In a world where migration constantly weaves new identities and is even seen as a threat to national identities, countries in Europe are throwing all their political weight to slow such a natural process. Being from a multicultural and multinational background can be a problem in a world that sees new identities as a threat.
On my life’s journey, I made over four decades ago one of the greatest discoveries and found peace with my multicultural self in my native Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Finnish Seaman’s Church. Even if such pleasant landscapes no longer witness my patient silence and stance, they are now memories that have turned into imaginary cities of the mind, where every building stands out eager to tell you a story.
Even though I have visited the Finnish Seaman’s Church on many occasions, the days I spent there as a brief tenant in 1999 brought me back to the beginning of a long journey I began in the 1990s.
The Finnish Seaman’s Church at aт San Juan 234, Buenos Aires. Photo by Enrique Tessieri.
For months, I kept the secret to myself. I didn’t even dare reveal it to my wife. Living a few years later in the northern part of South America, in the twilight quagmire of the violence and strife that has gripped Colombia for decades, I have decided to share the secret with you.
Dante and Jacob
William Blake (1757-1827) once said that improvements make straight roads but the crooked ones without improvement are roads of genius. Was my multicultural background my crooked road?
Both of my great-grandparents had migrant migrant backgrounds. One of them, Dante, was an anarchist sent to a prison on the island of Pantelleria, located between Sicily and Tunisia. Jacob’s great-grandfather, Jacob Weikain, a tinsmith, had emigrated to Finland from Latvia in 1799.
My family has been on the move for generations. A journey may take generations to complete, if ever. Is this the reason why in my deepest thoughts I am always traveling somewhere else, searching elsewhere? Does it reveal why I feel many times like standing alone in a railway station waiting for the last train home, feeling like being in the land of nowhere with a sense of being somewhere else?
At the end of the last century, the Finns were sowing the seeds of their independence from the Russian Empire. Italy comprising several kingdoms, duchies, and city-states, became a unified country in 1861.
Even if Dante and Jacob are talks of the past, and when they were alive I was talk of the future, I can say confidently that the yearning and restlessness that I feel is because of them or possibly it has to do with the fact that I was born in an enormous transit lounge called Argentina. I am like many that were born in that land: my great-grandparents arrived as migrants and after three generations, their great-grandchildren became migrants again.
Due to my multinational background, I used to feel out of place but understand such feelings were nothing more than my prejudices. Thanks to the Finnish Seamen’s Church of Buenos Aires, I don’t feel out of place at all no matter where I am.
The world is becoming a very small place as time races ahead. For this reason, I believe that my children and grandchildren will be luckier than I am. In the millennium we’ll be able to enter and leave cultures and lifestyles and be if I wish – from many places and will not be judged as a result.
As long as we are not overcome by racial hatred, greed, and power, life in the millennium will be like being in a vast city like Buenos Aires, London, or New York, where everyone is from somewhere but where no one is a real or imagined native.
If we all learned to understand that we are nothing more than temporary beings on Earth searching endlessly for that hill where the grass is greener on the other side where we can be from nowhere to be from everywhere.