unlearning patriotism through travel
There are many kinds of travel books. They range from white men ranting (On the Road) to white women ranting (Eat, Pray, Love). I can get down with a rant, but these kinds of travel books tend to legitimize bubbles instead of popping them. Traveling teaches us about other countries, but it also gives us a new vantage point from which to see our own. Here are books I have read while traveling that have given me new perspective on the USA. If you have no time to read the whole post, skip to the quotes! They are gold.
Let's talk about immigration! This book is about reluctant immigrants, people who end up in the USA because the USA has destroyed their homes in their home countries. These individuals do not come because they want to, they come because the USA has taken away all the other options.
This work of non-fiction centers around a Hmong family who fled from Laos to California after the USA started and then botched the Secret War in Laos, an off-shoot of the Vietnam War (which is called the American War in Vietnam, go figure). The USA wreaked plenty of havoc in Cambodia and Laos while trying to cut off supply lines and support for Vietnam. They dropped more bombs per capita on Laos in nine years than any other country in history, according to a bomb museum I went to yesterday. About 30% of the bombs dropped never exploded and now detonate when children accidentally find them in fields, killing about 40 childrn and 60 adults in Laos per year.
This book shows that the USA forced many Laotians to fight in a war that was not theirs and then abandoned them when the war ended (sound familiar?), leaving them vulnerable to punishment by the Laotians who won the war against the USA. It provides new perspective on what it means to be an immigrant in the USA, how countries surrounding countries at war are also impacted, and what happens when the country that messed up your life becomes your home.
"The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture."
Nicaragua! I can't talk about this country without feeling happy. The Sandanista movement is better known among USAers than the Secret War in Laos but it is still worth reviewing.
The gist is par for the course for USA foreign policy: the USA doesn't like the direction a country is going in (independence) and sends in the CIA and finances the haters in order to keep the country supporting the USA's interests.
Salmon Rushdie documented his observations while visiting Nicaragua in the 80s. Rushdie is from India. His viewpoint alone is illuminating for USAers to consider:
"...those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common — not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel."
This book is a crash course in Europe and the USA's role in crippling Latin America's economic sovereignty. Of course there are many books that could be read on each of the twenty Latin American countries. This one works as an introduction and lays some context.
It helped me understand why Costa Rica is an expensive tourist destination right next to Nicaragua, which is considered a cheap backpacker destination. It gave me a better understanding of the history of slavery in Brazil, where all the gold churches in Spain got (stole) their gold, and the ways in which each country is still suffering from the Europe and USA's pillaging of Latin American resources.
“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European--or later--United States-- capital, and as such has accumulated on distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.”
While we're on the topic of the Americas and I continue awkwardly typing "USAer," it's a good time to say that this book is when I first discovered that it is not cool to say I'm "American."
After spending awhile in Latin America, I've seen how much the word "American" is used for all of Latin America. It is not used to refer to USAers, it is used, logically, to refer to people of all the Americas. The word in Spanish for someone from the USA is "estadounidense" aka "United States-er." Spanish does not co-sign on the USA's monopolozation of this word, now I don't either. It feels myopic to me to use it now. Not that people who use it should feel ashamed or wrong, it's what we've been taught. But these books and these travels have given me new lessons.
Speaking of the USA, moving to New York and working in the Bronx/Brooklyn gave me an education on the USA that I did not get in marshmellowburg, Ohio. That's not Ohio's fault, it has rich history of its own but that's not what I sought out when I walked around malls as a bored teen. So here I have a book that illuminates untold histories of the USA:
Here's one about facts we think we've learned, my fav topic. The book studies the Great Migration, when African Americans in the south migrated en masse to the North in order to pursue lives less threatened by racism. It changed how I understand US geography and demographics, the fall-out of the Civil War, the role of Jim Crow, the history of great cities. As the country discusses the merits of Confederate statues, I highly suggest this book to provide insight and history that public school curriculums do not volunteer.
“I was hoping,” he said years later, “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”
This book filters foreign policy through the USA's healthcare. Not the healthcare that we are fighting for in DC, the healthcare that we mess up in other countries when we finance dams that cut off access to towns in poverty and spread infections, etc. This is one of the most inspiring out of the list because it highlights someone who solving problems. It won't make you feel good - it made me feel terrible - but it shows what humans are capable of when they choose to care instead of ignore. This quote gets to the heart of this book and this blog post:
"...he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. 'My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.' ”
Laos: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
Let's talk about immigration! This book is about reluctant immigrants, people who end up in the USA because the USA has destroyed their homes in their home countries. These individuals do not come because they want to, they come because the USA has taken away all the other options.This work of non-fiction centers around a Hmong family who fled from Laos to California after the USA started and then botched the Secret War in Laos, an off-shoot of the Vietnam War (which is called the American War in Vietnam, go figure). The USA wreaked plenty of havoc in Cambodia and Laos while trying to cut off supply lines and support for Vietnam. They dropped more bombs per capita on Laos in nine years than any other country in history, according to a bomb museum I went to yesterday. About 30% of the bombs dropped never exploded and now detonate when children accidentally find them in fields, killing about 40 childrn and 60 adults in Laos per year.
This book shows that the USA forced many Laotians to fight in a war that was not theirs and then abandoned them when the war ended (sound familiar?), leaving them vulnerable to punishment by the Laotians who won the war against the USA. It provides new perspective on what it means to be an immigrant in the USA, how countries surrounding countries at war are also impacted, and what happens when the country that messed up your life becomes your home.
"The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture."
Nicaragua: Jaguar Smile by Salmon Rushdie
Nicaragua! I can't talk about this country without feeling happy. The Sandanista movement is better known among USAers than the Secret War in Laos but it is still worth reviewing.
The gist is par for the course for USA foreign policy: the USA doesn't like the direction a country is going in (independence) and sends in the CIA and finances the haters in order to keep the country supporting the USA's interests.
Salmon Rushdie documented his observations while visiting Nicaragua in the 80s. Rushdie is from India. His viewpoint alone is illuminating for USAers to consider:
"...those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common — not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel."
South America: Open Veins of Latin America - Eduardo Galeano
This book is a crash course in Europe and the USA's role in crippling Latin America's economic sovereignty. Of course there are many books that could be read on each of the twenty Latin American countries. This one works as an introduction and lays some context. It helped me understand why Costa Rica is an expensive tourist destination right next to Nicaragua, which is considered a cheap backpacker destination. It gave me a better understanding of the history of slavery in Brazil, where all the gold churches in Spain got (stole) their gold, and the ways in which each country is still suffering from the Europe and USA's pillaging of Latin American resources.
“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European--or later--United States-- capital, and as such has accumulated on distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.”
While we're on the topic of the Americas and I continue awkwardly typing "USAer," it's a good time to say that this book is when I first discovered that it is not cool to say I'm "American."
After spending awhile in Latin America, I've seen how much the word "American" is used for all of Latin America. It is not used to refer to USAers, it is used, logically, to refer to people of all the Americas. The word in Spanish for someone from the USA is "estadounidense" aka "United States-er." Spanish does not co-sign on the USA's monopolozation of this word, now I don't either. It feels myopic to me to use it now. Not that people who use it should feel ashamed or wrong, it's what we've been taught. But these books and these travels have given me new lessons.
Speaking of the USA, moving to New York and working in the Bronx/Brooklyn gave me an education on the USA that I did not get in marshmellowburg, Ohio. That's not Ohio's fault, it has rich history of its own but that's not what I sought out when I walked around malls as a bored teen. So here I have a book that illuminates untold histories of the USA:
USA: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Here's one about facts we think we've learned, my fav topic. The book studies the Great Migration, when African Americans in the south migrated en masse to the North in order to pursue lives less threatened by racism. It changed how I understand US geography and demographics, the fall-out of the Civil War, the role of Jim Crow, the history of great cities. As the country discusses the merits of Confederate statues, I highly suggest this book to provide insight and history that public school curriculums do not volunteer.
“I was hoping,” he said years later, “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”
Haiti: Mountains Beyond Mountains - Trady Kidder
This book filters foreign policy through the USA's healthcare. Not the healthcare that we are fighting for in DC, the healthcare that we mess up in other countries when we finance dams that cut off access to towns in poverty and spread infections, etc. This is one of the most inspiring out of the list because it highlights someone who solving problems. It won't make you feel good - it made me feel terrible - but it shows what humans are capable of when they choose to care instead of ignore. This quote gets to the heart of this book and this blog post:
"...he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. 'My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.' ”
I remember reading Bitter Fruit back in 1983 about the CIA engineered coup in Guatemala and how disoriented it made me. I had no idea that the US gov't could so cavalierly stomp on the sovereignty of other countries. But by the next year I was marching for the Sandinistas in LA. and became more woke. I stopped singing "God Bless America" a long time ago. When I hear it now, all I can think of is black leather boots on brown necks all over the world.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great list Joho. I think I'll start first with the Rushdie one.
Awesome list. I've always heard USAian instead of USAer, which one led to an argument because someone got confused about Usain Bolt's nationality. Good times.
ReplyDelete