Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home / Edition 1

by Nina Glick Schiller

Overview

Combining history, autobiography, and ethnography, Georges Woke Up Laughing provides a portrait of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States that illuminates the phenomenon of long-distance nationalism, the voicelessness of certain citizens, and the impotency of government in an increasingly globalized world. By presenting lively ruminations on his life as a Haitian immigrant, Georges Eugene Fouron-along with Nina Glick Schiller, whose own family history stems from Poland and Russia-captures the daily struggles for survival that bind together those who emigrate and those who stay behind.
According to a long-standing myth, once emigrants leave their homelands-particularly if they emigrate to the United States-they sever old nationalistic ties, assimilate, and happily live the American dream. In fact, many migrants remain intimately and integrally tied to their ancestral homeland, sometimes even after they become legal citizens of another country. In Georges Woke Up Laughing the authors reveal the realities and dilemmas that underlie the efforts of long-distance nationalists to redefine citizenship, race, nationality, and political loyalty. Through discussions of the history and economics that link the United States with countries around the world, Glick Schiller and Fouron highlight the forces that shape emigrants' experiences of government and citizenship and create a transborder citizenry. Arguing that governments of many countries today have almost no power to implement policies that will assist their citizens, the authors provide insights into the ongoing sociological, anthropological, and political effects of globalization.
Georges Woke up Laughing will entertain and inform those who are concerned about the rights of people and the power of their governments within the globalizing economy.

"In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was."-from Georges Woke Up Laughing

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822327912
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2001
Series:	American Encounters/Global Interactions Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Nina Glick Schiller is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire.

Georges Eugene Fouron is Associate Professor of Education at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Read an Excerpt

Georges woke up laughing

Long-distance nationalism and the search for home

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By Nina Glick Schiller

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-2791-0

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Chapter One

"At First I Was Laughing"

Georges woke up laughing.

In my dream I was young and in Haiti with my friends, laughing, joking, and having a wonderful time. I was walking down the main street of my hometown of Aux Cayes. The sun was shining, the streets were clean, and the port was bustling with ships. At first I was laughing because of the feeling of happiness that stayed with me, even after I woke up. I tried to explain my wonderful dream to my wife, Rolande. Then I laughed again, but this time not from joy. I had been dreaming of a Haiti that never was.

Georges stopped in his recollection, trying to come to terms with the sadness that had accompanied the joy of the dream. His dream would be familiar to immigrants from around the world whose days as well as nights are filled with memories of things past. In the pain of resettling in a new country, memory is often replaced by nostalgia. The economic deprivation or political repression that prompted migration frequently are put aside. In Georges's case, the dull ache of lifelong homesickness has become a part of him, although he had not confronted it fully until we began to write this book.

But for Georges and millions of contemporary immigrants, the longed-for homeland is not just a site of nostalgia; it is alocation of ongoing experience. These immigrants live their lives across borders in a social world that includes not only the daily difficulties they encounter in their new land but also the often harsh realities of their homeland. Yet many immigrants continue, as does Georges, to dream of a homeland in which "the sun was shining, the streets were clean."

Before I left Haiti at the age of twenty-five, I had other kinds of dreams. Back then, I used to dream about travel and of the good life in the United States. I could even see myself driving a beautiful car, and I read all about the latest models. But the funny thing was, not only hadn't I traveled, I had never even been in a car. It was only after I had made a home for myself in New York that I began to have sweet dreams of Haiti, even though the Haiti of my youth had actually been more nightmare than joy. The Duvalier dictatorship was clamping down on all dissent. Wearing an Afro, speaking out at school, or joining any form of organization could lead to beatings, imprisonment, torture, murder, and disappearance. Besides being afraid, I was constantly anxious about how I would get an education and find some sort of a job. I couldn't even take my next meal for granted, even though my father was the director of a technical school, and my mother did sewing and fancy embroidery to supplement his very small salary.

Thirty years later, Georges is one of the immigrants to the United States who can say he has achieved "the American dream." While his car is not the latest model and he still owes money on the loans he borrowed to support his own graduate studies and put his children through college, he has made a place for himself in his new world. At first he could only find factory work, although he had arrived in the United States with a college degree and an advanced certificate in international relations. Over the years, Georges succeeded in obtaining a doctorate in education and becoming a university professor. He married Rolande, a woman from his hometown, and together they bought a home and raised a family. His daughter is now a corporate lawyer and his son is a computer engineer.

Still, through all their struggles to make it in America, Georges and Rolande have kept their connections to Haiti. In effect, they live simultaneously in two countries, participating in personal and political events in both the United States and Haiti. Georges is among the uncounted but large number of immigrants who, since the 1960s, have settled in the United States yet maintain a link to home. By retaining such ties, they defy the widespread assumption in the United States that immigrants are uprooted people who leave behind home and country to transplant themselves in a new terrain. They have forced scholars and political leaders to begin to reconceptualize the nature of immigration, and to create a new vocabulary and theory to describe the transnational connections of contemporary immigrants. A scholarship of transnational migration has emerged that defines these new immigrants as "transmigrants."

Transmigrants live their lives across borders. They settle in their new country while sending money and gifts back to family, and buying property, building houses, and participating in the activities of a land they still call home. Wherever their networks extend, transmigrants remain tied to their ancestral land by their actions as well as their thoughts, even though they may not frequently or ever travel "home" again. To describe the networks of social relationships that link together an array of transmigrants and individuals in the homeland connected to each other through kinship, friendship, business, religion, or politics, we speak of transnational social fields. Transmigrants live within a transnational social field that extends into countries around the world in which family members or compatriots have settled. They live in two or more nation-states.

Not all immigrants become transmigrants. For a variety of reasons, some do indeed cut their home ties and remain out of touch with the life they left behind. While some immigrants abandon their connections in order to totally assimilate and live "the American dream," others do so because they lack even the minimal resources to fulfill their obligations to those they left behind.

Georges is a transmigrant, but his relationship to Haiti extends beyond the level of personal ties and commitments to a deep love of country. As part of this love, Georges struggles to restore the glory of Haiti so that his homeland and all Haitians can obtain respect, dignity, and justice among the peoples of the world. Efforts to ensure that one's homeland stands as an equal in the world of nations is a form of nationalism. In this sense, Georges is a long-distance nationalist, as are millions of immigrants from around the world who have settled in the United States yet remain committed to their native lands.

The Scope of Our Inquiry

This is a book about long-distance nationalism, and how and why both Georges and many other Haitians living abroad and in Haiti have become long-distance nationalists. Long-distance nationalism is a claim to membership in a political community that stretches beyond the territorial borders of a homeland. It generates an emotional attachment that is strong enough to compel people to political action that ranges from displaying a home country flag to deciding to "return" to fight and die in a land they may never have seen. In order to explain long-distance nationalism and its reemergence within a world of increasingly globalized economies, we look to the experiences of transnational migration and connection.

Georges, as a long-distance nationalist, believes that the population of his homeland, Haiti, stretches across the territorial boundaries of two states. Therefore, our discussion of long-distance nationalism must necessarily include an analysis of how long-distance nationalists experience and think about states, and how this differs from the ways in which, since World War II, people around the world have been taught to think about government and citizenship. This, then, is a book not only about long-distance nationalism but also about people's relationship to states. There has been a growing debate among scholars about whether or not states continue to be significant in the lives of immigrants, now that manufacturing processes, corporate investments, the movement of capital, and all forms of media extend across state borders. All these forms of border crossing, collectively labeled "globalization," seem to challenge the role and importance of nation-states and destabilize the meaning of national identities. Some scholars have begun to explore the implications of dual citizenship or the political practices of long-distance nationalists, interpreting these developments as signs and symbols of an era of globalization in which nation-states are of diminishing importance. They have not, however, substantiated their claims by providing ethnographies of transborder citizenries.

In Georges Woke Up Laughing, we explore the continuing significance of nation-states in a world where state borders do not confine flows of capital, labor, culture, or political emotion. We argue that the reemergence of long-distance nationalism reflects the tensions generated by the global reach of corporations and banks, continued political division of the world into separate and very unequal states, and longings of disempowered people to lead lives of dignity and self-respect. While scholars debate the significance of nation-states in the wake of globalization, most people in states continue to identify themselves, their political leaders, and the people and political leaders around the globe in terms of these nation-states.

We offer the Haitian experience of transnational migration to the United States and long-distance nationalism as entry points into a public discussion of a form of identity and political action that challenges the world as we know it. The Haitian experience is a case study and morality tale that speaks to what has become a central question today: At a moment in history when worldwide flows of media, fashion, and finance seem to mark the emergence of a global society, what motivates people to fight, kill, and die for ancestral homelands?

While this is a book about the ancestral loyalties of immigrants in the context of globalization, it is also about the histories and politics that link the United States to countries around the world. Haiti is one of the many countries in which the United States has maintained a strong military, political, and economic presence. The backdrop for so much of the contemporary immigration to the United States from places as disparate as the Philippines, Taiwan, El Salvador, Israel, and Haiti is the close association between these countries and the United States. The relationship between the United States and Haiti began shortly after Haitian independence in 1804-a tie made real for Georges when he found in the library of Yale University the correspondence of the U.S. consul posted in Aux Cayes, Georges's hometown, in 1824. The relationship continued through two periods of U.S. military occupation in Haiti: 1915-1934 and 1994-1996. The U.S. influence in Haiti today takes both direct and indirect forms. Currently, some U.S. officials serve as advisers to the Haitian government, while U.S. congress people and the U.S. embassy in Haiti make pronouncements that have the tone of directives. Thus, a book that examines the intimate ties linking Haitians in Haiti and the United States must explore the connection between Haiti and the United States as well. The lines of interconnection extend from the daily interactions between family members in the United States and those still in Haiti to the domain of U.S. foreign policy.

This is also a book about the United States because transmigrants, with all their home ties, do become a part of U.S. society. They work, pay taxes, participate in neighborhood activities, and read U.S. daily newspapers; they worry about crime in the streets, the proliferation of drugs, and the quality of the schools; and they become citizens and campaign for political office. Nevertheless, although many transmigrants strive for inclusion, they have daily experiences of exclusion from the U.S. mainstream. Migrants' stories, especially those told by newcomers who find themselves portrayed as racially inferior, rarely resemble the myths of immigrants succeeding solely because of their hard work and merit.

As a black man, Georges experiences racial differentiation as part of his life in New York. He weaves into his relationships to both Haiti and the United States what he has learned about who does and doesn't belong in America. Every time he is stopped by the police on his way home from work late at night because he is perceived to be an intruder in the white neighborhood that surrounds the university where he teaches, Georges learns once again that he is never fully an American. His "Americanness" is modified by his blackness; to be a "black American" is to live a life shaped by negative connotations and stereotypes. While Georges identifies with black American struggles, he cannot say that the United States is his home. Instead, he identifies with Haiti as his homeland, not only by celebrating his "roots" but also by maintaining ongoing connections "back home."

Georges's accounts of his reception in the United States are not foreign to the memories of settlement contained in Nina's family stories. Nina's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland who arrived in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Nina grew up surrounded by stories of migration. She felt that her second-generation parents were somehow different from other parents in the white Protestant suburban neighborhood of her childhood. Her father's mother, Rebecca Weissman Zaretsky, was coupled in an arranged marriage at the age of sixteen to a man from her hometown who was fleeing the czar's army and whose parents were afraid he would end up marrying a non-Jewish woman. Rebecca was sent to join him less than a year later and she never saw her parents or most of her siblings again. Nine years later, Rebecca's husband, Baruch, died in a flu epidemic, leaving her with three young children, little knowledge of the English language, and no means of support. It was Rebecca's history of rupture, loss, and struggle that engaged Nina's imagination as she was growing up. Nina's elementary school essay about the person she most admired was about Rebecca, and in high school, Nina wrote a history essay on immigration.

If Nina's family stories were about migration, loss, and adjustment, they were also about race. In 1931, Nina's father's brother Jack, although born in the United States and a U.S. citizen, was forced to seek a medical education in Germany. He had been denied admission to medical school in the United States because of quotas against Jews. Even though he was an "A" student at City College, Jack was not able to obtain all the opportunities open to "real" (meaning white) Americans. Then, in 1933, he fled the Nazi persecution of "the Jewish race" in Germany and finished his education in Switzerland, returning home just before World War II. After the war, Jack changed his last name from Zaretsky to Barnett. He was able to pass into U.S. mainstream culture as a successful surgeon using this guise, sustaining his claim to "whiteness" by becoming staunchly racist.

Our Vantage Point

Our stand on immigration has, of course, been shaped by who we are: Georges, a first-generation Haitian immigrant; and Nina, the grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants for whom questions of immigration and belonging in the United States had been a lifelong interest. Until the 1980s, both of us had understood our personal migration histories as variations on the story that is widely told about immigration to the United States. According to this tale, those who arrive in the United States must make a fundamental choice about where they belong. If you are an immigrant, you must uproot yourself and cut your loyalties to your former home and country so that you can fully embrace your new life, language, and nation. If you are not willing to do this, you remain an exile, waiting for the time you can return home.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. “At First I Was Laughing” 1

2. Long-Distance Nationalism Defined 17

3. Delivering the Commission: The Return of the Native 36

4. “Without Them, I Would Not Be Here”: Transnational Kinship 58

5. “The Blood Remains Haitian”: Race, Nation, and Belonging in the Transmigrant Experience 92

6. “She Tried to Reclaim Me”: Gendered Long-Distance Nationalism 130

7. The Generation of Identity: The Long-Distance Nationalism of the Second Generation 155

8. “The Responsible State”: Dialogues of a Transborder Citizenry 178

9. The Apparent State: Sovereignty and the State of U.S.-Haitian Relations 208

10. Long-Distance Nationalism as a Debate: Shared Symbols and Disparate Messages 238

11. The Other Side of the Two-Way Street: Long-Distance Nationalism as a Subaltern Agenda 258

Notes 275

Bibliography 298

Index 314

Editorial Reviews

"Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene Fouron do a masterful job of describing the full spectrum of factors shaping the experience of migration, ranging from utopian dreams of the home country to the hard reality that some states are only apparent states. This is a work of inspired ethnographic research, stunning scholarship, and creative grace and energy."--Karen McCarthy Brown, author of Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn

From the Publisher