"A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for living in the same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
--Or also living in different places." -- James Joyce, Ulysses
Bloom's equivocal answer to the question "What is a nation?" is vexing. It is vague and impractical, but it is about the best I can do. So for this week I have set the question of nationhood aside, to handle something more personal: where am I from, and what makes me from there?
I was about six years old, and my mother was going through our old documents. Birth certificates, savings bonds, a few medical records, and mostly I was very bored. However, I had agreed to help, and I was determined to tough it out. I wanted to act grown-up, and as far as I could tell acting grown-up meant tolerating extremely boring things. We had just finished sorting the savings bonds, when she pulled out the gem: a certificate from Ellis Island. Not a proper record, but a print sold to tourists. The sort of thing that looks official enough to con the descendants of immigrants out of $20. To my six-year-old eyes it was a priceless artifact; a material connection to a family history that I didn't really understand.
The certificate had our family name, Lemke, some information about my great grandfather, and our nation of origin Bessarabia. This would definitely beat out Michael O.J.'s squirrel skull at show-and-tell. I ran to our globe (we had a computer, but we were not yet online), and I searched for Bessarabia. I knew my Grandmother spoke German, so I searched around Germany first, but to no avail. I combed through Europe, but it just wasn't there; this was a somewhat easier task than it would be today, because our globe still showed a united USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. I consulted with my mother, and she didn't know exactly where it was, but suspected that it was probably hidden in the Eastern Bloc. However at school, even the most up-to-date globes lacked a Bessarabia. Where had it gone?
Having lived through Soviet dissolution, I was dimly aware that a country could break up, but I thought there would be evidence. No one I knew had heard of Bessarabia, though admittedly my first grade class was pretty shaky on European geography. This was not helped by the fact that none of the maps seemed to agree, and the borders seemed to change regularly. Some years later, I worked out that Bessarabia was part of modern Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania, and my grandmother and her parents had likely left via Tiraspol or Akkerman (now called Bilhorod-Dnistovskyi) in modern Transnistria and Ukraine respectively.
You may have noticed that I threw in another country there
Transnistria is a semi-autonomous region of Moldova.
Transnistria is a an independent country that borders Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Transnistria is a Russian puppet state, bolstered exclusively by Russian arms in exchange for Russian access to oil and natural gas pipelines.
It very much depends on who you ask.
This is what sparked my interest in breakaway regions, balkanization, and frozen conflict zones. It begins with something important to who I am; where am I from? If the answer to that question is a place that no longer exists, what does that say of my heritage? Perhaps the just the names and the sovereignty changed, but the place is still culturally my "homeland."
What do I know of my culture?
My Grandma was a very sweet, very religious woman. My mother tells the story of nearly having our family ejected during a stay with her, because my father rented a movie that contained a sex scene. Religion also colored the cuisine we received from her, because she was an Adventist, the recipes were mostly from her peers in the church. Seventh Day Adventists are predominantly vegetarian, so the blood sausage, meaty cabbage wraps, and beef-stock soups were all abandoned in the old country. Though I did not know it at the time, one thing carried through, a love of corn. To this day, I will pour hot milk over day-old cornbread and relish the resulting gruel. Corn bread and mamaliga (that is Romanian polenta) is a foodstuff I can point to and say "this is my heritage." Gruel, war, and oppression are the birthright of all eastern Europeans.
Maize as the gruel-staple of choice supplanted millet in the 18th century, under Hapsburg rule. Like much of South Europe, my people cast off the Ottoman yoke, to exchange it almost immediately for an Austro-Hungarian one. Maria-Theresa, as a part of her benevolent despotism, encouraged the replacement millet with maize to combat the famine that was endemic to the region. Millet crops produce big yields, but it is prone to molding in the field and produced boom and bust years. Maize was a life-saver, and it has become a central feature of many Southern European cuisines. As with the tomato in Italy, paprika in Hungary, or the potato in Ireland, maize, and particularly mamaliga has become a staple of cuisine in the Romanian-speaking world.
Grandma, though, was abandoned by her husband when my mother was about seven. She had three children to feed, clothe, and raise, and mamaliga takes at least 40 minutes of stirring, and perhaps an hour of attention all together. Something practical for a housewife became an extravagance. Fortunately, America had the answer:
The recipes are simple and straightforward, but pretty different. The polenta was a ton of work, the water for it began to boil at about the same time as the muffins went in the oven, but they were out of the oven and fully cooled before the polenta was even halfway done. It's no easy job either, the polenta needs to be stirred constantly, whereas the muffins take hardly any mixing at all. The polenta was much easier to clean up though. I tasted them myself, and the jiffy muffins were much less pleasant than I remembered; more like a cupcake than a cornbread. The polenta, by contrast was chewy and rich, and much more to my taste. Fortunately, there were two children on hand to consult. Finn is 11 and Stella is 6, and they are both fairly adventurous eaters, as kids go. While both corn products went down pretty well, the corn muffin was a runaway favorite.
This is what sparked my interest in breakaway regions, balkanization, and frozen conflict zones. It begins with something important to who I am; where am I from? If the answer to that question is a place that no longer exists, what does that say of my heritage? Perhaps the just the names and the sovereignty changed, but the place is still culturally my "homeland."
What do I know of my culture?
My Grandma was a very sweet, very religious woman. My mother tells the story of nearly having our family ejected during a stay with her, because my father rented a movie that contained a sex scene. Religion also colored the cuisine we received from her, because she was an Adventist, the recipes were mostly from her peers in the church. Seventh Day Adventists are predominantly vegetarian, so the blood sausage, meaty cabbage wraps, and beef-stock soups were all abandoned in the old country. Though I did not know it at the time, one thing carried through, a love of corn. To this day, I will pour hot milk over day-old cornbread and relish the resulting gruel. Corn bread and mamaliga (that is Romanian polenta) is a foodstuff I can point to and say "this is my heritage." Gruel, war, and oppression are the birthright of all eastern Europeans.
Maize as the gruel-staple of choice supplanted millet in the 18th century, under Hapsburg rule. Like much of South Europe, my people cast off the Ottoman yoke, to exchange it almost immediately for an Austro-Hungarian one. Maria-Theresa, as a part of her benevolent despotism, encouraged the replacement millet with maize to combat the famine that was endemic to the region. Millet crops produce big yields, but it is prone to molding in the field and produced boom and bust years. Maize was a life-saver, and it has become a central feature of many Southern European cuisines. As with the tomato in Italy, paprika in Hungary, or the potato in Ireland, maize, and particularly mamaliga has become a staple of cuisine in the Romanian-speaking world.
Grandma, though, was abandoned by her husband when my mother was about seven. She had three children to feed, clothe, and raise, and mamaliga takes at least 40 minutes of stirring, and perhaps an hour of attention all together. Something practical for a housewife became an extravagance. Fortunately, America had the answer:
 |
| A box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix |
Just the image is instant nostalgia; I can taste the muffins from here. This is as much my heritage as mamaliga, if not more. I decided that I'd had enough pondering the intricacies of material culture, and the time had come to do some practical research. I bought some polenta and a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix, and I roped the children in my house into a taste test.
The recipes are simple and straightforward, but pretty different. The polenta was a ton of work, the water for it began to boil at about the same time as the muffins went in the oven, but they were out of the oven and fully cooled before the polenta was even halfway done. It's no easy job either, the polenta needs to be stirred constantly, whereas the muffins take hardly any mixing at all. The polenta was much easier to clean up though. I tasted them myself, and the jiffy muffins were much less pleasant than I remembered; more like a cupcake than a cornbread. The polenta, by contrast was chewy and rich, and much more to my taste. Fortunately, there were two children on hand to consult. Finn is 11 and Stella is 6, and they are both fairly adventurous eaters, as kids go. While both corn products went down pretty well, the corn muffin was a runaway favorite.
So there it is, a little window into my grandmother's world; the children prefer the corn muffin and it is much easier to cook. She also probably hadn't considered that her 21st century grandchild would get all sentimental about "heritage" and wax romantic about mamaliga as a cultural connection to the past. As with so many people who are just trying to get by, food to her was just food, and the chief measure of its cultural significance was price per pound. I cannot tell you where my grandmother was from, or what it means to have a culture or a country, but I can tell you one thing: tomorrow morning I will form a gruel with the leftover cornbread, and honor her memory.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1984. Print.
Very good post. It even made me nostalgic for your past :-) It would be fun to design a survey based on this topic--difficult, but fun.
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