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The Mobile Age, Part I: Modernism
There is a slightly embarrassing story my mother used to like to tell about me. It dates from 1965, when I was not yet two. That was the year my nomadic family moved back to Canada after years abroad to settle in West Vancouver. We’d lived in Venezuela prior to that point, where I’d been born in the town of San Tomé, the last of five kids. Oil brats, as they used to say, since my father was an engineer with the Mene Grande Oil Company. The move from South America had been a challenge for my parents. Five kids from one to eight years of age, 13 pieces of luggage. We’d had long stopovers in Washington and Toronto. My mother had given my two eldest brothers a sedative, the 1960s-era best wisdom on how to travel with feisty boys. The drugs had kicked in to completely opposite effect, turning them into town drunks. Twenty hours in airplanes with a five- and seven-year-old wandering up and down the aisles, singing “Johnny Appleseed” or whatever it was. And even arriving in Vancouver, the move wasn’t over. We first stayed in a motel under the Lions Gate Bridge, then in rented digs in Burnaby, where everyone but my father came down with the mumps. All told, it was 217 days later that the family Volkswagen Bug finally pulled into the driveway of our new house on Madrona Crescent in West Vancouver and that we all piled out to the amusement of curious neighbours. Tucking us all into our beds and cribs that night, I can only imagine how fatigued my parents must have been, how intensely, existentially relieved they must have felt to finally have a permanent roof over their heads and a bed waiting for them at the end of the hallway. However they felt, I apparently didn’t because that night, having kept my peace throughout the long move, I started wailing. And I kept wailing. All night. And the next night. And the next night. I took breaks during the day but otherwise kept it up for a week, sitting on the end of my parents’ bed. The eighth night, I stopped wailing and fell asleep, my point apparently made. I was reminded of this incident recently, reading an article by Harvard English professor Stephen J. Greenblatt. In the piece, Greenblatt suggests a worthwhile new area of interdisciplinary study might be “mobility studies,” which would examine the “restless and often unpredictable movements” of people in our mobile age. Greenblatt argues, among other things, that while we typically assume culture to be something dependent on a group of rooted citizens – an identifiable “people” living in a defined, stationary “home” – perhaps the truth is different. Perhaps culture is something shaped in a more fluid environment entirely. In the context of history and prehistory, this point certainly seems a reasonable one. When Homo erectus ambled out of Africa into Eurasia about a million years ago, an inextinguishable human trait was foreshadowed. We drift around. We follow our impulses, urgent and whimsical as they may be. In North America, where European migrations began only in the late 15th century, this phenomenon may have played out to the fullest degree. But the patterns of human movement are literally the patterns of human history. We journey as a matter of genetic imperative, ending up in different places as different people than where and when we began. That the pace of all this toing and froing has risen dramatically since industrialization is equally clear. Population migrations have shaped the developed world over the same period of time that technology – in transportation and communications – has radically reduced the barriers to such movement. We now mingle in obvious and subtle ways. You might ask yourself – reading this article on your way by air to or from some destination – how you contribute to a complicated web of cultural forces. Whether you’re a tourist, business person, student, artist or person visiting a relative who lives far enough away that you must fly, the things you leave behind as you travel – your dollars, opinions, tastes and ideas – change the places you visit just as you are changed by the things you carry home, including the very idea of what home itself should be. Every seat on your flight today, meanwhile, is occupied by somebody contributing to this effect in a different way, and Greenblatt’s mobility studies probably have merit for reasons of that complexity alone. For me, however, it’s personal history that opens a view into this topic. My parents came together as a product of mobility, both having travelled long routes to their unlikely meeting place in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Very different routes too. My mother was a half-Jewish German who’d spent much of the Second World War in hiding and whose family had reunited postwar in Ecuador, where her Jewish father had been waiting for them since getting a single exit visa in 1940. My father, by contrast, was an engineering grad from U of T, bored with the imprisoning provinciality of 1940s Toronto, out seeking his fortune. They met on August 22, 1953, but had both already been in motion for years. My mother had been travelling against her will throughout Germany and then to South America. My father, responding to his own whims and desires, had seen Manila, the Philippine jungle, Hong Kong, Paris, New York and Caracas by that point. What their experience leads me to believe about mobility studies is that the link between culture and movement isn’t much illuminated by considering only the amount we travel. You’re reading this article aboard a busy flight, some way between two even busier terminal buildings. So too my parents, postwar, were merely two of an estimated 20 million individuals thought to be in transition from a former home to a new one. What has to be considered instead – and what could teach us something about how mobility has affected our ideas of home and community and how these effects are evolving over time – is the degree of our mobility measured against the degree to which that mobility is voluntary. That approach breaks the universe of mobility experience into four archetypes as the graphic on this page shows. |
