A Non-Technical Report On Geographies and The Divinity of Culture Shock
Tectonic faults are as blameless and unapologetic as culture in shaping our world. Shaky backdrops make for blurry pictures; nonetheless, I owe two of my early memories to some earthquakes. The first was an earthquake as small as my world. It was a small and still afternoon and my grandfather was reading to me from an illustrated book of small-time bible stories. We were laying side by side on a hammock, the book perched on the taut and smooth curvature of his belly. We were probably reading the story of the tower of Babel when the hammock began to quiver. Clay roof tiles rattled like drunken maracas and the old house shook her hips to no particular rhythm. I didn't know what was going on, but I was so small that my grandfather just snatched me with the greatest of ease and carried me like a football to the courtyard. I was that size where people could just pick me up whenever they wanted to and carry me wherever they wanted to, and then put me down whenever and wherever they deemed it fit.
When my grandfather set me down the ground was dizzy drunk. My grandmother's chubby, steadfast ankles carried her to us in the middle of the courtyard with an unexpected dexterity on a backdrop of so much disorder. I hugged my grandfather's leg and looked up at my grandmother. Her eyes were closed and she was performing the stations of the cross and mumbling catholic prayers under her breath, and then her fingers became busy beading an imaginary rosary. Her nature was that of a small but ample tree that blooms and protects. The earth shook again. My grandmother stood rooted.
It was all over as fast as it started. The house and everything was still again; too still, like a brief but definite pause in time, as if the very Andes themselves were holding their breath. Then like an exhale the wind turned and made soft sounds in the sky and the earth suddenly came back alive; the birds, the dogs, the bugs, all restarted their evening songs. My grandmother went to the phone and my grandfather went to check the television news. The crisp calmness in the air felt strange following the stark but dreamlike violence of the shakes. That day my world expanded in a very geological way. I looked up into the vastness above and tried to decipher some solution from the slow shifting clouds as they dissolved over the Andes into the approaching night.
Several months later, I found myself in that very sky leaving the convergent Andean plate boundary and crossing the Caribbean Sea. You should know, my world was three feet high before this: a world of hotwheel cars, small bouncy balls, scrapped knees, and digging up worms. I could barely see over counter tops; things placed in the top shelves like plate tectonics, language, and culture may as well have been in the clouds. But man, I was in that flight and I was flying over waves of cumulus clouds with infinite possible shapes and the Caribbean Sea below looked like the sky and I was young and dizzy excited so I gazed out that tiny reinforced plastic window for the duration of the three and a half hour flight, ears popped. At one point, the plane shook and shivered as some turbulence hit us; it reminded me of a little earthquake in the sky. I performed the stations of the cross and my mother smiled.
The Floridan sea is licked by the sun. And her land, to a boy from the mountains, seemed impossibly flat. The roads were so flat and so wide that they seemed to expand infinitely into the horizon, and the cars so new that an air freshener scent has that namesake, and the places so far from each other that a new car becomes old by the time you reach your destination. Even time moved differently, with a certain purpose toward the weekend. And then there was Disney World, too. I understood little, but boy was it fascinating - until my first day of school.
I was a small boy and had yet to learn how a substantial part of beauty emerges out of diversity. And I could not as of yet recognize the beauty in myself and in my strangeness. I would speak to my classmates, small people in a small world like mine, but when they spoke back I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand me, and they looked at me sideways, like I was a weirdo. I mistook and misunderstood; after all, they were all just children too, but after a while it made me feel weird: foreign to myself and self-conscious of my foreignness. I learned what it was like to really miss certain people and to live that way, to miss certain places, certain flavors, to miss the way R's are rolled and turned over by the tongue. I wanted to hide behind my grandfather's leg, to feel the weighty reassurance of my grandmother's murmured prayers.
As the epicenter of my life was changed, almost all the things that I had just learned had to be reevaluated and redefined. It came on like an earthquake, almost dreamlike. It was not something a child could expect or prepare for. I had grown a bit, but I was still small so that people could just pick me up whenever they wanted to and fly me wherever they wanted to and put me down whenever and wherever they deemed it fit. For some time, I withdrew from my disorientation and into a newly created island where I looked out at a strange world as if from a reinforced plastic window. My lips had to figure out a new way to move, this gringo god did not understand my murmured prayers in my brand of Spanish. As my geographical map of the world unfurled my concept of language was undone, absorbed by the ever gluttonous sea that swallowed even the sun. I swallowed my strange tongue.
What is culture shock like, you want to know? It's like losing your parents for days at Disney World. It's like having an existential crisis as a kindergartner. It's like an earthquake when geography is your second parent. Man, I was small so I cried. Then, one day, it was over as fast as it started. I was small so that I was able get in and fit into many places full grown adults could not. The wind turned and made sounds in the sky and my earth was alive again; the birds, the dogs, the bugs, all repeated their evening songs in a bilingual tongue and I vibrated with the energy of two places and the rhythm of two peoples.
As the earth continues to breath and shift, landscapes are destroyed, created, morphed, and forged. And in this way, who I am has been shaped and reshaped. Geography and culture can expand our versions of reality, but not without some inherent tremors and eruptions when it may sometimes feel like we have lost balance and control, like we are living outside of ourselves. And we are; the world is bigger than any one of us, and when we allow the world to still again a new geography is created within through the knowledge gained from living in another place, in another way. As for me, mountains and valleys, islands, swamps and deserts flow within me; they are full of peoples and flavors and moments I revisit when I feel homesick. And despite whichever imaginary political boundary I may be in, in the mornings I like to rise with sips of coffee from the Andes, and in the evenings I like to think of the Florida gulf glistening as always, savoring yet another yolky sun with her salty lips. Yet, I am not here nor there, but just a piece of a river born in the mountains flowing boundlessly into creeks and estuaries and seas; and maybe you are there too, flowing into me, and we are limitless in our shared experience as people who are not so different as we thought.
