I am not a political refugee. Rather, I spent six years past the BA training for a very specialized sort of job and then was only able to get one in a far-off land. I have been trying without success to get home now for nine years and will keep on trying until the day I die. But one has to live, too, and living in exile has certain positive features. For me, of course, the primary positive feature of my situation is that I am able to practice my profession. I have the best job in the world, one I have decided not to give up even to return to my home. Mine is a competitive field; if I calculate correctly, more people earn a living playing tennis than working in my field.
But beyond my job, there are certain elements of living in exile that are, if not attractive, appropriate. Throughout my childhood and adolescence in the Midwest, I was a pariah, a real weirdo. It wasn’t just that I loved to read, although that was part of it. But more fatally, I never fit in because temperamentally I was cut out to be the daughter of a surgeon and a magazine-editor, a good student who received encouragement at her private school, who developed her interest in writing throughout high school and college, then went on to a job on a newspaper. However, I grew up in a working-class family which finally recognized its brand when Rush Limbaugh burst into popularity. That is, I grew up despised by my cousins, ridiculed with the same maniacal energy that they now apply to Democrats. The hatred that characterizes the general approach of the right today was already flourishing in my family back in the 1970s. I was its target: I was tall, gawky, studious, quiet. I was the antithesis of what my family valued.
I am in touch with my family and many high school classmates through Facebook. That is exactly the level of engagement with which I feel comfortable – I want to be home, but at a distance. To a certain extent, my current exile reifies a circumstance that feels natural to me.
My relationship with the Catholic Church is similar. I am not permitted to receive the sacraments because before my current real marriage, I was married (to a hyper-male, although he was nominally to the left of the political spectrum; in retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how he sees himself as a Democrat, because his authoritarian tendencies make him feel much more to the right, but whatever) to whom I simply could not remain married and therefore divorced. In any case, he had no interest in marrying me – I bullied him into it because my family was scandalized that we were not married - and less interest in being married in a Catholic Church, although (no, because) he had been through the Catholic school system during the period when nuns were still violent executioners. This did not stop him from threatening me with hell fire when I finally pulled out. It is entirely typical that within the literal-minded context within which he and many other Catholics operate he was allowed to not speak to me about anything beyond daily necessities for three years, fail to take part in any of the things that make marriage fun (like eating together), refuse to have children or even build a living space together, and then throw maledictions upon me when I said this is NOT a marriage. He was supremely indifferent to the rules except when he pulled them out to condemn me. But he could do whatever he wanted, because Catholics do not enter into a contract when they marry. You get one option – forever or nothing. I chose forever, and I am bound forever. Benedict recently reiterated that under no circumstances do we divorced and remarried Catholics get to receive the sacraments, which of course does not stop Rudy Giuliani or the divorced and remarried Kennedys from taking communion.
But the point of this is that from exile is an entirely appropriate way to relate to the Catholic Church. Even if it wanted me, I cannot in any case embrace an institution that systematically and self-righteously assigns second-class citizenship to women and views paedophilia as an internal issue. But, like my family, the Church is part of me. I see the things through the magical world view it taught me.
So I live in exile on a number of levels. And yet, I will never resign myself to exile. The outrage at being excluded keeps me alive. I meant to come here for about three years, then go home, that is, to blue America. But my own society will not have me, will not give me a job. So I fulminate out here, eternally shamed by this rejection by my own.
Yes, I am exiled, and it seems to be my permanent state. But this inside/outside position has advantages. Actually, it has one advantage, that is, it puts me in good company. Cicero, Ovid, Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, Rousseau, Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht. Exile is a position that exists, an acknowledged way of being in the world. I am a liminal being. We liminal beings have special properties, potential for creating unity in different ways. I’m not sure what they are in my case, but I am trying to find them.
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