"The Man Without a Country"
- Marie Laure
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
This story has haunted me since fifth grade, the same year of my awakening to boys and the disruption that liking one brought to friendships with girls. I was eleven years-old, and a good day was when I sat by the classroom window and daydreamed my way into other places like Mesopotamia on the exotic Silk Road. It was the year music took hold of my life through Mr. Filiatro, the first choral conductor introduced to the school. Let's just say, it was a year!
The teacher, whose name I no longer recall, assigned the short story by Edward Everett Hale that has stuck with me ever since. Over the years I have returned to re-read it in part or in total, most recently listening to it on a long train ride. The story published in 1863 hasn't changed, of course, but I see it differently each time it crosses my mind, compelling me to take another look. Today, in our ever-changing world, I am going back to that story, summed up in its title, with yet another understanding of the poignancy of being exiled from one's own country, never to return.
The main character lives aboard ships at sea for decades, never setting foot again on his homeland as punishment for renouncing his country in a trial for treason alongside infamous, Aaron Burr. Once his words: "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" left his lips in the court of law, his fate is sealed.
HIs life devoid of news from his own country sears his soul. He misses her terribly like a lost love. "The Man Without a Country" confirms in our hearts and in our collective soul and mind, the deep meaning of homeland. Many, many people have been forced to leave their own homelands to live in some other country due to violence, starvation, lawlessness, and all manner of oppression at home. Over time, the refugee settles into the new homeland, calling it home. Roots are not deep, but needs run with the land in which they have come. America, despite its own egregious trampling of indigenous stakeholders, has been for centuries the sought after homeland, come hell or high water.
A few years ago, I stood on the borderland at the Rio Grande River which was almost a trickle that day. I imagined crossing from my homeland to the other. What would it take to renounce the place where I started my life story? I remembered a time in Guatemala where I felt the oppression of the young men carrying machine guns and femicide, the murder of women without impunity, is the norm. Oppression so blatant as to force one into those waters is the great motivator.
How much has changed since that day on those banks when the border patrol shooed me on my way after asking if I was an American. "Yes", I stated unequivocally. What about all those others who know this land as home, but cannot say yes to that question? They are living some place in-between in exile without a country here or there in no-man's land.
We all know someone who made choices long ago that have landed them neither here nor there. They have contributed their talents, sweat and ideas to THIS homeland. If they are ousted against their will or voluntarily they take that with them wherever they go. The loss is ours as much as theirs.
The epitaph of Philip Nolan, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States, was written by his own hand aboard ship: "He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands".
