Nationalism & cosmopolitanism: can they coexist?
“I'M EVERYTHING, AND I'M NOTHING. I’M ALL THOSE CULTURES LIVED BY ME, AND AT THE SAME TIME I’M EVEN NOT THE CULTURE I WAS BORN IN. “
I wrote it in 2021 when I was deeply immersed into my Thai life and was surrounded by such a foreign but mesmerizing culture. Many things have happened after that. Or better to say: one big thing that has changed almost everything… And not only globally but on a personal level, a very intimate one.
One of the deliberate actions that an empire does with its colonizes nations and cultures, is to make them to be confused: it exterminates the native language, destroys art and literature works, kills the native artists and cultural figures, replaces the ideas and brings its own ones claiming “you are not what you’d thought, you are actually what I tell you are”. Without your language, your own history and your own stories, with a lie being told everywhere it’s easy to be lost. To be confused.
I can’t tell that I was completely confused. I’d always known who I was and who I wasn’t. However, there still were many gaps and lacunas in my personal perception of national identity. The war quickly filled them adding more answers to the question “what my culture is and what makes me a Ukrainian”. And besides rationalism in this matter there’s something more, something irrational that makes me want to be only in Ukraine in the times of a great fight for our survival. Not sure what this irrational is.
Nevertheless, a person who owns the world is still there inside me. The one who breathes the world with the eyes open and feels at home in so many places. I love my country very much but I also love the world outside of it and what it does to me. I like to be surrounded by a reality different from where I grew up: when swimming in the ocean I have to be aware of the sharks; when in the rivers there are crocodiles; when the air smells of the volcano ashes. I like when I have to get vaccines of the diseases not existing where I was born, when there’s no language I’m used to from childhood but the languages I have to learn from scratch. I like the strong tastes of unusual food, and when it becomes usual so coming back home I need to adjust back. I like when people behave differently from what I know, and I have to learn the unspoken rules of a foreign society. I like to become another person, a person who sounds different, who moves differently… It makes me feel that I live another life, it creates an illusion that I have multiple lives, and I can be so many versions of me in them. I think, it enchants me with a mirage of owning freedom in its most existential meaning. “I’m everything and I’m nothing” is a very testy feeling, and I’m not sure I can ever give it up.
