Author's Note: I was naturalized in Philadelphia during the 4th of July week celebrations. They asked me to deliver an address on behalf of everyone being naturalized with me. Several people in the audience suggested I send the text of the address to the NPR Democracy Forum, where it first appeared. For what it's worth, here it is:
Naturalization Ceremony
Philadelphia, 7 July 1995
Namaste.
In Sanskrit, the ancient language of my ancestors, the Aryans, and the core of the Indo-European family of languages, that means "I greet you as a kindred soul." That phrase has special meaning for me today, on this momentous occasion, in this rite of passage that I share with each of you, my kindred souls.
I am thrice honored: honored to accept the responsibility of speaking on your behalf today, honored to be doing so in the week that this country forged itself a new identity much as we ourselves are doing now, and honored especially to be performing this symbolic act on the very spot at Independence Hall where it all began in this great city of Philadelphia, the first capital of our new nation.
I have three responsibilities to discharge. To speak to you and the citizens who are taking us into their fold; to speak on your behalf to them; and to speak as myself. With your permission, I shall speak largely as myself, for while I can empathize with many of the emotions you are going through I can only speak with utter clarity of my own. To do otherwise would be presumptuous on my part and do less than justice to you.
With that as a preamble, let me say that I can feel the most palpable emotion each of us does now: the bittersweet anticipation of this moment, the twinge of sadness and nostalgia for the country of our birth, and the excitement of stepping into our new roles in the country of our choice. Indeed everyone in this country, by herself, or by proxy through her ancestors, with the exception of the native American, has been through a similar initiation. It is our most common bond.
It is also the key to why I am here today. There is no other nation that I could countenance committing myself to as I am to this one. This is neither arrogance nor fastidiousness. This is a country built by people from everywhere else, people who have found a common purpose and forged a common history. I could never, for instance, see myself truly becoming an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a Swede. Countries such as these would always have me feel like an outsider on the inside, where it counts most. But here in America we are a new tribe, one defined by a common vision, not by DNA or long servitude to a particular dynasty of monarchs. That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
I have a Serbian colleague in Denmark who has lived there all her life. On hearing of my naturalization, Danijela asked me how it felt, and told me she never thought of herself as Danish, only Serbian. Turks in Germany, Greeks in Britain, Koreans in Japan, Tibetans in India, all have expressed similar views to me.
The following story illustrates the difference that makes all the difference. Last year I was in a restaurant in London, a successful institution that serves nouvelle Continental cuisine, operated by an older Indian who was obviously a long-time resident. When a diner at the next table asked him where he was from and how long he was in the business, he replied in impeccably modulated Oxford English that he was Indian, and had been in business in London for the last forty years. Last month in New York I heard a young Indian, a recent immigrant by all indications, declare with a characteristic movement of his head, "I was born in Bombay only, but I am being American now!" That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
The very diversity of America makes for the possibility of the kernel of a process of peace, nurtured here, between strife-riven peoples elsewhere in the world. Where else do Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Turks, Serbs and Bosnians, get a chance to really know each other? The first person I ever met from the former East Pakistan is now one of my dearest friends. The Serbian who worked on my house has a Moslem assistant. My Israeli colleague in school was inseparable from his Syrian friend. The Turk who drove my taxi last week was working for a Greek. It reminds me of a short story by O.Henry where the last surviving member of one feuding Tennessee family sets out to shoot the last surviving member of the other, now living in New York City.
The first guy (let's call him McCoy) arrives at Grand Central after a long journey, clutching a piece of paper with the address of his sworn enemy (let's call him Hatfield) in one hand and a six-gun in the other. After much disorientation by the din and bustle of the city, the pace of its life, and the treatment meted out to a disoriented hillbilly by the average denizen of that metropolis, McCoy arrives at Hatfield's door and sees him step outside, an easy target, not even armed. "Cousin Hatfield! Cousin Hatfield!" he shouts, tears of joy running down his face as he hugs his surprised intended victim, glad to have found a friend...
My own story is that of the accidental immigrant. My father was a diplomat, and I grew up with the privilege of traveling the world. English has always been my first language, as it was with him, and with my mother, and with my grandparents, although we spoke our mother tongue with fluency and other languages besides. I grew up more familiar with the literature of Salinger and Flannery O'Connor, of Poe and Mickey Spillane than the average American child. It has therefore been much easier for me than for most immigrants to adjust. My story is not one of fleeing an oppressor, arriving with the clothes on my back, coping with adversity, learning the language, and learning to survive. To those here whose stories more closely resemble that, and to the millions before and hence whose stories indeed do, I salute you. That is the key to understanding the phenomenon of America.
I came here to go to graduate school, not as an immigrant. One year stretched into several, until I came to realize that this was where I did belong. My father, Mark Twain, and people like Pat Robertson, in that order, each have something to do with my being here today. My father was an intellectual deeply involved in government. He was influenced by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, of Thoreau and de Tocqueville, and was passionate about individual liberty and the never-ending fight against tyranny. He saw first hand the effect of the Second World War and the Holocaust. I remember his giving me Ann Frank's diary to read when I was the age she was when she wrote it, and taking me to see the closet where she hid from the Nazis. He was passionate about how precious and fragile were the rights most take for granted and he deeply influenced my view of the primacy of individual liberty.
Mark Twain was an American in the truest sense of the word. He was a man far ahead of his time. I was much influenced by his other than mainstream works, in particular 'A Connecticut Yankee' (an indictment of monarchy), 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' (an indictment of slavery and prejudice), and collections of essays like the Brick Moon which proclaim and celebrate the rights of women. This is starkly relevant today when small but very vocal and influential groups are seeking in the face of apathetic public reaction to abridge and abrogate those rights, to demonize the disenfranchised in a time when the gap between rich and poor is wider here than in any other industrialized society, and to promote intolerance and prejudice in the name of a better society. These people are the Pharisees of the day, closed-minded, fearful, hateful, insecure, bent on enforcing their exclusive truth on everyone else in a manner more reminiscent of George Orwell's Big Brother than the New Testament's Jesus Christ, whose attitude to social problems if reflected in a contemporary would be dismissed by the likes of Limbaugh as dangerously and laughably liberal.
This is how I came to the dawning realization that I was not going home, because I was home. Because my ideals were this country's ideals. Because I felt passionately about its well-being and its fate. And because I wanted to participate fully, and make my contribution more tangible.
This is now your responsibility as well. Freedom is fragile. Freedom can be taken away much more easily than tyranny can be overthrown, and with much greater subtlety. Freedom must be nurtured continuously. We cannot take freedom for granted. The extreme right is no different from the extreme left in that neither is a respecter of freedom and individual liberty. Stalin and Hitler were two sides of the same coin. Freedom is sustained by questioning and debate. Freedom is extinguished with the suppression of questioning and debate. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the Senate's attempt to censor traffic on the Internet has enormous ramifications for personal freedom. It has been less than two decades that communist and fascist governments alike were registering people's typewriters to trace typewritten copies of 'subversive' books like Orwell's 1984, Tolstoy's 'War & Peace', and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
It is NOT "America, love it or leave it." It is "America, question it if you love it, and keep trying make it better." Otherwise America, like the kingdom of Ozymandias' in Shelley's poem, is destined to become a distant memory. We must challenge our traditions because truth without questioning is false.
Defend that freedom. Even a nation conceived with it as a fundamental founding principle has hiccups without active vigilance on our part. We must guard against the hiccups and make sure they do not become seizures. Never again should anyone be treated as the Native Americans once were. Never again should slavery and prejudice be the law of the land. Never again should we allow for a variant of McCarthyism to return, or of the internment camps that Japanese Americans experienced. Never again should conditions permit a Kent State or Jackson State to happen. This country is too good, is too special, has too much potential, is too important an example for the rest of the world to risk its loss. Let's not romanticize: that's self-delusion. Let's not ignore or gloss over: that's dishonest. Let's look at this country of ours steadily, look at it whole, accept it as one would a parent or a child, love it, love the idea of it, and work to make it work.
But how we do that is of paramount importance. To me, the single most significant statement that Mahatma Gandhi made was, "There are many causes for which I would die, but none for which I would kill."
Take nationalism with a pinch of salt. True patriotism is not us versus them. It is working for the betterment of our country while recognizing that we are part of a larger community of nations on a very tiny planet with a shared ecosystem. Beware of the jingoists, beware of those who get more worked up over a symbol than the substance it represents, over a flag than a hungry child, over a controversial picture in a museum than adult illiteracy, over prayer in a classroom than affordable daycare, over erecting religious symbols in public squares than helping people build homes, over a welfare mother than an S&L thief, over the ownership of a killing weapon than succor to a dying man. There is a word for this, and it is hypocrisy. And such hypocrisy is terribly dangerous.
And what does this mean to you, to us? Get involved! Too many immigrant groups build enclaves in the image of their home worlds, hermetically sealed economic cocoons, interact among themselves, watch their own movies, befriend their own people, listen to their own music, and neglect the world outside. Get involved!
Get involved with the larger community; provide an infusion of the good skills and values you bring with you to the children and people of other communities who could benefit most. Find out about Head Start, about Big Brothers and Big Sisters, about volunteer organizations and community groups. Read. Think. Talk. To lots of different people. And for God's sake, vote. Vote! Vote! Vote!! Citizenship is as much about responsibilities as it is rights. And exercising your responsibility to vote responsibly is the single most important thing you can do as an American.
Having railed against symbolism for its own sake, I am still embarking on this new journey with a symbolic act: making a contribution to a Native American fund as my way of acknowledging and paying respect to the first inhabitants of our nation.
The following words are ones I am speaking for the very first time, and those for whom I speak are hearing them for the first time in a very different way:
My fellow Americans, on your behalf, I am happy to accept the rights as well as the responsibilities of citizenship. We will each do our best.