“Look, I admit I came to Paris to escape American provincial, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for French traditional.”
—Audrey Hepburn, Charade
Dear Britain,
In spite of Murakami and the rural male youths of my mongrel pubescence informing me otherwise, I still prefer to think of a “morning glory” as a cat licking its paws through choppy rays of light—just at the moment when “rosy-fingered” dawn neatly vivisects your eyes and the living room in two (if the postmodern turn has accomplished anything worthwhile, it has bestowed scalpels on Homeric metaphors), leaving little else to do than bat the sand from your lashes and gulp down that third cup of coffee.
It was during of one these scenes from my everyday homeostasis, Britain, when I began to realize, at first rather absently, that for all legitimate reasons, my cat is British.
First, it must be asserted that, in most ways, my cat does not go against her “supposed species script,” to borrow a page from Donna Haraway. Like the rest of her ilk, she is the arbiter of our (my) human mediocrities. Moreover, the cat is pigeon-toed. She was heavily discounted. The RSPCA offers 40% discounts on black cats, to encourage turnover. (It seems that, like the bubonic plague, medieval Celtic fears are still alive and thriving in this country.) When my spouse brought home a black cat with an orange dash on her nose one evening three years ago, she took revenge on her designation as bargain-basement by promptly taking a shat on our bed.
I am fortunate to make my living from stringing words together in multiple combinations, which I largely do in the comfort of said London living room. In this way, the cat is the closest thing I have to an office colleague, though her ears are unsympathetic (and asymmetrical). When I bemoan writer’s block (cheerfully affecting bravura), or mourn the conditional depository of words available for allocation to others’ writings and to my own, she employs her favorite rhetorical device: that of the half-interested rant. For example, last week, when I began this letter to you, Britain, such was her response:
“Stop making excuses for your inveterate procrastination. In terms of the amount of words you’re playing for keeps, how far along are you with this letter? Give me a metric, and please, no refined obscurantism.” Satisfied with this allusion, she flicked her tail, looking thoughtful. “Moreover, stop referring to me with any of those pet diminutives you seem to favor. Shortly after being abandoned by my mother, I named myself Ernest Hemingway (I readily confess to our obvious connection—mommy issues), which gives me leverage over Hampstead cats with lesser names, who were born and bred as literary confidantes. I can tell you that Tim Burton’s Russian Blue often whistles plagiarisms over the fence. [The Burton-Bonham-Carters are our neighbors, an interesting story for another time.] Also, are you married to Stevie Wonder? Perhaps you should consider brushing your hair, at least once a week.”
“Workplace bullying is a thing, you know,” I shouted back. I brandished my vile of Tom Ford’s Venetian Bergamot. “Unlike my cats, I insist that my perfumes have pedigree!” But the cat was already snoring softly on my serape blanket, weaving her rough sable wool into that of the striped cornflower-blue.
With the eve of Brexit (by the way, how very clever of you) looming closer, I am reminded that in November I will cast my vote in the American presidential election from my camp in London, and in a few years I will have to decide whether to keep my American citizenship or exchange it for a British one, to avoid tax penalties. The fact is, my cat, despite all her dubious qualifications as a productive British citizen, has much more right to a British passport than I do. Like McCann and Michael Ondaatje, I embrace the term “international mongrel” (the term is Ondaatje’s): my mother is from the Philippines, my father is American, I grew up in Filipino kitchens in Los Angeles, I was educated in California, Argentina, Ireland, and England, and I taught English literature in Paris. I am grateful for the ability to take for granted my education in multicultural and international libraries. Book-wise, my early schooling was largely Anglo-American and Anglo-British. (But isn’t it sometimes boring to stare at the same four walls all day?)
My spouse is one of your natives, Britain. He is a peaceful sort of man, ginger-bearded and tall, with a puppy-like enthusiasm for bringing people together. (“You know, he is the ESFP to your Meyers-Briggs’ INTJ.” Dodging one of his bursts of affection, the cat whispered her clinical assessment from beneath the couch.) In another life, he was a small-town mayor in the American Midwest. He descends from the Liverpudlian Bradleys, who have no time for Man U, the devil, London, or fully pronouncing words with vowels. They are a clan of German Shepherd breeders of celebrity status. (Indeed, my in-laws have so definitively shaped the breed’s gene pool in the United Kingdom, there isn’t a German Shepherd I pass without sensing a kinship by proxy.)
Frequently, I accuse my gentle, cat-loving financier of suffering from British post-imperial trauma. We do not see eye-to-eye on this diagnosis. When Donald Trump was granted the Republican nomination earlier this month, David Cameron publically congratulated him. I was furious. I took to my phone, understanding from the beginning that my spouse would assume Cameron’s defense.
“Did you see that Cameron congratulated Trump on his Republican nomination? What a charade,” I texted, thumbs drilling the phone’s screen like jackhammers.
“Good old British diplomacy,” my sweetheart serenely texted back.
“More like good old British passive-aggression?” I responded (predictably).
“Cameron is just being diplomatic. In case, you know, Trump does become America’s president.” Already I could imagine his brows furrowing in consternation. My spouse deflects even the most aseptic critiques of Britishness in the way Belgium has historically tolerated great European wars. Sure, they were important, and even expected, but really, what did they have to do with him and his country in the here and now?
“British Diplomacy. See: Munich Agreement,” I wrote, pressing “Send” with excessive gusto. Unfortunately, our Digital Age sidelines one of my favorite comedic devices: that of the deadpan. In any case, the Digital Age did not inhibit my spouse’s lack of amusement.
It became clear to me, in the temperate sneeze which is London’s summer, that whether leaving the European Union was genuinely in the United Kingdom’s interest is completely beside the point. Technical though inauthentic exercises in democracy, designed to uphold the illusion of “consensus,” by obscuring, rather than addressing, real issues, find their origins in beside the point. To coin a phrase. And yet, the narrative of legalized bate-and-switch is made up of so many intricacies, of tacit treaties, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interest of appearing to give the people what they think they want.
In Britain, the political Baccahnalia of the “Vote Leave” campaign looks less like a demonstration of democracy and more like a deep, languorous kiss with a public that rejects immigration across-the-board. Such is the lace curtain in front of the iron one. “Brexit will make Britain great again,” claim the Leavers. “Make America great again,” sound the Donald Trumpeters. “Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful,” said Doris Lessing (among lithely yawning cats and Hampstead Huguenots). “And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, ‘How could they have believed that?’ because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbins of history.” It was the 1985 Massey Lecture, and Lessing had left the British Communist Party some thirty years beforehand.
Nationalities are ill-fitting things—one size does not fit all. Although it is no surprise when someone attempts to prescribe your personal history with checkpoints or borders, each time this happens to me, I blink in ornery amusement: “Well, yes, I am American, Californian, actually, but I am also an individual, and I am not particularly interested in living in the country where my life started—unlike my mother’s family, who left those burnt-gold islands in the Pacific with no time for afterthought or equivocation, I am privileged with this choice—and what really matters to me is Nabokov, Lessing, Kafka, Camus, Chekhov, Jean Rhys, Jacques Prevert, Tolstoy, de Beauvoir…” My own windows looking out onto Europe go on, as I imagine some equivalent Indian schoolgirl marvels at the vista through the Cervantes window, or the Mary Wollstonecraft. Like Jean Rhys wrote, “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important it finds homes for us everywhere.”
I hope you will see, Britain, that I am the coy schoolboy in an old French film who is tenderly tugging your pigtails into the inkwell: this letter is merely badinage amoureux. (If I was an antagonist, I would have started my letter like this: I write to you in the blinking morning light, a week away from castration day…) Truly, I thank you for the sarcastic cat who has a dark beauty all her own, and for the Viking-faced prince of dog breeding royalty, who speaks dotingly of our future daughter. She will speak your English, which your natives never fail to remind me is the “real English.” (See: post-imperial trauma). Among the many other things that you have germinated, small and large, I am also grateful for: George Eliot, Radiohead, clotted cream, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, empiricism, and the worldwide web. I’ll even award you a point in one of your prehistoric feuds: I can attest that your regional cheeses rival those of France, and I believe that Yorkshirian matriarchs of a certain mature age embody the spirit of European post-WWII pragmatism. (Disembarking from the plane at Budapest Airport earlier last week, one of these nans and I engaged in my favorite British institution: the undervalued art of queuing. We tidily organized our bodies for boarding the shuttle bus to the terminal, but the continentals did not follow the program—indeed, they didn’t seem to realize that there was one! As you can imagine, our synchronized tsks of disapproval harmonized to giddy heights.)
Poking your ribs aside, Britain, we do not need to see our various hyphenations as fracture: we can be hapa, or Californian and British, or Liverpudlian and British, or British and European. We can even be all of these at once.
On the night train from Budapest to Vienna, I finished writing this letter to you, Großbritannien. I decided that I earned one of my rare breaks, and so, while chomping distractedly on a sandwich, I called the cat-loving postcolonial-denialist. In the light of the moon and the fluorescent reading lamps, icy stars and warm crumbs fell as I looked out the window onto dry meadows interleaving farmland and forest, and I remembered that were once ancient battlefields. With the phone glued to my ear, I tried to rally the army of English words at my command, asking them to desert their posts, to join up with Britain and with Europe, calling them to attention, condemning their morphologies to death, getting dizzy from the thundering of Indo-European hooves as they circumvented the guillotine in chorus. (“I speak and write in English and do not altogether share the preoccupations and perspectives of an Englishman. I teach English literature, I publish in London, but the English tradition is not ultimately home. I live off another hump as well,” said Seamus Heaney, whose translation of Aeneid Book VI, published by Faber & Faber, should actually be this year’s cultural revelation.)
My spouse shares that obnoxious habit of many pet owners: coercing dogs and cats to “speak” for you, if you are on the other end of a long-distance phone call. He picked up the phone in our flat, and he immediately aimed the phone at the cat, who, upon hearing my spouse’s general inquiry about my work, naturally had to dish out her two cents’ (pence’) worth.
“I’m sure your letter will be a mildly amusing program of doubtful value, limited virtue, problematic and debatable. In lieu bringing me tinned sardines or a plastic snow-globe encapsulating some European city that I will never visit, just please remember to bathe frequently,” she dispensed flatly into the receiver, the bell on her collar jingling as she quickly skipped away in search of better grazing grounds.
As the conductor announced our approach of Wien Hauptbahnhof, I prepared to say goodbye, but in the background of the other end of the line I could hear the wild parrots of Hampstead whinging merrily. These are actually rose-ringed parakeets that dapple London’s residential skyline with their swooning greens and yellows. Originating from Africa or Asia, their ancestors likely migrated (unwillingly) to Britain in the mid-19th century. You either pass a lifetime in London without noticing them, or you find them natural to your everyday homeostasis, like me.
This flock has loudly declared full squatter’s rights in prime London real estate—in a towering English oak that grazes our kitchen window. But for all legitimate reasons, Britain, these sub-tropical immigrants have successfully made this cold perch on your cragged island their home.
***
M. René Bradshaw is Editor-at-large, U.K. at Asymptote. She was born in California and lives in London.
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