Not to be Anything

Monday’s conversation about home and being a part of a specific culture was very interesting, and the idea of home still resonates in Sterling Brown’s poetry. In his poem, “Crossing”, he speaks about crossing several rivers, and the traveling will never bring him home. The search for a Utopia continues, even though he writes the poem knowing that it does not exist.

I guess this is the sad part with concrete definitions. Nobody can say that they are fully from one place or another. Everybody’s history is so mixed that it denies a part of their history to say that they are merely from one country. I know it does not bother everybody, but even with immigrant’s now, why do we have to have a set point when we decide that they are “American” according to the culture? Although speaking the language is a huge part of culture, it is not the only aspect of it, and by merely speaking the language, a person cannot say that they are “cultured”, one can easily take a Spanish class, but that does not mean that they are well adapted to either the South American nor the Spanish culture. Because the lines of when a person is a part of a culture or not is so hazy, maybe it is best not to define a specific place as home, and a specific person as a part of the culture.