Dennis Greene

I must admit to being taken aback at the thought. Me an Expat? I’ve been here 23 of my 57 years. One of my two children was born here; my parents, who followed me out here to escape Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, are both buried here. I anticipate ending my days here myself. I have become so immersed in my adopted country that not only do I barrack for an Australian Rules football club (a game not unlike American football in that it is little played outside its country of origin) but when Australia meets Zimbabwe in cricket or rugby I’m a one-eyed Australia supporter. I am aware of no hankering for what Housman called “the land of lost content”, no hankering for the “happy highways”. I have no wish to move anywhere.

Family history may have something to do with that. By birth I’m an Englishman, by upbringing Rhodesian, by ethnicity Irish/English/French, historically  British colonial, by family inclination and force of circumstance nomadic. I am only English because my parents stopped off for five years on their way from the end of colonial rule in India to its temporary continuance in Rhodesia. Realpolitik has long been a factor in my life. I was four when I first changed countries and by my early 30s I had done so six times, eventually washing ashore on the long beaches of Western Australia where I remain to this day.

So in a sense I am the ultimate expat, a foreigner even in the land of my birth, and with the land of my upbringing so changed as to be unrecognizable. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that I have assumed local colour to the point where to the casual observer I am local.

But, that said, there is one dimension of being an Australian that escapes me and I suspect always will. I am like the man who comes late to the party, able to hold his own in the moment, just as long as the discussion doesn’t switch to events that occurred prior to his arrival. He knows the history but everyone else is discussing the myths. Just as Americans see themselves as repositories of the world’s freedom, and the French of the world’s Culture, Australians have cornered the market in mateship and the fair go. None of them is wrong in the first instance. Americans undoubtedly enjoy their freedom, the French are highly cultured and Australians have a strong sense of equality and justice, but none of these things is unique to anyone. I of course have my own set of myths, what’s left of them after the Zimbabwe War of Independence reduced them to tatters. They are just not relevant to the current party.

So yes, despite my initial protests, despite my local colour, despite my long years here, I am still, at the core, an expat. But do I write expat poetry? Well it seems to me an expat poet can do one of four things. He can write the poetry of yearning (Browning’s “Home thoughts from abroad” and Brook’s “Grantchester” come to mind), or he can use the distance afforded by foreign domicile to take the home country to task as Shelley does in “England in 1819” and Auden in “September 1st 1939”). His third choice is to let the foreign culture in as Flecker does in  “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” (and for that matter Eliot does with his use of a surreal London in “The Wasteland”. It’s hard to think what the poem would be like if he’d stayed in Missouri). Finally our poet  can ignore the dichotomy inherent in his situation and let his subconscious bring to the surface what it will, when it will.

I tend to the latter, and what my subconscious brings to the surface is little tangled parcels of cultural displacement. Cultural displacement (as I use the phrase) is what happens when you take the culture of one place and superimpose it on another. It is not directly an expat issue as it crosses generation boundaries and affects people in their millions rather than singly  It is to being an expat what being the QE II is to being a dinghy. Its most powerful manifestation is living in the southern hemisphere to the rhythms of a northern hemisphere culture.  But even intra-hemisphere it makes its presence felt. I’m pretty sure I detected its familiar sense of unease in John McCutcheon’s 1912 short story “Injun Summer”. Just as gravity is so powerful it holds the moon in place yet is so weak that we overcome it every time we take a step so too is cultural displacement both strong and weak. Strong enough that it has shaped, and continues to shape, our world. So weak that any one of us can resist its urgings. It is a fascinating subject, and one my subconscious often returns me to.

Thirty-five years ago I wrote “Beloved Land I wish that I could say / that my forefather’s blood enriched your soil”. That was the last time I wrote an expat poem. Since then my subconscious has worked and reworked the material into a heightened awareness of cultural displacement.  I think I am the stronger for it.