It had been a week of unfamiliar places and people, and I had just arrived back at the residential centre where I have been living since the summer. I was wired and anxious, in need of a restful evening, a chance to unwind and re-anchor myself in a place where I was beginning to feel safe.
And so it was that within the hour, I had become caught up in an impassioned shouting match with a Bosnian-American woman about what makes something a casserole.
It was a debate that was to last over several days, with inputs from Americans, Irishmen and a man from the north of England who concluded without drama that ‘it’s just a posh word for stew’. The question was likewise quickly answered by a Northern Irish local who, sighing heavily, explained as though it were obvious that a casserole does Not. Have. Potatoes.
It was a conversation about casserole, but it wasn’t just a conversation about casserole. It was a debate about language, about the meaning of the words we use, and by extension, the significance that they have to us on a personal level.
What we call the food we eat, and even the ways in which we eat it, are deeply connected to our cultural backgrounds, our economic status, or the particular (and peculiar) habits of our families. And all of these things are of huge significance to the construction of our identities, both those we make for ourselves, and those we are given by other people.
When you’re living with individuals from all over the world, these differences of language are bound to rub up against each other from time to time, and cause us to try and re-identify ourselves in a way that seems understandable or acceptable.
So, when asked by people from the United States about what sort of faith tradition I come from, I am quick to point out that when I say ‘evangelical’, I mean with a small ‘e’. In different contexts, the same words are saddled with different meanings and connotations. I am finding that in this space where my identity is not necessarily shared by those around me, there is a greater need to explain it, to add disclaimers or justify my own sense of self.
It is rare that I have been in a position where I needed to identify myself as English; either that was already assumed, or I have been far enough away that I could say I was from the UK. Now that I am in Northern Ireland, the best way to give a meaningful response to the question of where I am from is to say that I am from England.
In more recent years, I have deliberately identified as British. Englishness now seems to carry with it a number of other political or social viewpoints: my subconscious fear is that if I tell you I am English, you might assume that I am nationalistic, anti-European, or dismissive of the rest of the UK. Reflecting on the nature of Englishness in the context of the Brexit vote, Fintan O’ Toole highlighted that: ‘nobody thought about what the English think of themselves’ and to an extent, I have never needed to.
But in this new context, I feel particularly aware of my place of birth, my national identity, and particularly my accent.
I have sat in a corner, hearing discussions about backing anybody apart from England in the rugby, feeling mildly apologetic about happening to be from a place that everybody else seemed to be standing against on principle.
A memorable exchange during my first month was with a woman whose first, slightly stern question on finding out where I am from was ‘so which way did Hampshire vote on Brexit?’ Identifying myself as being from England in that context seemed to carry with it a level of culpability; a need to explicitly distance myself from the values or points of view that have become associated with a certain version of Englishness.
And yet, in this place where I feel more conscious than usual of my own national identity, in the end it becomes irrelevant, just one more amongst the many cultures and languages that co-exist. Evenings can be spent joining in with English versions of French chants led by a Lithuanian man, who learnt them in Belgium and sings them accompanied by an American on the guitar.
When it all seems overwhelming, it’s worth remembering that our days are ultimately framed by silence, as well as noise. We take a quiet moment at every mealtime to be thankful. In the morning, we gather for twenty-five minutes of silence around a lit candle, an open bible, and the symbol of the cross.
Silence, by necessity, unifies us. It relies on everyone’s involvement, but requires nothing of us, except just to join in. It is not accented, or affected by the nuance of language. It just is, and allows us just to be. After the morning silence, there is liturgy. A prayer for courage. Like the quiet, liturgy asks very little of us. We can speak it, whether we believe it or not. We can not speak it, and let others do so on our behalf.
I hope there will be many more of those heated ‘cultural exchanges’. I hope that we may continue to show the heart of ourselves to one another through ridiculous arguments about what we call our dinner. Because we can do so, safe in the knowledge that in the end, we are not united by where we come from, what we say or how we say it, but by our willingness just to show up, to be quiet, to be.
Emily Rawling
Emily Rawling is originally from the south of England, and is completing an internship within the programme department at Corrymeela- Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation centre. She lives with other volunteers from all over the world at Corrymeela’s residential centre on the Antrim coast. These are her personal reflections on national identity in a multi-cultural context.