The Remains of the Day
This is just to say…..
I have eaten
the flapjacks
that were on
the speckled dish
and which
you were
probably
saving
for tea time
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so warm.
Sojourn 2 for Speckled dish
With Dominica, November 13, 2007 - January 10, 2008, in Norwich, VT, USA
Home Thoughts from Abroad
Maureen began the speckled dish sojourn with some thoughts about home. I like to think that she passed the dish onto me because we’ve both had experiences of living abroad—she as an expatriate American living in France, and I as an expatriate Briton living in the United States.
I’ve taken the process one step further however, by becoming an American citizen. This means that I am technically a dual citizen—I can call two places home. Or perhaps I have merely formalized the process of becoming an alien in two places at once, since the US government assures me that I am really an American wherever I go in the world, even if I return to my country of birth. Luckily for me, Her Majesty assures me that this is OK with her. As long as our countries remain good friends—and I think it’s safe to say we’re way past that unfortunate business back in the eighteenth century—I am not likely to be applying to Buckingham Palace for permission to relinquish my British citizenship any time soon.
But the experience of being an alien, I suggest, has more to do with the newness of coming to another country, rather than living in it and becoming to some extent, assimilated. Being an alien is about living each day as an infant negotiator of language, and being acutely conscious that the experience of homelessness has the most poignancy when it is newly experienced. When I first arrived in the United States, I was daily reminded that “they don’t do things like that here.” I spent hours laboring mightily to explain, or more often, to translate, the misunderstandings that arose when people find themselves divided from their neighbors by a common language, yet, curiously enough, not by the different spelling.
As the newness ebbs, assimilation begins. One of my first lessons in assimilation I learned in graduate school. My writing professor, a “philosopher-critic” who stormed the barricades of the American Establishment in the fifties and sixties with the likes of Norman Mailer, gave me a choice: spell American, or spell American. And he had no problem declaring Chekhov a greater playwright than Shakespeare, either. Conveniently reassured with the East Coast Ivy League equivalent of “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead,” I learned to spell American just as well as I ever spelled the Queen’s English. And when I write now, I stumble along in Richard Gilman’s well-polished critical footsteps, so different from the tortuous half strangled Marxist quasi-proletariat lurchings of my undergraduate professors in their dark Satanic steel town of the English Midlands. Some things you should leave behind when you leave home.
The definition of home is, of course, not really about passports and where they come from, or feelings of alienation from your mother tongue, and how these things enable, or constrain, your choice of destination. I may feel slightly schizophrenic these days when I contemplate where home is—where I belong—but I quickly return to a sense of cognitive equilibrium when I remember that home is more a collection of people—my family and friends—than a place, or a country, or even dropping my ‘h’s in speech, and my ‘u’s in spelling.
I chose the title of this post to remind me that the expatriate syndrome is nothing new. The poet Browning also suffered, as I do, from the occasional pang of memory of an English spring while living abroad. By taking dual citizenship, I have added to his experience a yearning for a New England winter or fall whenever I’m sweating through another humid un-airconditioned British summer. Where is home? Sometimes it is a negation—wherever I am not.
So I’d like to propose a possible solution to the expatriate disease. It’s not new either—the Bedouin have been practicing this for thousands of years—and the gist of the idea is that if you want to stay home, always travel with your tribe. This is proving somewhat complex to realize in practice—I refuse to fly, and my husband won’t go to Europe any other way—and I’m meeting quite a few people these days that I would like to make part of my “tribe,” so this idea is still very much in the “you’re dreaming” category. But still.
Your thoughts on home or abroad?
Anzac Biscuits
Here’s a little history on the Anzac Biscuit (or cookie, as it would be termed in the United States.)
And here's how to make Anzac Biscuits
Ingredients (makes approximately 24 cookies)
1 cup Quaker oats
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1 cup of all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup white sugar or brown
1/2 cup butter
1 tabsp. Lyle’s golden syrup
2 tabsps. boiling water
Method
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a number of cookie sheets with greased parchment paper. Mix oats, flour, sugar and coconut together in a large bowl. In a small saucepan, melt the butter and golden syrup gently. Mix the baking soda with the boiling water. Add the butter and syrup mix, and the baking soda mix to the dry ingredients and stir well until everything is blended. (This is a good workout for your arms!)
Drop teaspoon sized pieces of dough on each cookie sheet, making sure that there is space between each piece, as the cookies will spread a bit as they bake.
Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, or 10 minutes if you are using a convection oven.
NB: there really is no substitute for Lyle’s Golden Syrup, sadly. Molasses or any other kind of sweetener just won’t taste the same. The good news is that it’s becoming easier to find here in the United States and it’s instantly recognizable in a grocery store.
Gallipoli, Skyros, the Somme
And so, as I conclude this sojourn, and wrap up some thoughts before handing the speckled dish on to my friend Kathi, maybe you are asking “Why Anzac cookies?”
Well, apart from the fact that they taste good, keep well, and bear a direct relationship to Maureen’s Scottish flapjack recipe in the previous sojourn, I actually have another reason for wanting to post the Anzac cookie recipe.
About a year ago, a can full of these cookies baked by me, Janna and her friend Olivia, headed south by mail to Mississippi. They were bound for an army base, where the fiancé of a former Dartmouth student of mine was preparing to ship out to Iraq. He, like so many young people these days, joined the army to pay for graduate school, and not realizing, perhaps, how fast we’d be mired once again in the Middle East, found himself all too soon far from home and his wife to be, among people who didn’t necessarily share his artistic view on life (he was the unit’s photographer.) When my former student described Dolphin’s* plight and suggested that we might like to send him a care package, naturally these cookies came to mind. Knowing the history of the Anzac biscuit, I was confident that they would survive the heat, the Army, and anything else that could befall them before Dolphin received our package, and I hoped that the cookies’ admirable survival techniques would rub off on him.
I’m happy to report that Dolphin did receive the cookies and they were a great success with him and with his unit. (He graciously shared a few). In the months that followed, we didn’t hear much from him, but I knew he must be OK because he had left fortified by the biscuits of warriors. And sure enough, we received quite recently, the happy news that he had returned home safe and sound, with photos showing men from his unit making friends with some Iraqi kids.
When I bake Anzac cookies, I always think of those First World War soldiers from Australia and New Zealand, who left home to fight in a war in a part of the world that must have seemed so incredibly remote from home. That generation of soldiers in the Great War were young men in their twenties, for the most part, fighting for a motherland that most of them had never seen—fighting for a world that was soon to disappear, and for what? So that they, like their European counterparts, could be mown down like grass on the beaches of Gallipoli, or die of blood poisoning on the island of Skyros, or be suffocated by poison gas in the trenches in France, and leave just a handful of memorable poems, or photographs or, in the case of my grandfather—one of the lucky ones who did return home to his motherland—a few, faded letters describing not the horrors of war, but the sound of nightingales singing in the trees.
Maureen gave me the task of writing on the theme of thoughts about home in this sojourn, and I’m grateful to her for raising a subject that sounds simple enough on the surface, but which, more than anything, connects us to all that is most strongly experienced in our lives. It seems fitting, somehow, that the most mundane of everyday things, an enamel plate, with home baked cookies on it, should not just make me want to think of home, but to remember all those who have to leave it—often without much faith that they will return. But it is, nonetheless, proof of the importance of such simple things—these things that sustain, these things that can travel the miles between the familiar and the unimaginable—these things that connect despite difference, despite strife.
A package from home—can you imagine the moment at which the gift is received? The simple thing that is the speckled plate of cookies—well, first you have to open the can and breathe in that unique scent as you do. The powerful smell of Anzac cookies hits you right away—they could have arrived fresh from your mother’s kitchen this morning. The taste of oats, coconut, syrup, and the slightly fizzy taste of the baking soda as it rushes like a wave across your tongue—this is simply home, in and of itself. So the women who baked for their Anzac soldiers, who cleverly invented a cookie that would withstand all the vagaries of the long journey to war, were not just sending their men nourishment. I think they understood very well that they were also sending their men home.
- Name changed to protect the innocent, although Dolphin’s real name did come about as a result of being born on the night of a particularly important game between two NFL teams. Fortunately for him, the team with the least controversial name won.
My favorite First World War poem
Returning, We Hear the Larks
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song –
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
Isaac Rosenberg