The United States Welcomes You

We’re happier when we chat to strangers, but our instinct is to ignore them https://t.co/ExmL3GSCWw via @researchdigest

— Tina Seelig (@tseelig) July 19, 2018

A tweet from Tina Seelig led to this interesting piece of research: 

It’s become a truism that humans are “social animals”. And yet, you’ve probably noticed – people on public transport or in waiting rooms seem to do everything they can not to interact…. This is the paradox explored by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder in a series of nine new studies involving members of the public on trains, planes, in taxis and a waiting room….

[that]  provides evidence of a “severe misunderstanding of the psychological consequences of social engagement”, thus providing a clue as to why, despite being social animals, we so often ignore each other.

And: 

A further interesting detail from the studies is that the pleasure of talking to strangers was observed for introverts and extraverts alike. “Removing the barrier to starting a conversation, rather than trying to increase a person’s own trait extroversion, may therefore be the most effective way to encourage interactions with distant strangers.” 

You can read the study digest here: We’re happier when we chat with strangers but our instinct is to ignore them

And it reminded me of Tracy K. Smith’s ironically tiled poem “The United States Welcomes You”. Right now it does anything but and as a result tourism is down and immigration – legal and otherwise – is in a turmoil of fear and uncertainty.

Currently, and not for the first time in history, we have a pre-dominant stranger-danger, Trumpian-induced, racist narrative gripping America. It’s a paranoid mix of imagined alien threats, fear, projection and guilt. Tracy Smith’s poem imagines the interrogation at the border: 

It’s from her 2018 collection Wade in the Water that The Guardian review called “lost voices of the American underground. A long overdue collection [that] weaves a spiritual hymn to the nation’s forgotten people.”

Smith is now on her second term as America’s poet laureate. Wade in the Water reflects that more public role. 

 You want a poem to unsettle something. There’s a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say: ‘This is what you think you’re certain of, and I’m going to show you how that’s not enough. There’s something more that might be even more rewarding if you’re willing to let go of what you already know. – Smith in The New York Times Magazine in April 2018.

Poetry then is an encounter with a stranger – an experience that can unsettle, feel dangerous, may take courage and can give happiness.

Here is Smith reading the title poem“Wade in the Water”. It’s  dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters –  a group of performers in Georgia who preserve their culture through song and dance. Smith tells how every person in the audience was greeted by one of the performers with a hug and the words I love you:

Ben Shahn was eight when he and his family from Lithuania arrived at Ellis Island. It was a time when the United States welcomed mass of immigration. But then, as now, nativist politicians railed against what they saw as a dangerous tide of aliens. Immigration was curtailed with the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that controlled “undesirable” immigration by establishing quotas, and barring immigrants of some specific national origins. 

Homesteads Mural shows the story of the Jewish immigration to the United States (1880-1924) The left of the three panels panel begins in 1930s Germany where a Nazi soldier holds a sign warning Germans not to buy anything from Jews. Two women mourn at open caskets containing Sacco and Vanzetti and below them the registry hall at Ellis Island where the Statute of Liberty is visible through an open doorway. The group of immigrants walking off a ship include Shahn’s mother and Albert Einstein.