Nil by Mouth

As 16h rolled around today

As 16h rolled around today (10am EST), i noticed the relative emptiness of my AIM buddylist. Naturally my first thought was that all my slacker friends had coincidentally overslept on the same day. That thought is pretty well within the realm of possibility. Later on today i saw my calendar and realized it was MLK jr. day.

A coupla days ago darleen and stephen and i listened to an old This American Life episode on Americans in Paris, and one of the segments was a really good one on a black American, Janet McDonald, who has permanently moved to Paris and her thoughts on the perceptions of race here as opposed to the good ol’ USA. It is a really good one. Even though you should brave real player and listen to it yourself, to sum up she talked about how here in Paris she’s seen as an American. Whereas in the States she is seen as black, first and foremost. As white as i am, i can concur that living here is the only time i’ve really felt like an American. But when i actually give it some thought, it’s not so much that i feel like an American. It’s really more that i am consistently reminded that i am *not French*. And all of these group labels, whether race, nationality, social descriptions are not really about what one is, but rather about what one isn’t. It takes a city of frenchies to make me feel American. It takes being the only white girl at a party to make me a white girl. It all is much more acute when we talk about race in the United States however; The history is so painful and the politics far from being resolved. In a white country, white is nothing; and black is black. It’s easy to see from any random conversation. Race becomes a descriptive adjective (without any racial meaning persay) only when the person is non-white.

Do French people here feel specifically French? I will have to ask around. Of course in Europe countries are much closer together and share more history, thus the need to define oneself against another group is much more present than in the States. I would imagine anyway. I was aware of being an outsider from all these groups at a really early age. Spending a formative early portion of my childhood in the whitest suburb ever, Orange County California, as an immigrant and a Jew had the potential to be destructively isolating. But my first grade self assimilated into the narrow society of suburban American elementary school children with a vengeance. This included consciously abandoning any connection to either my Turkish or Jewish culture. In a way it was even sort of fun. I would make up entire new histories for myself every so often. Sometimes i was born in the local hospital in Irvine. Sometimes it was names of hospitals i heard on daytime television. I don’t know why but we kids were obsessed with pointing out the hospitals we were born in. Once i said it was in Minnesota because i had just learned how to spell that word. I liked to say i was Roman Catholic because i thought just saying those big words made me seem refined and smart. Luckily we moved a lot so i could lie with impunity. Plus kids have either short memories or just short attention spans. No one ever caught me in my fabricated history.

This also all coincided with the years in which i was changing my name constantly. The name on my birth certificate is Nil Yvette Hillel. None of these names now appears on any of my IDs, credit cards, checks, or correspondence. Now i call myself nil from time to time (thus the title of my blog). It’s neat to be in Paris with my family here who knows me as nil and calls me by that name. When i hear it, it’s a good feeling. Like there’s someone who knows me. Which is also odd, because my family here doesn’t know me *at all*. In some ways i’d like to have nil back, but the weird part is that the acceptance of my given name coincided with the fact that i kind of just stopped caring what people called me all together. Nil is good, neille is just as good.

I remember the feeling of listening to politicians on television talking about The Immigration Problem, which in California translates pretty directly into The Mexican Problem. But i remember the feeling of fear i would get at these speeches as a child. This feeling that a certain important They didn’t want me here. And then i precisely remember a moment as a freshman in college listening to a similar speech on tv in the lounge of my dorm. I listened and disagreed in my little liberal mind about whatever it was he was saying. And it struck me that this old fear was gone. I had completely assimilated. I was just like everyone else. Of course there were always the explaining-to-my-friends-where-i-was-born conversations. But those only came up once or twice in the course of the friendship. It was right about then too, when i was fitting in easily with whatever group i wanted to fit in with, that i made a pretty conscious decision that i’d stay out of groups as a rule. Which i have. I float on the edges of certain circles, removing myself if i ever feel like i’m getting even slightly swallowed up in them. And it suits me just fine.

Even amidst the recent patriotic frenzy, i’m not entirely comfortable being described as an American. As with all of us, it’s a lot more complicated than that. But i recognize that this description is just another way of saying Not French, and hell if i can argue with that!

• Jan 21