Essay from The Literary Review

The World's Skin

Erica Johnson Debeljak

When I was growing up in the America of the nineteen-sixties, I had little concrete notion of anything outside my immediate surroundings. I look back now and wonder if my obliviousness was a symptom of the times or of the country in which I was reared or simply of a superficial approach to geography in the San Francisco public school systems. In all likelihood, it was both a combination of these things and one of the more pleasant side-effects of the egocentric condition known as childhood. Whatever the reason, I conceived of the world in one of two ways depending on the expansiveness of my mood. When feeling adventurous, I thought of it as a vast borderless realm only waiting to be discovered. When feeling provincial—which was most of the time—I saw it as a quaint and manageable place just about the size of a residential urban neighborhood with a relevant population not considerably more than the student body of the nearest elementary school. From time to time, I heard foreign languages spoken on the city buses I rode through Chinatown and the Mission district. I took up Spanish as an elective in junior high school, but it was after all just an elective. Only one language was required in the middle-class environment where I grew up; the Babylonian roar of multiculturism hadn’t yet sounded even a distant murmur. At some point, I became aware of the fact that my ancestors—indeed practically everyone’s ancestors—had sailed across an ocean to come to this continent from another. But preoccupied as I was with my own emerging self, this information struck me as beside the point: ancient history. With the exception of the great divide presented by the Pacific Ocean visible from my mother’s bedroom window, I had no real sense of frontiers. The Nevada state line, the only border I crossed in my youth, hardly counted. I never bothered to get a passport until I was approaching my eighteenth birthday and ideas of travel and romance began to filter in with the afternoon fog. Up until then, I took the basic conditions of my existence and identity for granted.
          This is no longer the case. For not only did I leave behind the metaphorical continent of childhood but that tenuous desire for travel and romance ended up crowding out most other desires. The upshot was that I wound up marrying a man from one of the smallest and newest nations on earth and so also left behind the vast physical continent that is America. Today I live in a complex land of jigsaw puzzle borders where absolutely nothing is taken for granted. The borders of the country that I now call home changed in 1918, 1921, 1938, 1945, 1991 and are still hotly contested. Today, I—and my three children as well—carry not one passport but two: American and Slovenian. We keep our traveling documents always at the ready for we are never certain if, on any given day, the most direct route from point A to point B within our small country might take us past a check point and into one of the four nations that border Slovenia. During our annual winter vacation at the spas on the Slovenian Adriatic coast, for example, we might wake up one morning and decide that, rather than spending another day in the therapeutic saltwater baths, we will go to the Karst region to visit the birthplace of the famous white Lippizaner stallions. The quickest route, always desirable with small children, from the Slovenian coast to the Slovenian Karst involves entering Italy at the Krvavi Potok border crossing (a place name that translates, suitably enough given not too distant history, as Bloody Stream) and reentering Slovenia some twenty minutes to the north. Notwithstanding the delay to check passports, it is still faster than the inland route. Returning to the seaside after a day at the Lippizaner stables, we often take a detour to the tiny Slovenian village of Piran and march up to the castle ramparts to watch the sun go down. At the top, I instruct my children to turn their heads slightly to the right of the glowing ball that is slipping behind the rim of the horseshoe shaped bay of Piran. Those little lights just starting to twinkle on the hills over there, I tell them, shine from the Italian port city of Trieste. Then I direct their gaze about thirty degrees to the left of the setting sun. That landmass over there, I continue, marks the beginning of the Istrian peninsula which is part of Croatia. Not long ago such proximities thrilled me. There was a time when crossing borders was still a novelty.
          For nearly ten years, I have made my home in the city of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which was once a member republic of the former Yugoslavia. I moved here in 1993 shortly after the ten-day war of independence against the Yugoslav National Army and in the midst of the much longer and bloodier wars that marked the secession of the Croatian and Bosnian republics from the Yugoslav federation. Though Ljubljana escaped the greatest horrors of ethnic warfare and fratricide, it is nevertheless a city where most inhabitants could glance down the list of names in the nursery school where my children spend their days and make the following accurate conclusions: Azra Bažic is a Bosnian Muslim girl; Tjaša Radovan is a Slovenian girl; Janez Novak, Slovenian boy; Velidon Bytyqi, Albanian Kosovar; Dušan Djordjević, Serb; and so on and so forth. Paradoxically, when I first arrived, many people insisted that before the war they hadn’t the foggiest idea who was a Croat, who a Serb, who a Muslim. Naturally, given how keenly each is now aware of every other’s ethnic and religious identity, I didn’t believe them.
          Just as naturally, I began my own gradual process of balkanization. Donning the cloak of stranger in a strange land, voluntary exile, spouse in a bicultural marriage, acquiring my second language and then my second nationality, I stopped taking the basic conditions of my existence for granted. The infinite and undifferentiated ether extending between the shining seas of childhood evaporated and I was left to peel away the layers of my identity in the wider world, to discover who I am, what makes me who I am. As I gave birth to one after another of my hybrid children, I began to keep a sharp eye on them as well. Day in day out, I monitored who they were becoming. Did they favor one language over another? Were they bursting with my American optimism or did they peer out at the world with their father’s melancholy Central European gaze? Did they feel a stronger affinity for Kekec, the barefoot Slovenian shepherd boy who scrambles down into stony ravines to collect herbs that will give sight to his blind friend? Or did they hanker for more muscle-bound heroes who, in pursuit of hightech adversaries, zipped across the surface of the planet shooting lasers from an array of shining armaments?
          All parents pay at least casual attention to what kind of people their children are becoming but their observations generally focus on such nebulous concepts as intelligence and personality. My observations focus on the basic building blocks of identity—language, ethnicity, nationality—things that most parents take for granted. This ongoing surveillance has become an obsession. I measure the degrees of my children’s identity the way a hypochondriac parent might measure their rising and falling body temperature. This is what I have learned.

2.
          In the beginning, my children were literally part of me. Because they were extensions of my own body, I experienced them first sensually: as queer delightful movements inside my stomach, then as squirming lumps laid on top of my stomach, downy skulls beneath my fingers, milky sweet breath. My first child, a daughter who we named Klara, was born in early March 1995 and her first days on earth coincided with the last days of a very cold Central European winter. Snow blanketed the streets of Ljubljana when she was born so I spent the first two weeks of her life holed up with her in the hospital and then in our apartment: feeding her, changing her, sleeping and stirring with her. I distinctly remember the sensation I had, after that brief period of hibernation, walking the single block to the store alone. As I passed through the chill bright air, I felt liberated and light and, at the same time, as if one of my limbs had been suddenly amputated. I made my purchases and rushed home to my missing limb.
          Perhaps because Klara was both my first child and an extremely easy infant, or perhaps because she was, like me, a girl, I hardly noticed her gradual separation and independence from me. In fact, it was not until she was nearly three years that I underwent the shocking realization that her existence was not my existence, her identity not my identity. This realization occurred when she related an unremarkable nursery school experience. She told me that she had been standing in the bathroom stall with Azra Bažic and Tjaša Radovan and that the girls had swapped hair ribbons. In a single vivid and startling instant, I envisioned the three small girls conferring between the tile wall and the low toilet bowl, holding up the colored ribbons, exploring the frayed edge of one, the embroidered nubbles of another. Cascading past that first imagined scene came a torrent of my own unremarkable childhood memories: strolling loose-limbed across an asphalt schoolyard with Heidi Metcalf and Peddie Kaliski, making furtive preparations to share a cigarette with my sister, pressing down the lid on a tin box that contained one cigarette, one pack of matches and two sticks of peppermint gum. With a fierce jolt, I understood that just as I had occupied the center of my own existence, so too would Klara henceforth occupy the center of hers. Of course, unbeknownst to me, she always had.

3.
          The knowledge of my existential alienation from my children came faster and easier with my second and third, who were both sons. I sensed from the outset that their existence, their formative experiences—being boys—would be distinct from mine. This intuition came early on, perhaps on the first blurry night when, fumbling with a diaper, a stream of urine arched up and hit me in one of my half-closed eyes. Not only was I female and therefore unable to perform the same trick with my more obscure equipment but I had also been raised almost exclusively among females, feminist females at that. Despite that upbringing—or perhaps because of it—I had not always been convinced of the essential difference of the male. I had once believed that, in spite of external dissimilarities, deep down we were all the same.
          Like most women, I do of course recall occasions in my youth when I had stepped off a city bus or strode along a busy avenue and had been greeted by a chorus of young men hooting—“Hey mama! Come to daddy!” Bemused, I had watched early rap videos in which the male singers gently tugged at their crotch after every other line. Back then, I assumed these mannerisms to be nothing more than macho affectation, something men had learned to do in order to impress or intimidate the women who crossed their paths. Not until I observed my own infant sons—Simon and Lukas— did I realize that, in fact, this was something that men had been doing since the cradle and that, contrary to my assumptions, the men who didn’t do it as adults had had to learn not to. I didn’t teach my sons to make the explosive blasts of specific kinds of artillery, to make the sharp tsinging sound of a sword slicing through the air, to lie dead on the kitchen floor after a pitched battle. These gestures arose from them as naturally as the arc of urine during diaper changes. Once these offspring of mine sprang off of me, they landed first in their identities as boys and girls.

4.
          Reaching beyond the boundaries of their own skin, the next role my children occupied was their place in our admittedly traditional family: mother, father, daughter, son, baby. Again I more observed this phenomenon than actively promoted it. I cannot say whether my children would have fastened on to a different family paradigm if I had been divorced or if my partner were a lesbian. But each of them, before reaching their second birthday, not only adopted the prototype of the nuclear family and grafted their emerging identity onto it but they aggressively exported it to others: to people, animals, fruit, inanimate objects. In my toddlers’ lexicon, a raisin was a baby and a prune, its mommy. Single or childless friends were a sad and peculiar phenomenon, something akin to circus freaks.
          I remember, on one of our many family visits to California, standing jet-lagged before a dimly lit glass case at the San Francisco Aquarium. I was staring at what looked like a fantastic translucent sculpture opening and closing its gelatinous layers like an umbrella. My weary eyes followed the thing as it swam, an electrified creature in outer space, and for an instant I lost my moorings. I forgot whether it was day or night, forgot where I was, who I was. Suddenly, a small hand tugged at my shirt and broke into my reverie. “Is that a mommy or a daddy?” asked the shrill piping voice. “It’s a jellyfish,” I replied, the childish inquiry bringing me abruptly back to reality. And then I added with a touch of cruelty: “It’s asexual; it makes babies all by itself.” But the child beside me pointed at the animal in the case and mournfully persisted: “But is that one a mommy or a daddy?” “It’s both,” I relented and led the children—already resistant to transgressions of identity—to the next hall where the nursing baby seals and other mammals were housed.

5.
          Up until this point my children’s early definition and awareness of themselves differed little from my own experience or, for that matter, from most other people’s. Language—absorbing two languages practically from the womb if we are to believe the pregnancy literature—was the first factor that set them apart. Duality and difference existed within the epidermis of their own family and inexorably seeped into their beings. Just as adults who learn a second language have two distinct personas, so too do children. My husband, for example, is verbally fearless in his native Slovenian, ranging wildly from colloquial vulgarities to multi-layered cultural references. In his otherwise excellent English, he becomes cautious and pedantic. Similarly, my children are more willful and sassy in Slovenian because they learn it from their friends. In English, they communicate mostly with adults and their locutions are unnaturally correct. They stumble over standard childish English; grasping for a second piece of candy, they cry out “I also! I also!” rather than “Me too!”
          That being so, the reputation of children as linguistic geniuses is largely deserved. They learn words after one repetition, expertly emulate accents, mutter drowsily in Slovenian or English depending on the language of the dreams unfurling behind their sleeping brows. But whether children are monolingual or bilingual, language is nevertheless one of the first steps they make on the way toward clannishness and exclusion. It is simply not true that children would just as soon communicate non-verbally as verbally. Once able to speak, my children avoided Italian-speaking children in a Trieste playground as fastidiously as I might have avoided their parents at a cocktail party. Though it might be easier to scramble up a jungle gym than to discuss nuances of European politics without a common language, children also tend to gravitate toward their own. Language, as a practical matter, divides people into groups, into extended families, and children feel this as soon as they speak and become aware that others speak differently.

6.
          Growing up in America, race—not language or nationality—was the flash point of my youth and I remain attuned to it, feeling a burden of residual guilt and sensitivity. I watched with interest how my children, brought up in Ljubljana where spotting a person of color is an experience akin to spotting a grizzly bear in my native California, would react to racial difference. Was it an aspect of identity that would resonate with them despite the fact that they were being reared in a society where it is largely absent? In the event, I discovered that difference in skin color does exercise a certain fascination on young children but it is one that falls into the same developmental sweep as comprehending that one ball is green and one is red.
          Arriving at the San Francisco Airport when Klara was three, I had to practically pin the toddler down in the baggage claim area. She whipped her finger round, crying out: “That one’s black! That one’s black!” I held her arms to her sides and hissed at her to stop pointing and that the correct term is African-American, except for the last person she indicated who looked like he was probably Filipino. But this failed to stifle her growing enthusiasm. Baggage in hand, I rushed her toward the exit where my little blond daughter shrieked at the uniformed customs official: “You’re black too!” As I fumbled for our passports and customs forms, the woman intoned: “What did she say?” I smiled sheepishly: “She said you’re black.” The official slowly initialed each of the blue-and-white forms before fixing her gaze on the child: “Well,” she said, “you are a very observant young lady. I am black,” and that confirmation sent Klara on a frenzied path of racial typing that didn’t end until our return one month later to homogenous Slovenia.
          But it was my brother’s family that offered the greatest enlightenment on this subject. He also lives in Europe, in Germany, and is married to an African-American woman. They have two daughters, Kelsey and Olivia, both born in Germany and attending German public schools. The girls’ rooms are populated with black dolls and white dolls. They have a video of Snow White starring Whitney Houston. On a visit to their home, our two families sat around the kitchen one evening talking about popular music, a subject about which I am woefully ill informed. The conversation turned from Britney Spears to Toni Braxton, MTV’s comeback sensation of the time. Trying to figure out who she was, I asked no one in particular: “Is she black?” No answer. I repeated the question and finally ten-year old Kelsey spoke up: “What do you mean black?”
          Dumbfounded, I found myself casting about for what, after all, should be a straightforward definition. Using the term African-American would be a cop-out when speaking to a child residing in Europe who felt more German than American, let alone African. Should I put forward the reprehensible one-drop theory according to which one drop of black blood makes a person entirely black? In the end, I could find no sensible response. Germany and Europe as a whole are far from models of unbigoted liberalism. If Kelsey’s mother were Turkish or Yugoslav, she would no doubt have been aware of her otherness long before she could write her name. All the same, I was amazed how, deprived of context, stripped of relevance, a facet of identity could slumber so deeply within a person.

7.
          And what of the national borders that were absent in my youth yet criss-cross back and forth through my children’s? What of the lines tattooed across the world’s skin? Do these delineations—so dense and complicated on European soil—carry special meaning for my children who were issued passports in the first weeks of their lives, who in their early years crossed more time zones than they had teeth, who flew halfway round the globe long before they could walk halfway across a room? One morning when he was not yet four years old, Simon rose early and the two of us sat at the kitchen table eating our breakfast in the still Ljubljana dawn. Taking advantage of the intimacy of the moment, I indulged my obsession to measure the temperature of my son’s identity. “How do you feel this morning?” I asked brightly. Then I leaned in a little closer and whispered covertly: “Do you feel more Slovenian or American?” He shot me a scornful look. He had no interest in such nonsense. But then he answered, by way of a question, as honestly and accurately as he could. “How does babica talk?” Babica is his Slovenian grandmother. “Slovenian,” I answered, a tad disappointed with the direction the conversation was taking. “That’s how I feel today,” the little boy stated matter-of-factly.
          It turns out that nationality, like race, is not terribly compelling to the young mind. It strikes them as abstract, arbitrary, meaningless. Language, being concrete and useful, fuses automatically with their emerging beings. Border crossings and time zones can be learned by children but they lay unconvincingly on top of the skin just as they lay on top of the earth. They don’t penetrate, or at least not right away. On the rare days when my children are feeling more American, they might ask me to call their American grandmother. At lunchtime, I tell them that it is the middle of the night in San Francisco and that she is sleeping. At dinner, I tell them to wait another hour, that she is just about to wake up. I grab two pieces of fruit from a bowl on the table and rotate the tangerine around the grapefruit showing how the sun is shining now on Slovenia, now on California. They listen somewhat blankly and then one of them grabs the world, peels off its skin and eats it.
          Watching my children grow, and monitoring the shades of my own identity as I shift from America to Slovenia, has convinced me that absorption in the immediacy of our surroundings, in our own neighborhood, is our natural, almost inescapable, condition. Empathy with and knowledge of the other is not. It is something we learn. We read about rain forests and black holes, about the thinning ozone layer hundreds of thousands of miles away or about refugees perishing just over the next hill, but these are things that remain outside of our skin, that are exogenous to us until they march into our own backyard. The accomplishments of the early thinkers—Ptolemy and Aristotle—who speculated that the world was round, that it continued beyond the next horizon, are all the more impressive when I realize that even today, after having collectively possessed this knowledge for centuries, after having personally seen the curve of the earth from the window of an airplane, I still step outside on a gray Ljubljana day and have difficulty imagining that the sun is glittering on a ski slope only a half-hour away. The triumph of these men was one of matter over mind—the triumph of an unknown and ultimately not very persuasive reality over the stubborn certainty of the mind’s immediate perceptions.

8.
          And so my children reach out beyond their immediate perceptions, cross the borders of their own skin, first into their own family, then into their own specific neighborhood and finally out into the world. As they become conscious of themselves and enter the world’s atmosphere, little concentric waves radiate outward and then back inward, ripples of the self. Girl, daughter, sister, white, Slovenian, American. Some of these identities penetrate the skin and become inseparable from it. Some slumber silently under the skin while others sneak up slowly and imperceptibly on the self. A Slovenian journalist recently asked me whether I consider myself Slovenian-American or American-Slovenian. Startling even myself, I responded not with a hyphenated hybrid but with a single word: American. Nationality—a quality of which I half disapprove, a quality which I hadn’t even noticed growing up and which my children don’t yet understand—had crept up behind me like a thief and now I find that I can’t rid myself of it.
          I would like to think of myself and my children as divers moving fluently through a serene environment, as slow-motion creatures swimming unhindered through liquid space. Sometimes, however, the world, in its forcefulness and dissonance, abruptly interrupts our progress. Then our layered selves seem more like clanging gizmos than organic forms. We become slot machines equipped with a series of colorful cards—cherry, banana, apple—that flip up and alternate behind a glass window. On an ordinary day, for example, a person who lived not far from the place where I live now might have revealed a face composed of four such cards—woman, mother, Bosnian, Yugoslav—until the extraordinary day that a knock came on the door followed by the announcement that Muslims were being gathered up and massacred. Then—jackpot!—the bells started ringing and another series of cards popped up—Muslim, Muslim, Muslim—even if that particular identity had only moments before been submerged deep inside the machine, invisible and unknown.
          The threatened card crashes forward instantaneously. It becomes all important and the self flees inward along the ripples of identity toward those which lay closest to the skin: woman who loves a man, mother who must protect her children, human being made of vulnerable flesh. Superfluous identities that yesterday dominated—Yugoslav and European—fall instantly by the way side, emptied of meaning. The same thing happened to the vast continent that is America on September 11, 2001 when a stunned people rushed out to buy flags that to many had been an utterly invisible part of their interior and exterior landscape only the day before. On a less catastrophic and more personal scale, the same thing could happen to my niece, Kelsey, if, for example, she went to college in the United States, fell in love with a boy only to overhear his best friend chiding him for going out with a nigger. Despite her nearly color-blind European upbringing, a sudden reshuffling of identity would ensue, an awakening, a betrayal. It is not enough to tinker with the malleable identities and attitudes of the world’s children; we must also change the world into which they dive or they might bump up against something hard and deadly and, as a consequence, become hard and deadly themselves.
          It seems odd that our universal identity as human beings has never been much of a unifier, has been, over the course of our history, almost entirely useless as a rallying cry. Odd because, after all, it is our humanity that lies at the very center. It is the stone from which the echoing ripples of identity emanate when it is dropped into the world. Surely, we sense our humanity even before we realize that we are girls or boys, black or white, American or Slovenian, Muslim or Christian. Why then is it ultimately so uninspiring and ineffectual? Why is it such a flaccid common denominator that it almost never rouses us to great collective action? I think it is so for the simple reason that, like the undifferentiated ether of childhood, we take our humanity for granted. It is never really at risk: neither intolerance nor persecution nor death can take it away from us. And finally the humanity we sense in the womb is like an internal response to the world’s skin. The world is somewhere out there just as our humanity is somewhere in here but neither is viscerally felt. We know about the many dispossessed and powerless people on this planet, about the disappearing rain forests, the melting polar ice caps. And perhaps these distant and unseen realities pose a threat to us, but wherever we are in the world, we step outside and breathe the air and watch a river flow by. We remain absorbed in the immediate. We do not feel the world’s skin as our own. To do so might be one of the last goals worth striving for.