The Romanian in the West ("Romanul in strainatate")

This is a personal translation of a very interesting article I read a couple of days ago. I believe it applies to vast number of people that travel/live in other countries than the ones they grow up in and still maintain strong connections to their departure country.

The original title is "Romanul in strainatate." Andrei Plesu is the author: a Romanian scholar who explored several fields, but is known more for his writings in cultural anthropology and philosophy. He was briefly involved in politics as Minister of Culture and Foreign Affairs Minister. The article may have acquired my personal bias in the translation process. Perhaps I will update an improved, more readable version soon.

He makes an enormous amount of claims (that are more or less obvious). So I will comment on it in several days.

"Any Romanian outside the country experiences, more or less willingly, both the intensity and the ridicule of the double identity (“dedublare”). From this perspective, to travel can be equated with spending some time in the chambers of schizophrenia. You are in two places at the same time: drawn by the prestige and astonishing unexpected of one and by the comfortable domestic routine of the other. You can’t hold back from completely plunging in the novelty of where you are without craving for the scents and sounds from home. Since the emergence of the internet, this experience of the bi-location is yet more perverted. You are confronted with two series of news papers and breaking news bulletins. A perfect exercise of relativism… is reducing things at their “real scale.” The Diaspora lives this situation with maximum intensity that often has destabilizing effects. Even a short stay outside the borders, can have a similarly devastating result.

I have met compatriots that are so essentially different “at home” and “in exile” that it becomes close to impossible for one to estimate their true identity, to distinguish between the authentic and disguised. At home, the exiled is a combination of agrarian sentimentalism and pedagogical delirium. He comes from “the West” from the “normal world.” Consequently, he knows better than you, the un-traveled and uncultured individual at home about democracy, science, and any other area of academics. He is irritated by what he sees, critical… frantic even. On the other hand, in his adoptive country he is the complete opposite. He is self-conscious, obsessed with being marginalized, careful not to jeopardizing his future. Insecure, compliant, hypocritical, a “foreigner” to the others and tormented by a “foreign” language (regardless of how well he speaks it) the individual prefers being passive rather than daring, submissive rather than defying. He winds up developing an interior aversion towards the hosts. In Romania he is the advocate of the West, while in the West he is the teacher of “Eastern-ness”. In Romania he is sick of the characteristic “balkanism,” yet in the west he is sickened by the “liberal fundamentalism,” and the excessive secularization and political fairness. The ideal is of course, to obtain the western retributions while being a super-star among his people. The common result is often a double dislocation. It is distressing to contemplate the spectacle of some decently gifted individuals that are too often disfigured by an odd arrogance emergent from defeat. The feeling of defeat grips them too often: even when they had proved their edge in their niche. They don’t want to be mediocre among the “high-end people of the west.” They would much rather like to shine solitarily at home, where all sorts of worthless people, instead of praising and appreciating them, take their rightful societal spots.

If they are religious they are faced with the hell itself: deep inside they need to comprise needed vanity and required submissiveness. They need to accommodate the necessary culture of love in a poisonous mindset of hate. Angry (alternatively or simultaneously) with both their co-nationals and with the Westerners, intoxicated with frustrations and untamed ambitions, switching from grand rides at home to muddy crawls at their new home, depressed, suborned… these people are the epithemy of misery. They are not comfortable anywhere anymore, they become connected to their places through nothing but pure resentment. Before 1989, the Iron Curtain and the “communists” were entirely to be blamed for such torn destinies. Today however, despite the disappointments and difficulties Romania provides its citizens with, the fault becomes individual. Its source: vanity, provincialism, elitism and egotism. [...]"

PS: I do apologize, as my translation fails to capture the entire subtlety of the article, but I believe I preserved the essence.