imagined-community

It’s funny how a long vacation can disrupt all the little routines that organize a life. The morning exercise. Cooking for the week on Sunday afternoon. Prework trips to the corner café to read the paper.

Good riddance to some of those habits! (I don’t need to watch that much TV.) Other habits, like exercise and blogging, I don’t want to fall away. That’s why I decided to take up the NaBloPoMo challenge (National Blog Posting Month). I need to jumpstart a routine that I have lost; if I don’t rebuild the habit of blogging, and quickly, I may lose it for the winter. All that green and amethyst wool piled up on my living room floor would be easy to get lost in. Maybe I should just knit away the winter and not write a single word. Sigh. But I don’t want that.

The year after I finished my MA one of my graduate advisors told me a story about how painful writing used to be for her. Her resistance was so strong that she felt writing against her own apathy as physical pain. I understand that. I feel that. Her story, and the story of the French writer Colette’s early writing career in the literary factory, which only came to be because her first husband locked her in a room until she produced enough pages, comfort me. While writing often feels as alive and as clear as daybreak, the path to that early morning inhale, to breathing, is a struggle for me. I never want to write and yet I always want to write.

I guess NaBloPoMo is my locked room. One post every day for the month of November. Bring it on!

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“On August 31st, (BlogDay 2007), bloggers from all over the world will post recommendations of 5 new Blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.”
– Read more about BlogDay here.

This year, all my BlogDay picks are written by expats who blog about their experiences living and working abroad while simultaneously reflecting on their home countries and culture. It is been my experience that expats often see themselves, their home country, and their new country through a unique lens.
According to Lloyd Kramer, Professor of French History at UNC, the experience of exile (and I would argue to a lesser degree the experience of living abroad for an extended time) can radically alter a person’s sense of self as well as the framework through which they interpret the world. Kramer writes:

The experience of living among alien people, language, and institutions can alter an individual’s sense of self about as significantly as any of the traumas known to psychologists. The referents by which people understand themselves change dramatically when they are separated from networks of family, friends, work, and nationality. Although this separation affects each individual somewhat differently, the resulting disorientation commonly provokes important changes in self-perception and consciousness. Intellectual exiles frequently respond to their deracination by describing home (idealistically) or rejecting home (angrily) or creating a new definition of home (defiantly); in any case they almost always explore problems of national and personal identity in new ways and write about their conflicts in texts that become unusually rich revelations of conscious and unconscious needs, motivations, and anxieties.

Along with this new perspective on the self, exiles often gain insights into the collective consciousness of their society and historical epoch. Extended contact with a foreign mentalité helps them to recognize the unconscious social or ideological hierarchies that create order and meaning in their native culture but pass unnoticed by the people who never leave home. The “normal” (or normative) values of the home country become more relative: simply one way of explaining reality or social experience rather than the way. Exiles learn from their own difficult experience about the relationship between language and mentality: the words by which they name ideas or things at home lose meaning abroad, and the whole linguistic system that organizes experience must change if the outsider is to cope with a different culture. Alien social environments reveal unconscious mental structures because these structures do not work well in the new place. Indeed, the unnoticed assumptions that enable people to function in their own context frequently become impediments to life in another culture. The shock of recognition that accompanies this experience allows exiles to describe their native-country attitudes with unusual critical distance and to analyze aspects of collective consciousness in their new culture from perspectives unavailable to people raised and educated within that culture. Located on the margin of two cultures, the exile can become one of the most astute interpreters of collective consciousness, prejudice, and ideology and an extraordinary informant for people who want to understand the unexamined values of their own society…

– Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830 – 1848.

And now, my blog picks…

1. Chitlins & Camembert . Amy & Laurent left New York City for rural France. Now that’s a culture shift! Today Amy takes up the topic of a curious cultural difference between American and French women: most French women are completely uninterested in developing close relationships with other women.
2. Duong Lam Anh. Ok, Lam Anh is not an expat. He was born and lives in Hue, but he did study in the United States at one time. Written in both Vietnamese and English, Lam Anh’s blog is great for the English speaking blog reader hoping learn more about Vietnam (and the US) as well as students of Vietnamese.
3. In Provence. Meredith is a Minnesotan living in Provence. What’s not to like?
4. Michellanea. An American journalist living in Italy, Michellanea writes about the U.S. and Italy with a clear, critical (in the best sense) eye.
5. Our Life in Pittsburgh. (en français) Jean moved from Paris to Pittsburgh (!). In his own words, “Vivre ailleurs, c’est réapprendre à conduire, à faire ses courses, à recevoir des amis, à lire son journal, à régler ses impôts… Ca commence par changer de quotidien, et puis de rencontres en découvertes, c’est la vie toute entière qui change. Parfois meilleure, parfois pire, mais toujours différente.”

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It’s not too late to help a blogger raise money for a good cause as they slog through 24 hours of constant blogging for Blogathon 2007!

Don’t want to scroll through the long list of bloggers to find someone to sponsor? (Or you can use this surfing frame to click through the home pages of all the participating blogs.) For an international charity, consider the Purple Corner where Jogany is blogging for the SOS Children’s Village in Madagascar. The site is in French though there is an addictive chat going on right now that is mostly English. The Purple Corner also has some great podcasts.

More about Blogathon from the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Bleary-Eyed Blogging for Charity

More than 500 bloggers from around the world have signed up to participate in a 24-hour Blogathon to raise money for charity starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday.

The participants will raise money for a charity of their choice, promising donors they will update their blogs every 30 minutes during the 24-hour period.

The annual event was started in 2001 by Cat Connor, a blogger in Portland, Ore. That year, more than 100 bloggers raised more than $20,000 for 77 charities, according to the Blogathon’s Web site. Participation has gone up and down since then. This year, more than $70,000 has been pledged so far, it says.
The rules for bloggers are strict. “Don’t use an update script or other trick so you can go to bed and still blog,” the site warns. “You must be awake and participating in person.”

It offers helpful tips for staying awake: take quick, cold showers; chat with other Blogathan participants; dance or play computer games; or create a “themed blog.”

All money goes directly to the charities through online donations.

The bloggers still have many hours to go…

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