[A]s a psychological choice, the exilic position may become not only too arduous but too easy. Perhaps the chief risk of privileging the exilic narrative is a psychic split—living in a story in which one’s past becomes radically different from the present and in which the lost homeland becomes sequestered in the imagination as a mythic, static realm. That realm can be idealized or demonized, but the past can all to easily become not only “another country” but a space of projections and fantasies. Some people decide to abandon the past, never to look back. For others, the great lure is nostalgia—an excess of memory. —Eva Hoffman in “The New Nomads”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, Andre Aciman, ed.

In a way, we are nothing more—or less—than an encoded memory of our heritage.

It is because these things go so deep, because they are not only passed on to us but are us, that one’s original home is a potent structure and force and that being uprooted from it is so painful. Real dislocation, the loss of all familiar external and internal parameters, is not glamorous, and it is not cool. It is a matter not of willful psychic positioning but of an upheaval in the deep material of the self.

Is it then all pain and no gain? Of course not.

Being deframed, so to speak, from everything familiar, makes for a certain fertile detachment and gives one new ways of observing and seeing. It brings you up against certain questions that otherwise could easily remain unasked and quiescent, and brings to the fore fundamental problems that might otherwise simmer inaudibly in the background. This is perhaps the great advantage, for a writer, of exile, the compensation for the loss and the formal bonus&mdashthat it gives you a perspective, a vantage point.

But the perspective one gains from dislocation is, of course, not only retrospective but prospective. Exile places one at an oblique angle to one’s new world and makes every emigrant, willy-nilly, into an anthropologist and relativist; for to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute—it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seemingly natural aspects of our identities and social reality are constructed rather than given and that they could be arranged, shaped, articulated in quite another way.

—Eva Hoffman in “The New Nomads”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, Andre Aciman, ed.

[O]ne certain outcome of exile is the creation of a bipolar personal world. Spatially, the world becomes riven into two parts, divided by an uncrossable barrier. Temporally, the past is all of a sudden on one side of a divide, the present on the other. —Eva Hoffman in “The New Nomads”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, Andre Aciman, ed.

• It has helped process and grow from my immigration experience.
• It solidified my decision to make writing the focus of my work.
• It triggered the epiphany that led to my writing and publishing (on demand) of my book, Guerrilla Yardwork: The First-Time Home Owner’s Handbook.

The time has come for another adventure. I am joining the love of my life Lindsay on a yearlong trip around the world (we’re leaving on June 17). We will be documenting our journey at Where Is Your Toothbrush?. While the trip is a culmination of a dream, it also means American Robotnik will take a break. Aside from the scheduled immigration experience-related quotes there will be no (or very rare) posts here for at least 12-14 months. I look forward to sharing my life as an American immigrant when I return stateside in the summer of 2014. 

Thank you for reading American Robotnik. Now please head over to Where Is Your Toothbrush?.

Sincerely,

Peter Korchnak, American Robotnik

Their home now was a country in which they had not been born. Their place in society they had established themselves through the hardships of crossing and settlement. The process had changed them, had altered the most intimate aspect of their lives. Every effort to cling to inherited ways of acting and thinking had led into a subtle adjustment by which those ways were given a new American form. No longer Europeans, could the immigrants then say that they belonged in America? —Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

We are come to rest and push our roots more deeply by the year. But we cannot push away the heritage of having been once all strangers in the land; we cannot forget the experience of having been all rootless, adrift. Building our own nests now in our tiredness of the transient, we will not deny our past as a people in motion and will find still a place in our lives for the values of flight.

In our flight, unattached, we discovered what it was to be an individual, a man apart from place and station. In our flight, through the newness, we discovered the unexpected, invigorating effects of recurrent demands upon the imagination, upon all our human capacities. We will not have our nest become again a moldy prison holding us in with its tangled web of comfortable habits. It may be for us rather a platform from which to launch new ascensions that will extend the discoveries of the immigrants whose painful break with their past is our past. We will justify their pitiable struggle for dignity and meaning by extending it in our lives toward an end they had not the opportunity to envision.

—Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

The life of the immigrant was that of a man diverted by unexpected pressures away from the established channels of his existence. Separated, he was never capable of acting with the assurance of habit; always in motion, he could never rely upon roots to hold him up. Instead he had ever to toil painfully from crisis to crisis, as an individual alone, make his way past the discontinuous obstacles of a strange world.

But America was the land of separated men. Its development in the eighteenth century and the Revolution had set it apart from Europe; expansion kept it in a state of unsettlement. A society already fluid, the immigrants made more fluid still; an economy already growing, they stimulated yet more rapid growth; into a culture never uniform they introduced a multitude of diversities. The newcomers were on the way toward being Americans almost before they stepped off the boat, because their own experience of displacement had already introduced them to what was essential in the situation of Americans.

—Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

The old folk knew then they would not come to belong, not through their own experience nor through their offspring. The only adjustment they had been able to make to life in the United States had been one that involved the separateness of their group, one that increased their awareness of the differences between themselves and the rest of the society. In that adjustment they had always suffered from the consciousness they were strangers. The demand that they assimilate, that they surrender their separateness, condemned them always to be outsiders. In practice, the free structure of American life permitted them with few restraints to go their own way, but under the shadow of a consciousness that they would never belong. They had thus completed their alienation from the culture to which they had come, as from that which they had left. —Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

Bulgaria: Horo Dancing with Portland’s Bulgarians, 5/3

• Friday, May 3, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
• Podkrepa Hall, 2116 North Killingsworth St, Portland, Oregon
• $5 suggested donation and finger-food potluck

Come and join us for a fun night of dancing and learning.

Poland: True Life Trio, 5/4

• Saturday, May 4, 7:00 pm
• Polish Hall/St. Stanislaus Church, 3916 N. Interstate Ave., Portland, Oregon
• Tickets: $10
• Band website and Facebook page

Polish Music @ Polish Hall presents True Life Trio, an evening of Polish and Eastern European Songs. True Life Trio weaves sumptuous vocal harmonies and sultry rhythms from Eastern Europe, the Americas & beyond. This innovative trio explores the creative possibilities of cross-fertilization of different traditions with unlikely timbres connecting Bulgaria to the Bayou.

Czech/Slovak Republics: Hospoda, 5/7

• Tuesday, May 7, 6:00 p.m.–close
• McTarnahans Taproom, 2730 NW 31st, Portland, Oregon
• Free

The monthly gathering of Portland’s Czech and Slovak community. Guests welcome.

The Balkans: Kafana Klub, 5/7

• Tuesday, May 7, 7:00 p.m. dance lesson, 8:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m. live music
• Al Forno Ferruzza, 2738 NE Alberta St., Portland, Oregon
• $3-$5 cover

Join us for the unbeatable combination of live Balkan music and great Italian food. See you there!

Bulgaria: Iliana Bozhanova and Todor Yankov, 5/8

• Wednesday, May 8, 7:30 p.m.-10:00 p.m.
• Chalet, 7045 SW Taylors Ferry Rd., Portland, Oregon
• $8
• Event flyer

We’re delighted to announce an evening workshop with Iliana Bozhanova and Todor Yankov in Portland. $8. Iliana will teach Bulgarian dances (and sing) with accordion played by Todor. Fun!

Hosted by Ciganski Igraci Balkan dancers and Kyklos International dancers. For more information, contact Jeanne Gibson, 503-233-1322, folkdance@comcast.net or Sonia Connolly, 503-334-6434, sonia@sundownarts.com.

The Balkans: Krebsic Orkestar, 5/10

• Friday, May 10, 8:30 p.m.–midnight
• Mississippi Pizza, Portland, Oregon
• $8, at the door; 21 and over
• Event page

Join us for another installment of Gypsy BrA$$ Dance Party with the incomparable local Balkan characters Krebsic Orkestar and our very special guest DJ Global Ruckus just to keep the BrA$$ a boomin’all night!!

Since [Eden], is there anyone who does not—in some way, on some level—feel that they are in exile? We feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from childhood, from our first family romance, from our authentic self. We feel there is an ideal sense of belonging, of community, of attunement with others and at-homeness with ourselves, that keeps eluding us. The tree of life is barred to us by a flaming sword, turning this way and that to confound us and make the task of approaching it harder.

One one level, exile is a universal experience.

—Eva Hoffman in “The New Nomads”, in: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, Andre Aciman, ed.