between two worlds

Early in Gaza Sunrise, there's a scene in which the main character (an unmarried, independent woman who was raised by her militant father) is sitting in a room full of women in her grandparents' home.  The women are all talking about marriage and babies and she feels totally uncomfortable.  She leaves and walks down the hall to a room full of men, where she feels much more at home, even though the first thing that happens is that someone calls attention to the fact that she's female.

When I brought this scene to class someone asked what the point of it was, from a dramatic standpoint.  My teacher, who can be quite insightful despite the fact that I've had many arguments about the script with him, hit the nail on the head.  "It's to show that she's between two worlds," he said.  "Not really this, but not really that either."

That is, of course, exactly the point of the scene, and I was pleased someone had noticed it, because I've spend large chunks of my life feeling exactly like that.

My home town of Baltimore is, like many post-industrial northern cities, sharply divided into white and Black neighborhoods.  My childhood home is the last house in a fairly wealthy white neighborhood, which is divided from a much poorer Black neighborhood by a wall (politely called a "noise barrier") that abuts our property.  I have often thought that this image is a surprisingly apt metaphor for my life.

I grew up perceiving the Black neighborhood as alien and a bit scary.  The kids there walked home from school or took what seemed to be a completely unintelligible bus system.  My sister and I were not to go to the 7 Eleven directly across the street without adult supervision.  The Black neighborhood was the source (it was always implied) of the thieves who stole my sister's bike off the back porch on Christmas Day and stole our crappy car four or five times over the years (it was always recovered--the parts weren't even worth anything) and of the homeless man who my dad once paid a few dollars to help with yard work, who then harassed us like a stray cat at all hours of the night until threats to call the police were made.

Clearly, I wasn't part of that world.  But the white neighborhood, whose center of gravity was the multi-million-dollar houses around the Sherwood Gardens tulip park, didn't really feel like my world either.  Those people had moveable feast fundraisers for charity in their lavish homes, and their neighborhood association once sent us a nasty letter when our house had gone too long without a new paint job.

My mom was a teacher's assistant at a private school, and my dad was a civil servant with several advanced degrees.  We owned our home (although, like most of America, it's now mortgaged to the hilt.)  My sister and I both attended private schools and fairly expensive private colleges.  We certainly weren't poor.  We just weren't as rich as most of the people around us.  There was a reason we lived in the last house in the white neighborhood.

This sense of estrangement from almost everyone who, on the surface, looked like me reached its apex in high school, when I attended one of a coterie of three very preppy prep schools not far from my home.  Surely some of this alienation came from being queer (a fact of which I was not aware until college) but most of it came from class.  

Don't get me wrong--I received a fantastic education, for which I am extremely grateful.  I took film studies, Russian, a semester-long class on Middle East history, and college-level math, science and English classes.  Our theater department put on productions that rivaled many colleges' in sophistication.  But the upshot was I was surrounded by people whose families were much wealthier than mine (because clearly only wealthy children deserve such an excellent education), and spent a lot of time feeling intensely, deeply, profoundly alienated.  It was not surprising, therefore, that I became friends with a rogue's gallery of five or six class outcasts, and that many of us, whether we were aware of it or not, were united by class.

As I've moved through different social circles, I've experienced various levels of fitting-in-ness, but the feeling of being just a little bit outside has persisted.  The corollary is that I've always been drawn to outcasts, rebels, loners and weirdos, to people who have some experience of being a bit uncomfortable with their identity, be they present-day real people, historical figures or imaginary friends.

Even now, when I have many wonderful friends who are interested in many of the same things I am, the otherness is hard to shake.  When I'm with my film school friends, I won't shut up about Gaza, to the point that some of them are probably quite sick of it--since, after all, being political is not a prerequisite for film school.  But when I'm with the circle of activists I've started to associate with, I often find myself far more preoccupied with the politics of representation and audience identification than with the logistics of planning the next event.

I have another teacher who recently told our class: "Outside can be a good place for an artist."  I suppose that's true, but it doesn't change the fact that outside feels pretty lonely an awful lot of the time.