Stupid American

It has already been a week since a dragged my broken suitcase out of the London airport, but I am still trying to remember the rules of the city: 1) Do not smile at the people whose glances accidentally stumble into yours; 2) Do not compliment women on their clothes unless you actually want the glares; and 3) Cars do have the right to nearly run you over if you are in the street even a millisecond after the light changes. In addition, every day I rediscover the fact that I am tragically and hopelessly directionally challenged. For instance, as I traipsed about London alone on our first free day, I went left when I was supposed to go right, north when I was supposed to go south, and found myself retracing my steps through semi-familiar loops in the winding alley-ways. I am the worst kind of English major-poet-girl; when my nose is not stuck in a book, it’s stuck in the clouds. I notice patches of sky instead of street signs, the cheeky swagger of citified pigeons instead of traffic lights, the occasional book store branded “G-A-Y Is the Word” (like the one I am sitting in now) instead of left and right turns; and today, I directionally challenged my way into a pub full of reveling World-Cup fans whose chant of cheers I had heard from half-way down the street.

Following the sudden unction to live the “full London experience” and add my body to the swarming human energy, I tentatively wandered in to watch the long anticipated England-Germany “football” game. It was standing room only, and my feet were tired from walking all day; but as I studied the movement of the ball from one cleated foot to the next like squares in a game of dot-to-dot, I quickly found myself immersed in the competition, cheering the red jerseys right along with the rest of them. In the middle of a commercial break, however, I spotted an empty chair, and asked the “bloke” in the seat next to it if it was taken. My Yankee accent must have pushed the wrong button, because he snapped at me, “Can’t you see it’s reserved?” with that piping up-then-down British intonation at the end of his exclamation. Noticing the inconspicuous “reserved” tag I had missed before, I apologized quite profusely only to hear him muttering “Stupid American” as I walked away. I realized with a start that this revelry was not mine to partake, that I was just as foreign here as the word “soccer.”

I felt disturbingly out of place, and as I watched the countries battle their quarrels on the green “football” field, I found myself pondering the question of nationalisms. What does it mean that the world is parceled into borders and flags that fence in our perceptions of humanness? What does it mean that language and sports – both of which are necessarily communal – have become means of division? In London, I can walk into a pub and hear Rihanna, I can traipse down the street to a Starbucks or McDonald's, I can catch a train and notice movie advertisements starring J.Lo and Adam Sandler; but because I think dollar instead of pound, “elevator” instead of “lift,” and the aforementioned “soccer” instead of “football,” the city is as strange as it is familiar. How is it, though, that a city so infatuated with imitating the foreign in its music and art and architecture, that hordes artifacts of the foreign in its world-renowned museums can somehow remain hostile to the foreigners themselves? Like the gay man we read about, the one who was denied asylum in England although he was nearly killed by a mob in Iran. Like the American student studying abroad in a class called Queer London, a class which necessarily involves her in a transatlantic conversation. Funny – as a less-than-patriotic, left-wing political activist, I proudly identify as queer, but I have never really identified as American before traveling away from it. Suddenly, however, my Americanisms make me queerer than ever, and I find myself reluctantly attaching to my national identity, even as I try to queer the notion of identity itself.