American Exiles

Much of what I think and write springs from an at times appallingly regional point of view. As much as I would prefer to think internationally, I am first and foremost a child of America’s Pacific Northwest; more specifically, I am an Oregonian. My stripe of nativity is wide and deeply engrained, and I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on the synergy of mobilization and sense of place.

Around me I have witnessed Oregon’s growth of transplants, seedlings, people who have arrived here to begin anew, lured by geography and escapist dreams. This is not a mystifying trend. The transplants speak openly of the allure, the advantages of the environment. The social anthropologists’ documentation of migration and hope is vast; I do not need to recover their sense of what lies “beyond” in the imaginations of exiles.

I’m in a unique situation now (for me) wherein I meet many transplants, more than at any time since I first gave thought to the meaning of place as social experience. A jobless black man newly arrived here from Detroit said to me recently, “Of course I knew the economy is bad here. But I also knew it could not be as bad as Detroit. I had nothing to lose coming here.”

The argument is both a hopeful view and a curse generated by the ruling class in a new paradigm of intensified greed and increasingly harsh social distortion. It always amazes me to realize that everyone is here for a blink of time, yet we are infinitely capable of turning our little time-allotment into a life or death pursuit of wealth. That is not what we need from our every endeavor--other sources and goals should move to the fore. They must if we are to survive as a species, isn't it plain enough?

The trend to job loss in the U.S. exasperates the loss of place in the psyches of people; for its part, the Pacific Northwest provides a salve for some very open wounds created by the high-tech economy and neoliberal, global economization. Powerless to defeat moneyed interests, ordinary people caught in the contraction of the U.S. economy must renew their sense of comfort by reinvention. Often, and seemingly progressively, that entails reconfiguring place as destiny. If I am to suffer the indignity of poverty, the transplant can argue, I shall at least suffer elsewhere, for I have lost the faith I once held for my home.

My sense of this began naturally enough when I moved to Maine in 1974. I was an adventurist, like many of the young people I have met over the years who have settled here in Oregon. Maine, too, has as draws landscape and figments of possibility, and environment as refuge. I determined long ago that it was either there or here, that I would live and die in one or the other. I chose Oregon because of its power to transform my imagination within my rootedness, but I could have just as easily remained in Maine, in exile, or returned there, because I had reinvented or perhaps “found” my character there. Though I have not visited in many years, Maine yet draws me into its web of place and possibility. Who knows, perhaps I shall live there in the end, fall into a snow bank and take my last frozen breath. That is a popular and necessary way of dying there.

Of my sixty-years, I have lived all but six in my homeland. As much as any region in the U.S., the Pacific Northwest is marked by its provincialism, a quality that the American expatriate author Paul Bowles labeled, in a different context, “the sheltering sky.” In his novel The Sheltering Sky, Bowles draws a conflicted married couple into the intrigue and unsettling discomfort of North Africa, where Bowles had noted certain varieties of American expats unlike him were unable to foil their conundrum of exile and longing.

The Pacific Northwest has in its own manner become a "sheltering sky" for a new breed of exiles within an America that is barely recognizable from the country I knew forty years ago.

Darling you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
So you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go

It's always tease, tease, tease
You're happy when I'm on my knees
One day is fine, the next is black
So if you want me off your back
Well come on and let me know
Should I Stay or should I go

Should I stay or should I go now
Should I stay or should I go now
If I go there will be trouble
An' if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know…

The Clash

Tennessee Williams on Paul Bowles and the 1949 publication of The Sheltering Sky.


TS