Native

This is a piece I performed last week at Write Club at the Hideout. Two opposing ideas. Two writers. I wrote about "native." The incomparable Mary Fons wrote about "foreign." Mary won. The picture above is what I looked like. Here's what I wrote.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a smallmouth bass

First off, you are adorable

Those golden iridescent scales cascading down your back

That Betty Boop mouth. Sensual. Small.

You are, and I quote a very reputable fishing site, a “plucky game fish that gives good fight on the line”

Well well well…

Native is what is here and what belongs here

It is the indigenous and the natural and the group with deepest roots

BUT

We can’t deny that in this globalized, post-colonial age, we are, and should be a little suspicious of the term

The word NATIVE has been used to delegitimize the colonized (“the natives are restless”—hint: they mean DARK people!)

The word NATIVE has been adopted by conservative cranks to describe all those guys that they CLAIM were disenfranchised by our most recent election results  (hint: they mean WHITE people!)

So I want to take NATIVE out of the realm of politics altogether, and wash it clean of its historical muck in the fresh, sweet waters of that closest body of water. Lake Michigan.

Back to you, a smallmouth bass, shimmering through the chilly damp atmosphere, maybe blowing a kiss to a drum fish, maybe winking at a perch (or not, cause you know, no eyelids)

It’s a good life

Swimming peacefully through the green-brown haze of the Greatest of Great Lakes, and the world, is not your oyster, but your delicious local crayfish

When all of a sudden, it’s coming at you, the gaping maw, a huge hole in the middle of the lake, framed by teeth

You are staring into the abyss

Then your eyes meet the eyes of this creature

(I mean this metaphorically, because not only do you not have eyelids, your eyes are actually on the side of your head)

You are looking down the throat of your own destruction

You may have heard of the terrifying ASIAN CARP. The possible invasion of this species of hulking meaty fish, gnashing at the water around them, their bottomless hunger, their rapacious need to eat everything in sight sends environmentalists into a frothy panic

They don’t belong here, the Asian Carp

Their presence destroys the delicate balance

They are the foreign, and they will destroy the native

And you, the innocent little fish, just trying to swim around

Is it your fault that globalization, that the rapid speed at which every beast, fish or fowl can now travel to parts of the glove where they were never meant to be means that your very ability to gurgle and spawn should be threatened by pre-historic monsters from Asia?

It is not.

It is our fault. The humans. We enjoy our first world access to cheap electronics that sending boats around the world allows. The destructive foreign influence has merely hitched a ride on our greed. But still, the native will pay.

Now I am fully aware of the racialized undertones to this story. Lest you fear that I espouse any sort of xenophobic, nativist philosophy, let me assure you that I am big fan of the human Asian-American community, having gone so far as to MARRY an Asian-American

For you see my husband was raised by foreigners

And let me tell you, no one loves all things deeply, disgustingly American like a man who was a little boy with 2 heavily accented parents. He’s at home right now figuring out how to deep fry a turkey for god’s sake.

I’m glad his parents were both brave enough to become foreigners in a strange land. I love foreigners. We live in a city, which seems by definition a celebration of the foreign. Cities are the places where foreigners arrive, where they buy cheap property and open restaurants. Where they get their footing in a new world and I am thankful for that for both ethical and culinary reasons. But that is merely the built environment. Nature, that thing that is native by definition, peeks through the cracks in the pavement, the spaces between parking lots. There are places you can stand, on the shores of Lake Michigan, within the city limits, where you can watch the native grasses swaying, and listening to the birds who have sung the same songs since long before you came here.

Everything I know about the native small-mouth bass I learned from the aforementioned turkey frier, my own little Asian Carp. He’s dragged me out to the lakefront at ungodly hours of the morning to go fishing. Here you see Polish grandfathers, sipping their Ice Mountain beer as the sun comes up. Vietnamese men who have arrived on bicycles, balancing heavy buckets as they pedal. Men from places in Africa I can’t identify, whispering rapid French to one another. They each love the lake. They trade tips and disagree about which of the native species is the tastiest. And if you walk past them on an early morn, you’ll see them periodically pull a fish from the Lake frown at it, and throw it behind them to be fed to the seagulls. Foreign, invasive species. These foreigners share one thing, a love of the native.