Identity

I walked to my swearing-in ceremony in the persistent fog on Friday morning, wearing demure black.

There are no pictures from inside the massive courtroom, or of the hundreds of hushed faces in every shade from biscuit to chocolate truffle (at whose stories I could only guess), because cameras and cellphones were confiscated at the entrance.

I was ready for the great emotion, but it didn't come. And what has come, is unexpected.

After hearing the white-haired guard bark at the Indian-looking man ahead of me at the Xray machine (metal detector, OK, fine): WHAT part of wait do you not understand??? And after I'd fixed him with an intense scrute* (his guard-mate noticed my scrute, and I noticed him noticing, and continued to scrute, and felt I was making progress, but then I had to go through.

[*Chris Langham, Muppet Show: I scrutinized him with an intense scrute...]

So I went in well balanced. Welcome to the U.S. You are now part of the problem. The same guard smiled and sweethearted me and complimented me on my "good shoes" *($40 four years ago) that made the machine beep and told me to come and get my cellphone and camera straight from him afterwards, ahead of the crush.

All animals are equal. I was a more equal animal.

After many hours, some snafus and anxiety (my photos had been lost and I was sent back to Federal Plaza without the certificate that everyone else had, to have new ones glued to my certificate waiting there) and much boredom on the part of the four gum-chewing officials, I was in. I am an American.

It feels more complicated, and sad, than I had imagined. I am not at the root of it yet.

Maybe it is because I am no longer the outsider I have spent most of my life being; a role in which I felt very comfortable: it is a position of objectivity and one of remove. From which one can participate or criticize or celebrate without obligation. Even as I loved so many things American: music, friends, National Public Radio (!), I was safely South African. I could take the good and reject the bad. It wasn't mine. But now, instead of feeling lighter, I feel heavier. Belonging comes with a burden.

And maybe it is because of the South African blood flowing in my veins? For all my liberalism, and worldliness, I have a strong streak of cultural pride and association. Soil, sky, intonation. A language. Where do I want my bones to rest? I feel like I sold out.

And yet there is nothing in blood. It is in the head. Or is it? Perhaps we are vibrate instead with landscape - with the geology and botany of our birthplace. Why does my heart beat faster and my blood begin to sing  in the rolling grasslands of the Free State, a place I have not lived in since childhood?

And maybe because it simply raises questions of identity so ingrained as to be unconscious. Now bubbled to the surface and steaming in the cool Brooklyn air.

Do you know who you are?

In the end I know that I did what thousands, millions, have done, and for the same reasons: I became American in order to have a better, and easier, life.

And, with time, I will come to terms with that, as my life becomes better, and easier.

(And as long as I am not a Communist, a prostitute, or an habitual drunkard...)