the store empty-handed. The question I ask myself now is whether all I’m doing these days when I dodge the origins questions is wearing the logo AMERICA on my forehead, a neon sign warning trespassers to approach no closer. Just another schmuck toting a national brand identity as proxy for his idea of personhood.
Whatever the country or place of our birth it is, almost by definition, a vanished land.
Eight years have passed since I last set foot on American soil, when, in that week of November 2016, Donald Trump was first elected. Leaving directly after his election was coincidence, but in the four years that followed I always felt bubbling anxiety at the prospect of being questioned by Trumpist border agents. In their eyes, I imagined that, despite my passport, I’d already become an inauthentic American. Later plans were scuppered by the pandemic, and before I return, I’ll have missed the lifespans of at least two entire political administrations. Not a great loss. I’m already questioning plans I have to finally visit in the fall and may not return for another four years. What ties I had beyond my friendships feel sorely frayed while proclamations of my Americanness ring ever more hollow.
In Peter Handke’s My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, an epic meditation on, among other subjects, borders and statelessness, the narrator, a writer and former law student like the author himself, contrasts the child he was with his mother. After the dislocations of the Second World War, they return to her native village in Austria where she easily fits in and grows “cocky” while he can’t discard the feeling that he “had no right to be in the country,” and where official documents continue to classify him as “stateless.” As he grows older, he becomes unable to shake “the twisted sense of being a refugee and illegal that had grown into me.” Like Handke’s narrator, I’ve never fully escaped a sense of unbelonging that’s followed me from childhood. More and more, I wonder why I cling to an idea of an American me, an anywhere me. As a British American dual national, with rights of permanent residence in both Greece and India, and as someone who might plausibly claim Pakistani or Kenyan heritage, I can argue for any number of mes. The question I ask myself now is why claim any.
As an immigrant, America offered the room to make and remake myself, and in whatever image, or images, I chose. In a very real sense, I was made by the United States because it gave me that space. That was something vitally precious, and in the years since, when I called myself an American, this was why. I mourn that old America; a country I’ve watched vanish during my lifetime. I find little or nothing that connects me with the doppelganger nation that’s taken its place. No nation is a static object, and like cities, they exist in time, in eras. The New York City of my thirties, when I first lived there, is long gone. The Athens I arrived in a few years ago is vanishing rapidly, being buried by the forces of international capital and mass tourism. In the novels of Patrick Modiano, a lone narrator often wanders the streets of Paris trying to piece together dimly remembered incidents—romances, crimes, deaths, disappearances—from his youth. He does this through a minute reconstruction of vanished landscapes, street name by street name, landmark by landmark, searching his memory for long vanished cafes, auto-repair shops, hotels and bars. What actually happened—who killed who, who was in love with who, who deserted who—remains tantalizingly out of reach. The past disappears into fog. As a metaphor and description of our modern condition, I can think of few more apt examples, and that even as lifelong citizens of a single nation, we all become, at some point during our lives, stateless persons. Whatever the country or place of our birth it is, almost by definition, a vanished land.
At the heart of that question—Where are you from?—is a concern with roots and the enormous value people place on the idea of being rooted. Not having them, or denying them, can be deeply unsettling. Being called rootless, which the Oxford English Dictionary colorfully defines as “destitute of roots,” is a modern pejorative while to deracinate originally meant not just to uproot but to “eradicate” or “exterminate.” The sense of loss, of erasure, of literally not existing, is palpable in both definitions. There have been many times when I’ve gone round after round with someone who wanted to pin me down, place me, find my so-called origin on a map, both geographic and cultural. Their need to root me, plant me so to speak, feels visceral. I understand the impulse, even sympathize to an extent, because the answer offers potential for common ground or connection. But more and more I prefer to either dodge or answer more honestly because, really, I don’t know anymore. The London of my youth, the Punjabi village of my parents—these are deracinated places, worlds that have been eradicated. How to possibly describe them? Like a character in a Modiano novel, when I interrogate my origins all I see is mist.
If I’m honest, there’s little American left in me and it’s probably time to revisit the question and transform myself, but now into a former American. Add to that former Englishman, former Indian. The last thing I want is to pick up new monikers. To call myself a Greek would be a joke. My spoken Greek is abominable, as the Pakistani waiter at my local taverna, a fluent Greek speaker who has lived here as long as I have, regularly chides me about. Nor do I want to crow about the ease with which I move through immigration posts and pompously call myself a man without a country. I was one of the lucky few to win the passport lottery. As nationalist drums beat their anthems ever more loudly throughout the world, and more and more people happily brand themselves with the symbols of their country, subsuming individuality into jingoistic agendas, I can only recoil at the idea of borders, nations, flags, these celebrations that project a self onto imaginary epic histories. I’d rather turn my back on the lot of it. The former British prime minister, Theresa May, once scorned anyone who called themself a citizen of the world as a “citizen of nowhere.” While I’d never be so bold or tasteless as to call myself the former, I’m warming to the ring of the latter.