I’m stranger in my own country. When I first read the sentence, I of course misread it…
I read: “I’m a stranger in my own country”, and in misreading it my hair stood on end. The last time I heard this comment was from a rather unpleasant taxi driver in Brisbane as he was driving us to the airport. He had detected my British accent and asked me where I came from. Often being the “stranger” with a foreign accent you get asked this question a lot, and on many occasions I enjoy to give confusing answers, which will confound the person asking the question…Sometimes I say I am from Brazil, which i clearly am not (although i possibly could be), sometimes I say I am from Wales, or Luxembourg, places so fantastically small that people don’t have anything cliché to say about them so then you can just get on with talking about something else…. You see, I really am a strange stranger.
I turned the question around on the taxi driver and asked him where he was from. He said he was from Sydney but then eagerly added that he had to move away because there was too many foreigners, and then said: “I’m a stranger in my own (bloody) country”. I swallowed hard….this coming from an Australian! and not even half of the one hour taxi ride complete! The journey continued with all the trimmings of racial slander. I tried to side track the conversation by telling him that i had lived outside of the UK (“my own country”) for many years and there were many benefits to being a stranger and strangeness in general…but it did not stop his banal hatred. At the end of the journey (once we had paid) I told him that I hoped he could learn to like himself, which did cause a moment of confusion in his eyes. But I had misread the sentence. Proving that you often see and hear what you WANT to hear rather than what is really there, which also somehow fits with the story and the statement and is probably a good place to end.
Simon Will (for Gob Squad)
