Leaving Freedonia Behind

First, a confession: despite what I may have told you in September 2001, I am not now, and never have been, Freedonian. Freedonia, as you may recall, is the fictional country Groucho Marx rules in Duck Soup; for a few weeks at the beginning of freshman year, I claimed it, with a straight face, as my homeland. Because Harvard first-years are loath to admit their ignorance, my declaration of citizenship went mostly unchallenged. Sometimes my fellow first-years, brows furrowed, would ask where Freedonia was, again, and—because these conversations generally took place over dinner in Annenberg—I’d sketch a map of the Balkans on a paper napkin.

“Look,” I’d say, drawing little upside-down V’s to represent mountains. “It’s here, nestled between Croatia and Slovenia. It’s really mountainous. Actually, we’re famous for our mountain goats, which have enormous curling horns, dainty hooves and this very fine wool. You’ve probably heard of them.”

“Oh, right,” my classmates would say, nodding. “Right. Freedonia.”

Like so much else I did during my first year at Harvard, my declaration of Freedonian citizenship seemed like a good idea at the time, and now like mortifyingly pretentious posturing in retrospect. But unlike much of what I did during my freshman year, my declaration of Freedonian citizenship sprang from an insecurity that still haunts me: a lack of cultural identity.

It hadn’t seemed particularly important at home, where, on various occasions I was mistaken for a Brazilian, an Irishwoman and a Russian. But I do not possess a true cultural identity. I am a mongrel—an improbable amalgam of Midwestern white trash and New York City Jew (which makes for an interesting holiday season, culinarily speaking). Back home, I took my status as a cultural chameleon in stride. In my eastern Massachusetts hometown, where your roots need to extend five generations before you’re counted as native, and where non-natives are branded “wash-ashores” even after fifty years’ residency, my lack of cultural identity didn’t seem particularly important. I wasn’t a native—not by the five-generation standard, at least—and in my hometown, that negative definition was enough.

When I got to Harvard, though, I was startled to notice that most of my classmates defined themselves—at least in part—through their cultural heritage. One of my first-year roommates was half-Finnish, and coached us on the correct pronunciation of sauna (“Not ‘saw-na!’ There’s no such thing as a ‘saw-na.’ It’s ‘sow-ow-na!”); another, of Uruguayan descent, explained the finer points of gender roles in Uruguay, as well as why she found bad Uruguay-related puns so unfunny; a third taught us Greek invectives. Neither was cultural identification a phenomenon limited to my room; at the activities fair held for first-years, representatives for organizations like the Hellenic Society gave out candy and encouraged students to sign up for e-mail lists. Though I looked, I did not find a table representing students of combined white-trash and Jewish descent. This was about the time I started telling people I was Freedonian.

And while, happily, I have abandoned this habit, I still feel that my cultural non-identity puts me in a minority at Harvard. Given enough time, most conversations between acquaintances here will devolve into a discussion of the participants’ heritage, usually by way of a discussion of the etymology of their surnames. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether my classmates’ cultural identities aren’t as newfound as my Freedonian one—albeit more authentic. Our cultural identity isn’t important in our hometowns, where we know each others’ families, and where we tend to take certain parts of our lives—what we eat for dinner, say, or how we celebrate holidays—for granted. At Harvard, though, away from our families, we begin to see the observances we took for granted as unique to our cultural communities. Our cultural identities work as a sort of shorthand for the experiences we share in common; cultural organizations are so appealing because they can provide an instant connection to people whose lives are in some basic way similar to ours.

My frustration with my lack of cultural identity springs, I think, from my inability to form this sort of connection. Though I’ve not stooped to reclaim my Freedonian citizenship, I have, at times, been sorely tempted. This weekend, after many telephone calls conducted at a high volume in what sounded to me like particularly vituperative Greek, my roommate departed for a Greek club in Boston with a swarm of people with whom she shares little more than a common heritage. And as I watched her go, part of me wished that I could have a posse of Freedonians.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.