Caught in a Cross-Cultural Stew

I'm in a cross-cultural stew.

I just co-curated an exhibition for the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum titled Healing: A Cultural Exploration, which looks at the ways that different cultures approach the journey to well-being. In researching the 45-plus cultures represented in the show, it became impossible to dismiss the house-sized and not-so-astounding elephant in the room: we are all the same.

Sounds simplistic, and is simplistic, but nevertheless true. There is no doubt that we are also different from one another--say, like camels and monkeys. But since people aren't exactly leaping to embrace their differences lately, checking out the similarities might open a doorway into our common humanity.

I am not African-American. I am a Black, American woman originally from Haiti, and I am married to a Frenchman. Help! He is Parisian of Corsican ancestry; I am from the Caribbean, and we both speak French. The stew thickens. I recently participated in a book club's discussion of my new book on the amusing relationship challenges of an American woman married to a Frenchman (yes, it's really fiction, okay, 50% fiction). Disappointingly, the group's questions and comments focused more on my personal relationship with my husband rather than the pros and cons of the book itself. But an African-American woman got around to asking a question that provided food for thought. She asked if I had purposely chosen to play down my blackness when writing the book (what she meant was the main character's race, not my own. It's fiction!!). The first interesting thing about her comment is that the character's Haitian origin is disclosed in the very beginning of the book, and the subject of her "blackness" is also a central issue in a later chapter. The second, and more edifying element of her question spoke to that old race relations monster, ever waiting for the right moment to jump out and scream boo! Haitian-American meaning not African-American meaning not Black enough? Hello, Obama.

In the end, my race is meaningless. My French sculptor/mixed media photographer husband has more in common with our Senegalese photographer friend than he does with most of our African-American friends because, on the most basic level, they both spent a lot of time in Paris and they understand each other's jokes. Between his heavy accent and mixed metaphors, no one, and I mean no one ever understands what my husband is talking about. I have more in common, culturally, with Haitians and New Yorkers (black or white or other) than anybody else because, bottom line, we understand each other's jokes (I grew up, and went to high school and college in New York). Why does it always have to come back to race? All I have to say to that is a big, fat yawn. I know racism exists and is at the bottom of many a societal ill--consider this: all that black on black killing in gang-infested neighborhoods? Change that to white on white and see how fast they call in the National Guard. However, not everything comes down to race.

I told the woman at the book club that my book's story speaks not to an interracial couple but to a cross-cultural couple, and that, in this context, an emphasis on race would have been de trop. It's funny because the point of the book--other than to have a good laugh at the shocking differences between Americans and the French--is to show how people from Venus and people from Mars can love each other in spite of their dangerous, gap-inducing differences.

My co-curator on the Healing exhibit is a Jewish American woman married to a German with a difficult personality. I am a Haitian American woman married to an irreverent Frenchman with thorny character traits. Somehow we all manage to get along separately as couples, and together as friends. Can you beat that? In the meantime, as our healing exhibit illustrates, the Batak people of Northern Sumatra and modern-day Greeks and Moroccans; Native American Indians and East Indians; people from Wyoming and New York; and tribes from Africa to Israel all believe in one way or another that to achieve a state of harmony in one's life, the assistance of magical beings, spirits, or ancestors is needed. It turns out that common ground isn't so hard to find. All we have to do is look down at our feet to notice that we make contact with it every day.