The Brooklyn Rail

I know what people want me to say. They want to know about my birthplace, about my childhood and exile from Egypt, about my years in France and Italy, and finally about my move to the United States. They want me to give a design to the random events of my life, which is another way of asking for the logic of things when there is no logic and none to be had. They’ll ask how does the experience of displacement define your identity or alter it, when all that displacement does is muffle if not distort what was once an identity. Nothing about me now is sufficiently definitive. As I’ve written in my essay “Parallax”:

I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learned to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. “Back” to France was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever even set foot in France.

Today I write in English yet English is not my mother tongue. Does knowing other languages help me write? I don’t know. I might as well be asked in what language I dream. I don’t know that either.

If you have more than one identity then you have none. The American Heritage Dictionary calls identity “being the same as something else.” And this grounded sense of self stands against everything I am. Not only do I not nurse in the evening the same thoughts, same feelings, same desires I had in the morning, but I am by birth mutable, easily malleable, and incapable of sticking to a decision. Convictions I once had have completely eroded. I no longer have convictions. Like Robert Musil’s “man without qualities,” like Fernando Pessoa’s disquieted self, I am always an outside man. I want to belong somewhere, but the moment I am welcomed, I notice a fly in the ointment, and with it comes my urge to withdraw.

I don’t have a homeland, don’t know my flag, don’t even want a flag. To top it all, I have no religion. When I look around I can’t tell whether I am wedded to a past century or would prefer an age that has yet to come. I am lucid enough to know that both options are fantasies.

Some things about me won’t change. I carry the same illusions I coddled as a child, I dread what I’ve always dreaded, I still blush no differently than when I was much younger. I have my guilty, shallow thoughts as I have high-minded ones. At times I manage to pass for someone who belongs to his time—and usually get away with it. I do have an official nationality, a discoverable address, an accidental religion, a chosen profession, a wife, a family. I own things, even collect a few. Yet since Egypt, where so much was left behind, I do not trust possessions, and they no longer root me anywhere. I don’t know how to own.

I like being untethered. Friends who say I lack affiliation of any kind see only one side of me; friends who swear I am rooted in reality more than I claim fail to see the other. I am unaffiliated not only because I am an outsider everywhere I turn, but because, late in my life, I have learned to suspect that everyone feels as I do. Some may not know it, others may not admit it, but everyone is in one way or another unaffiliated. But if everyone is like me, “I refuse to belong to a club that would have me as a member,” as Groucho Marx aptly put it. I mistrust all categories, all received ideas, even if they are true. I pursue my own elusive truths. Which, perhaps, is why I write fiction.