Dearest reader, I must first begin by apologising. What follows is a rather disjointed, incoherent mess of some of the thoughts I’ve had over the past few weeks living in America for the first time as an exchange student. I’ve tried to assemble these into more structured subheadings but try as I might, I’m not sure I can find a cohesive narrative to string to together the experiences I’ve had since arriving. So reader, I apologise if this messy, hard to follow, incomprehensible. But that’s what America has been to me. In the short time I have been here, America has impressed me, it has devastated me and more often than not it has left me bewildered. I hope that amid all these anecdotes, observations and musings you will see that above all, America is possible to pin down. It is everything and it is nothing and it is somewhere in between. I hope that among all this mess I am able to capture that, even just a little bit.
Dreiser, Naturalism and Kylie Jenner Vending Machines
It is 7pm central time when my plane lands in Chicago’s O’Hare airport and the first thing I see after touching down on American soil is a Kylie Jenner lip kit vending machine. It stands just to the left of my gate, and I wonder if anyone has ever decided they desperately need an overpriced lip liner in the shade ‘Vixen’ just seconds before boarding an 8-hour flight.
In the two hours it takes me to wait for my connecting flight to Minneapolis, I get lost in the endless consumerist hellscape that is an American airport. Every store you could conceive of intercuts gates and information desks. Why wait for your flight when you can shop! Why relax when you can buy!
Weeks later in an American literature class we are discussing Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a novel (coincidentally set in Chicago) chronicling the rise of the department store and shopping culture in early 20th century America. Dreiser’s seminal work is an early example of literary naturalism; a movement that supposes forces such as capitalism, greed and endless consumption greatly shape how we see our world, desires and our lives. It makes me think of O’Hare and how something so innate to human life like travelling has been so fundamentally changed by consumer culture. We constantly repackage shallow desires as something new and shiny. Again and again, we fall into the same traps, the same endless cycles of attempting to quench a thirst we didn’t even know we had.
Fascism and Weak Coffee: 9am in America
It is disconcerting to have such incredible professors here at the university, who urge us to think deeply and challenge oppressive dominant narratives, to better ourselves and the world around us, only to have the vice president of this very country turn around and tell us that these people are the enemy. These institutions, which yes are discernibly imperfect, but nonetheless places of growth and knowledge and freedom, must be “honestly and aggressively attacked”, Vance goads America.
The day after Trump’s inauguration I look around my gender studies class, a space unsurprisingly comprised of a lot of gender non-conforming people. There is a sullen atmosphere. The conversations that ensue over the next hour are heartbreaking, pessimistic and above all undercut with a genuine palpable fear.
In a 9am class on Afropessimism, a student speaks on the growing rise of fascism in this country. It will get us all in the end, they say. It is a sobering thing to hear at that time in the morning, when the weak American coffee has not yet roused you fully from sleep. There is an unrelenting feeling, beyond the shiny facade of newness that America has offered me: that these are truly dark times.
I am stupid and I am dumb and I miss Glasgow
There are times here that I feel small and stupid. I sometimes feel like a baby, relearning to walk and talk and just generally exist. There is a foreignness in everything. Unfamiliar words and customs and movements. It is unbelievably disorienting to hear someone speak English and still feel lost as to what they are saying. It is a liminality that I simply cannot feel accustomed to. I wonder if Americans look at me and see a helpless, pitiful European. But then again, I’m probably thinking about myself too much. If Americans thought about others in the hypercritical sense I think about myself, they would be drowning in a desperate sadness. There are too many people here to even begin caring.
Other times I’m just sad. I’m sad when I see the tents of homeless people lining bridges by the highway in sub-freezing temperatures. I’m sad when I find out 25% of said homeless population in Minnesota is Native American. I’m sad when the cop at the safety demonstration asks us to imagine a shooter bursting through the door of our lecture theatre, a gun loaded with bullets to ripple through our bodies. I am sad when I look at the map on my phone and see the multitude of tiny blue pixels that make up the vast ocean that separates me from everything I have ever known.
Though everything here is new and exciting, even after just a week I feel the dull ache of homesickness pounding in my chest. I miss Glasgow. I miss Christie and Faris and Oliver. I miss my dad. I miss strong coffee and clear water and dumbbells that are in fucking kilograms. I miss free prescriptions and cops with no guns and cities that are easily traversable by public transport. I miss my home.
It is silly to write all of this, I think. To overthink the way I do and to chronicle something as mundane as homesickness as though it were some profound epic saga of the human experience. This is a very English major thing to do, I hear.
People have left their homes for as long as we have existed on this planet. America itself is a diasporic nation. I doubt the masses at Ellis Island cried into their pillows when they realised they couldn’t run to their dad for a hug when things all felt a little too much.
Or maybe they did. Idk.
Gumbo: The Modern Americana
But for all the great American spectacle and wonder, the greatest moments thus far have been the mundane.
I sit cross legged on a chair in the dining room of a college house in a neighbourhood called Como. This, my friend Max tells me, is where the freaks live. The queers, the artists, the stoners. My favourite people, I tell him. We gather around the table, eating bowls of gumbo cooked by his roommate Roger, a mullet toting Minnesotan who’d been sat on the sofa reading a book about Greek communism when I first entered the house. The remainder of the gumbo bubbles softly on the stove in the other room.
I look around the room at faces who have only ever known this life. I wonder if they know how strange I find it to experience their everyday, how weird I find their normal. I wonder if they know that all of this has only ever existed for me behind the dull glow of screens showing TV shows and films and news broadcasts. I nod along at food brands I’ve heard in dramas, drinks I recognise from sitcoms, chain stores I’ve heard of in romances. Hallmark movies, Walgreens, 7-Eleven. To me, this is a country of cultural references and semiotics. A landscape compromised of abstract symbols. Recognisable but never fully knowable. And yet suddenly the fictional has been made real, the intangible is within grasp. This is my life for now. I look around and take it all in.
It’s a strange place to be.
Author: Ailbhe Ní Mhurchú [she/her] [Instagram: @ailvhe]
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