EXPAT ALIENATION
What I Love Most About Being an Expat
Hint: it’s certainly not the accompanying cringe moniker
My apologies to all those who revel in, or are at least reconciled to, the term ‘expat’. It’s not a label I would choose for myself, with its icky connotations of pot-bellied golfing-capped accountants in a gated enclave in the Gulf, cannibalistically chucking a lobster on the barbecue. I’m happy enough to throw my lot in with all the other migrants of the world, relying on the forbearance of our host countries to leave us be.
But who am I kidding? As the white-skinned spawn of a wealthy first-world nation, I can scoot around the globe in a metaphorical Learjet of social and economic privilege. Truth is, I have more in common with that low-tax Gulf golf lobster than the Guatemalan guy who installed my FTTH last month, or the Romanians staffing the car valeting place down the road at all hours and in all weathers.
With that relative choice and freedom, though, come all kinds of first-world gripes and problems. I can easily find myself stressing and fretting about what is in the grander scheme relatively minor political events that will not in truth cost anyone their life or liberty. And stress and fret I do, synapses flickering from suicidal despair to homicidal rage, like a short-circuiting neon sign down some post-apocalyptic alleyway. I tear my hair, gnash my teeth and vent my spleen until there’s nothing left of me but a seething bucket of offal.
Or rather I did, until I discovered the joy of living in someone else’s country and learning to give rather less of a fuck. There is a cartoon by Max Beerbohm of Lord Byron Shaking the Dust of England From His Shoes, which I first saw many years ago without really understanding why it had made such an impression on me. And a line in the Dinosaur Jr song Feel the Pain that I have had going around my head as the most persistent, chronic earworm for the last twenty years:
I feel the pain of everyone,
Then I feel nothing
Together, they explain the solace I feel, the freedom from angsty acid reflux, through living anywhere but my homeland. Back in the UK, I would take every act of parliament, every general election result, and every governmental announcement as a personal affront if it deviated from my own intransigently liberal views. I would have been in a permanent froth-flecked rage for the last decade and a half since the halfwits were voted in by the quarterwits, and above all the last seven since the donkeys gulled the monkeys into flushing the UK out of the EU and round the U-bend.
I’m not sure my heart, or my family’s eardrums, would have taken it. But from here in Spain (though it could be anywhere)… The direction taken by the nation of my birth bugs me. Disgusts me, even. But somehow never actually enrages me. Now you could say that’s obvious, as I don’t have to live with the consequences. But in truth I never did. My own life continued to be just as relatively comfortable within the global 10%. I was rightly enervated instead by the fate of those less fortunate. To the point of numbness.
I feel the pain of everyone,
Then I feel nothing
Somehow the extra degree of separation I get from living abroad isolates and insulates me from feeling the rage of the politically disenfranchised. Despite being more disenfranchised than ever here. Or precisely because of that. And local politics doesn’t wind me up as it otherwise would either.
Clearly, Spanish government policy as to health, education, tax, and all the rest of it does have a direct impact on me here. But whether that is broadly the right policy, as has recently been the case, or absolutely not, as under despicable previous administrations I have dispassionately seen come and go over the years, it never leaves me irate.
That, for me, is the superpower of expat life. Not the food, the weather, the café culture, or the chilled-out beach bars. But the sense of muffled dislocation allows me to shrug life from my shoulders.
Es lo que hay.
¿Qué vamos a hacer?
Everything, though, comes at a price. The ferryman that brought me here all those years ago must have his coin. Thus far it has been nothing more than the gnawing guilt that I ought to care more. I ought to feel more righteous indignation at the damage done to both my native and adopted homelands by self-serving demagogues and the blinkered bigots who vote them into power, against even their own best interests.
I could live with that. On balance, I’d rather have an ulcer than an aneurysm. But the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children, as they say. I have my own kids now, who were born and have grown up here, and hold Spanish passports (unlike their dear old procrastinating dad, who still can’t face the paperwork, or is maybe fearful of starting to care a little too much if naturalised).
For them, it seems to be just a geographical accident, the blotch on the map where their parents happened to end up. A healthy attitude, in my view, and one which perhaps will save them from having to take cowardly flight as I did, to prevent their compatriots’ idiocies from driving them to distraction.
Nonetheless, they will be rolling the dice of democracy for themselves in a couple of years, and anxiously watching how the numbers come up in the early hours of a Monday morning. It will be their livelihoods being nudged one way or another by a contest on which they have scant influence. Myself, none at all.
And the ghosts of Cable Street loom large again. The populist rabble-rousers are on the march, here as elsewhere, exploiting the fear of an uncertain future, and firing up hungry bellies and empty heads with religious bigotry and atavistic jingoism. Might I not be pricked from my comfortable torpor by the voters of my host country choosing to strip my daughter of her full rights as a young woman, in sacrifice to their holy virgin, or force my son into flag-waving military service, to grease their half-cocked fantasy guns for them?
I’m not panicking yet. My nonchalant shrug has some life left in it, I believe. The ballot paper tigers are still just shadows in the jungle, as I sip my pink gin on the veranda, old chap. The natives aren’t all that restless. But maybe the charm of the expat’s life is beginning to lose its magic, just as I was settling into my carpet slippers. Maybe Don Logan will have one last caper for me after all.
