Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold The Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, is a novelist and immigrant. She tells an important story about her German publisher. I like it because it is such an international story.
Imbolo is from Cameroon and midtown NYC and Rhinebeck, New York. “My German publisher [once] asked me, “What is your second book going be about?” I said, “It has to do with characters fighting against environmental degradation in their community.” And he said, “Just remember to keep it about the characters.”
We just received nine new members in my New York City Congregation. They are all “characters.” One lives in San Francisco, one lives in Minneapolis, a few live in New York and five were born outside the United States. Zoom has discombobulated us and recombobulated us. Like many congregations these days, we have enjoyed the return of our diaspora.
These two experiences – Imbolo and her German advisor and my congregation’s newcomers coming in – led me to a wonder. Are people more defined by their national origin or their “characters?” Most of the people I really know are characters. They are odd. They are idiosyncratic. No one is the same. Still, they quote their Enneagram number with vigor. They also love to tell you their horoscope, as though Aries explains how flighty they are, or Gemini explains how split they can be counted on to be. I suppose it is something about the grandness of the human genome, and the way it all opens up in the aurora borealis, especially after we die, and we are no longer working on individuation. Folk wisdom often says we are more alike than different. But then what happens to national origin or border? What then is an “immigrant?”
The United States is a country born in motion. About 2 % of the population is native to America. The rest of us are like bag ladies. We carry a tattered bag. We came over or up or were dragged. We continue to be a people in motion. The average American moves 11 times in a lifetime. I thought I had moved a lot – and it turns out that I am below average.
I don’t know how you feel about your luggage, but I do know how I feel about mine. I join most people in saying, “I don’t like living out of a suitcase.” No one ever says, “I love moving.” And what about storage units? What are they? Aren’t they places where we pay to put things we can live without?
Migration or immigration motion is different than physical motion. But is it without suitcases? We take the past with us, our triggerable histories of suffering and joy. We take other interpretive frameworks, with us to whatever our new neighborhood is. One of the great tragedies for people who have been so unjustly deported in recent years is that they had to go back to a country they don’t really know at all. They may not even speak the language. Often the nation to which you immigrate is more home to you than the one you left ever was.
Jesus gave remarkable advice about what to take on either a physical or spiritual journey. “Take nothing for your journey with you.” Does that mean our internal journey requires only a cane? All characters, if lucky enough to live long, get a bit lame. Is there any universality to wanting an unencumbered journey and never really getting one?
My wonder wanders. Which part of our character helps us be at home, while loving, at home while living out of a suitcase, at home wherever we are, even in a detention center? Is spiritual strength a capacity to live as a “character free” person? Which part of our character is baggage or nationality free? Which parts are bound to place and home and origin story? When people ask us “where are you from,” what’s an honest answer?
Which character will fight environmental degradation the best? Will it be someone defending their tribe, their place, their neighborhood, their home? Or their world? Whose world is it anyway? Do cosmopolitans ever really have a home? Or “native” land?
And does this kind of character questioning matter? I guess I’ll have to ask my German “publisher.” Or whoever advises me on how to write my next chapter.
Rev. Dr Donna Schaper is senior minister at Judson Memorial Church, co-founder of New York City New Sanctuary Movement and Bricks and Mortals: RemoveThePews.com. Ashe is the author of 35 books, most recently, I Heart You Francis: Love Letters from a Reluctant Admirer. She also grows a good tomato.
