How to be both...

Posted on: 21 February 2017 by Jonathan Ellis in Posts

From an early age my now 7-year-old son has been practising how to answer the familiar question: where do you come from? Growing up bilingual in Sheffield where this question frequently doubles as a query about national identity, his first tactic was to reply according to the language in which the question was posed. If you asked him whether he was English or Spanish in English, he would always be English. Try the same question in Spanish and, perhaps not surprisingly, he would suddenly be Spanish. (Woody Allen’s Zelig acts similarly, changing his accent and appearance depending on who he is with.) As my son got older, probably around 4 or 5, he preferred to be both. “I’m English and Spanish,” he would affirm, the stress always landing on that conjunction.

I’m proud of the fact he feels at home in two languages and two places, that’s he’s old enough to realise we can be rooted in more than one identity. That a citizen of more than one place is not a citizen of no place or nowhere. That having more than one place to call home might be an addition to rather than a subtraction from what we call ourselves in language.

How to Be Both is the title of one of Ali Smith’s recent novels in which two stories, one set in the present, one set in the past, exist in two different editions. Each story contains references to the other. They can be read separately, and in either order. Smith compared what she was doing to the form of a fresco. “You have the very first version of the fresco underneath the skin, as it were, of the real fresco. There's a fresco on the wall: there it is, you and I look at it, we see it right in front of us; underneath that there's another version of the story and it may or may not be connected to the surface. And they're both in front of our eyes, but you can only see one, or you see one first. So it’s about the understory. I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.”1

I’ve spent most of my academic career thinking about the twentieth-century poet Elizabeth Bishop in similar terms, as a poet of both fresco and understory. The three qualities she admired in poetry were “Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.”2 Like Smith, one has the feeling that all her writing travels with “an understory,” one almost visible beneath the surface. “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”, she once wrote in a poem.3 That’s three “ands” together. I cannot think of another poet who repeats herself so much and who can get away with saying the same word three times in a single sentence. Yet perhaps the triple “and” has another purpose, to highlight our multiple and multiplying selves. It was Bishop who declared herself “3/4ths Canadian”4 to her first biographer, Anne Stevenson, in 1963, two years before the publication of her third collection of poems, Questions of Travel, the title poem concluding with two stanzas of italicised questions, none of which are definitively answered:

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come 

to imagined places, not just stay at home? 

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right 

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society: 

the choice is never wide and never free. 

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, 

wherever that may be?”5

Bishop’s maternal and paternal ancestors were what we would nowadays call economic migrants. They travelled from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to New England when such journeys across borders were not just permitted but actively encouraged. Bishop scholar, Sandra Barry, rightly refers to such movements of people between Nova Scotia and New England as migration. Bishop’s relatives felt Canadian and American. They may have travelled from one country to the other, but both places felt home. They shared a common identity. It’s one of the reasons why Nova Scotia sends a Christmas tree to Boston every year, a tradition began in 1918 as a token of thanks to the citizens of Boston for their help after the Halifax Explosion.

Travel implies a home to travel from and a home to which we can return. By the time of this poem’s composition, in the midst of the Cold War, there were more pressing reasons for travel than “lack of imagination” as Bishop acknowledges in her acceptance that for most human beings “the choice is never wide and never free.” It’s the traveller’s freedom, the traveller’s responsibility, to think about freedom. One such freedom is the freedom of movement. This is a freedom that Bishop never takes for granted, that home can be “here, or there” only for those fortunate enough to own the right passport.

It seems to me that the actions and comments of Theresa May and others are directed against political and imaginary freedom of movement. It is not enough to limit the number of people who wish to live and work here. In addition to this, we’re told what citizenship means, that a little over half of the people who voted can tell the other half not just what to do but how to think of themselves. “Half is enough,” says Bishop’s Gentleman of Shalott who lives his life through the looking-glass, not sure whether he is real or a reflection.6 Brexit Britain feels like a similar body divided, each side convinced their image of the country is the right one, neither sure what lies on the other side of the glass.

What about me? Well, I was born near Chester and have lived all of my life in England. One of my grandparents was Welsh. I speak Spanish at home and my son calls me papá. I live in the North of England, and teach American and English literature, film, and even letter writing. The university I teach at has academics and students from over 100 countries. These other lives and languages make us more than one thing. They add up to more than me.

At a recent workshop at my son’s primary school, we were told about the government’s new SATs test, one of which includes the requirement for 7 year olds to recognise and employ conjunctions. Adding “ands” to sentences is a silly test for understanding the English language. Thinking of oneself and one’s country as a place where “ands” matter is a more serious matter. Sometimes it takes a 7-year-old to teach us the way. “And” and “and.” How to be both.

1. Ali Smith, “A life in….” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/06/ali-smith-interview-how-to-be-both

2. Elizabeth Bishop, “Writing poetry is an unnatural act.” Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, p. 208.

3. Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 58.

4. Elizabeth Bishop, Letter to Anne Stevenson, 2nd October 1963. Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. New York: Library of America, 2008, p. 852

5. Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel.” Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 92.

6. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Gentleman of Shalott.” Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 12.