Mosaics and Melting Pot

My niece, Sarah, is doing a course at Western on twentieth century immigrants in Canada and the United State that explores the notions of “cultural mosaic” and “melting pot” -- ideas that had currency when I was still in school. As a consequence my interest was renewed. I don’t often find myself in sympathy with the British philosopher A.C. Grayling, but I think there may be something in his view that rigid theories of multiculturalism and assimilation both have their risks. He argues cogently that multiple, complex human identity is the only way that a global society can exist in harmony.

Not that I advocate an abandonment of community, but rather a recognition that while community can support, it can also entrap.

As a part of her program Sarah is reading Jeffrey Eugenides Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Middlesex, a book that I had previously avoided because of its controversial subject matter. But Sarah made me curious so I decided to read along. Middlesex traces the story of Calliope Stephanides, who has been raised as a girl but later doctors discover that she is in fact a hermaphrodite. She has inherited a recessive gene as a consequence of incest and inbreeding. Shockingly, Callie’s grandparents were siblings.

Born in an isolated village in Asia Minor, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, grew up sharing a bedroom. Their parents died as they entered adolescence. With few potential partners to choose from, sexual curiousity led to a mutual attraction. It might have stopped there had they not been caught up in the turmoil and violence that erupted during the war between Greece and Turkey in 1922. Left with nothing, and fighting to survive the trauma, they turned to one another for physical comfort. Eventually they fled to American and conspiring to hide their relationship, married. Their story plays out against the pageant of 20 century America, with its jostling cultural and ethnic evolution. At one point Lefty is stirred up in a literal “melting pot” at a Ford Motor Company English graduation ceremony.

Callie herself becomes a kind of metaphor for the entrapment of community and the disconnection in our global society.

If I find parts of the story shocking, I wonder how Sarah sees it. Much has been made of the fact that many of today’s youth are post racist. They don’t make judgments about race or sexual orientation and partnerships and pairings reflect a jumble of colours, ethnicities and social and economic backgrounds. And yet, can they grasp life experience so circumscribed that choice was reduced to a close relation?

We often forget that certainly in the nineteenth century, marriage between blood relations was relatively common. Queen Victoria was paired with her cousin Albert, and even Darwin married his first cousin. Does Sarah even know that several generations ago within her own family, the grandchildren of two sisters married? Her father descends directly from that liaison. Can she imagine a time when travel of even short distances could take days, when personal acquaintance was limited to a few dozen souls? There was no internet, no chat rooms and no online dating. And the only good-looking boy within 50 miles might be your own brother.

Middlesex is a fascinating read, not only for its sometimes prurient, headlong narrative style, but for the textured layers of juxtaposed ideas that prod conventional thinking about community, assimilation, ethnicity, sexuality and love. As part of the mainstream, it can be hard to find a reference point with those living on the fringe, but just as Lori Lansen’s, The Girls, challenged the conventional “freakish” stereotyping of conjoined twins, Eugenides offers us access to a better understanding of the “other.” And in doing so, it also gives us a new perspective on the cultural mélange we now inhabit.