Sour Grapes and Nationalist Leanings

July 29. 2010

Last time I left you, dear readers, I was musing over coming “home” to Kaunas.

I don’t know what it is about this little town, but there is something here that makes it familiar and safe, and so I lay claim to it as somehow being “mine” even though I am not actually from here. Maybe it’s because I married into a family with roots here, and one of the wonderful gifts of marriage is that my husband’s world also becomes mine. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not perfect, and there are definitely some parts of this little world that I would like to give back, (Rokas’ sister comes to mind right now), but it’s like I told my parents when we got married, “you’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a country.”

So, why is it that today that I got really steamed today while listening two American girls chitter on about the tattoos they got of the Lithuanian-American community symbol? They are at least a “little” Lithuanian by ancestry (I guess), but while listening to them giggling and mocking some other poor schmuck who got a far inferior rendition of their tattoo,  it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, “you know that getting a tattoo doesn’t actually make you Lithuanian, right?”

You’ll be happy to hear, dear readers, that I did refrain from saying that (though there’s always tomorrow), but I did snicker to myself when one of the girls remarked that she was happy that her Lithuanian relatives seemed to be positive about her tattoo because she was worried they wouldn’t like it, to which the other girl noted that, ‘of cooooourse, they thought it was cool because it was something they themselves would neeeeeeever do.’ What was hanging in mid-air after this enthusiastically produced observation was that these people would never have to endure hours of torture to produce a Vytis on their wrist “because they are actually Lithuanian and don’t need to get a tattoo to prove it….”

Hey, they (almost) said it, not me….

But, I know, let’s stop right there: this conversation about righteous belonging is the slippery slope toward exclusion, ethnocentrism, racism, and even genocide, so I should plant my feet firmly at that top of the hill and say, “hey, kids, you can be whoever you want to be!” People get all kinds of tattoos for all kinds of reasons.

And, hey! Wasn’t I the one only two weeks ago saying that Lithuanians should expand their understanding of what it means to be a Lithuanian?  

Yes. That was me.

So what gives?

For me, an admitted “outsider,” these kinds of outward displays are akin to the ladies in “Lithuanian” restaurants who wear “traditional dress” in places where tourists frequent. It’s an invented tradition of something that displays a superficial snapshot of “being” something, but thinking about such symbols doesn’t go much deeper than that. I guess the best analogy for me is that it feels kind of like playing house…

But I digress.

Perhaps it would be useful to provide a little context to my negativity, no?

To make a long story short (I know, too late), you may remember a few weeks ago that I posted an ironically timed post asking ‘where are all the Americans are in Vilnius?’ Apparently, they weren’t in Vilnius because they were all here in Kaunas.

Yes. I have been overrun by little J crew boat shoes and cotton sun dresses, as well as all the “likes,” “you knows,” “totallys,” and “I drank way too much last nights” that I can handle thanks to a brand new program that throws money at ancestral returnees who want a state-sponsored vacation to Lithuania.

Now, I was a Holocaust scholar in my previous academic life (and the scholastic gods seem to be pushing me back that way again), so I know that the second generation of migrants/immigrants/survivors of almost any minority/migrant community is always way more interested in the reclamation of their historical belonging than those closer to it, but it just all seems so, I don’t know, “heritage tourism-y.”

…But maybe I am just bitter because I didn’t think of the tattoo idea first….

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