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“Locals” by James Lasdun
They peopled landscapes casually like trees,
being there richly, never having gone there,
and whether clanning in cities or village-thin stands
were reticent as trees with those not born there,
and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands.
Others to them were always one of two
evils: the colonist or refugee.
They stared back, half-disdaining us, half-fearing;
inferring from our looks their destiny
as preservation or as clearing.
I envied them. To be local was to know
which team to support: the local team;
where to drop in for a pint with mates: the local;
best of all to feel by birthright welcome
anywhere; be everywhere a local …
Bedouin-Brython-Algonquins; always there
before you; the original prior claim
that made your being anywhere intrusive.
There, doubtless, in Eden before Adam
wiped them out and settled in with Eve.
Whether at home or away, whether kids
playing or saying what they wanted,
or adults chatting, waiting for a bus,
or, in their well-tended graves, the contented dead,
there were always locals, and they were never us.
(From Landscape with Chainsaw, 2001.)
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Reporters’ choice
I am no longer ashamed to admit that I don’t understand this at all.
It reminds me of how I felt when I first cane to Hendersonville.
Chas: It’s about how longtime residents of a place look with suspicion on newcomers.
Stanza 1: They never went to where they are from somewhere else, they’ve always been there. But they are suspicious of outsiders because they fear the outsiders could affect their lives in negative ways. Their fate is not, they believe, in their own hands.
Stanza 2: They divide all outsiders into two groups. Refugees, those who come to where the locals are seeking to integrate and take shelter; and colonists, those who will bring their own ideas and cultures into the local place and thereby change it.
Stanza 3: Outsiders might well envy locals for their familiarity and long-established patterns.
Stanza 4: Locals often go back for generations, making anyone new coming in an intruder not just into the present reality but long centuries of history. And (the reference to Adam and Eve) this has been part of human culture forever.
Stanza 5: We (the author’s point of view) can never be locals to anywhere. We’ve already moved too much, been too many places, to have put down those kind of roots.
Simple! Based on your second sentence though, I think you understood it perfectly.
You’re right Steve. The original denizens of H’ville don’t want us here. However, the hardware stores, Ford & Mercury dealers, radio stations and news papers were overjoyed that I came. They complain about the traffic on Four Season’s Blvd. I’m tempted to say, “If you want to see traffic, try the Washington Beltway.”
The natives have a point, however. I was reared in the South and I’m familiar with how things are. But there are many in the area who are from NY, Chicago, etc. and want to tell them (us) how it was better there. Some suggestions have been made in response to that.
But a lot of people here are “halfbacks”. That is, people from NY who went to Florida and discovered that that wasn’t what they wanted.
A fellow Lion and Sunday School class guy was telling me the other day why he came to FBC. He was a retired banker from Indiana. He joined a small church in Henderson Co. They welcomed him, made him chairman of the finance comm., etc. But he said, after ten years, he realized he “still wasn’t one of them”. i.e. He wasn’t the one they thought of when trying to make up a golf foursome. So, he came to FBC, where lots of us are from somewhere else.
In Charleston, in the ’40’s, you couldn’t break into the social scene no matter how rich you were unless your ancestors were pre Civil War.
I ride a ferry to and from the island where I live. On Friday, the ferry is crowded with people coming to the island for the weekend. They are loud and boistrous, the are often confused by little details of parking and other aspects of how the ferry procedure works. I sigh with irritation. Three years ago we moved to the island; I was just as clueless about all the ferry protocol. It only took three years to deceive myself into believing I am an “old timer.”