Moving forward

Be­fore I launch into this month’s col­umn, per­haps it’s worth re­it­er­at­ing why I de­cided to call it The cul­tural tightrope when I first started writ­ing it many years ago. Know­ing that I was going to be writ­ing about dif­fer­ences in cul­ture as a for­eigner who had set­tled here in Cat­alo­nia, I de­cided the title had to con­vey the idea that telling peo­ple about their own cul­ture from an out­sider’s per­spec­tive while liv­ing among them was a very del­i­cate mat­ter, and that if one is not ex­tremely care­ful when com­ment­ing on a cul­ture that is not one’s own, one might over­bal­ance and fall off what I per­ceive to be a tightrope... hence the metaphor­i­cal name.

Any­way, hav­ing at­tempted to ame­lio­rate what comes next, I think I should also add that I see my writ­ing this col­umn as an op­por­tu­nity to act as an im­par­tial com­men­ta­tor on my adopted cul­ture, and when read­ing it you should bear in mind that my son and my de­ceased wife’s fam­ily are all Cata­lans. So my in­ter­est in mak­ing these ob­ser­va­tions is in fact to help my adopted coun­try and cul­ture progress.

Let me start, then, by stat­ing that I be­lieve tra­di­tion and knowl­edge of the past have a very im­por­tant role to play in any so­ci­ety, and what I am about to say does not con­tra­dict that. I also be­lieve, how­ever, that if you hold on to tra­di­tion and the past too tightly, it will slow you down and even lead to a form of stag­na­tion, which is worth avoid­ing in this rapidly chang­ing world. As ever, bal­ance is the key.

The thing is, after liv­ing here for 25 plus years, my im­pres­sion is that for the ma­jor­ity of Cata­lans, al­though in­clu­sive­ness – by which I mean the way out­siders are wel­comed into so­ci­ety – nec­es­sar­ily in­volves ex­pos­ing the out­sider to Cata­lan tra­di­tions and ways of doing things – as in any so­ci­ety, of course – it does not in­volve enough of a rec­i­p­ro­cal in­ter­est in the out­sider’s tra­di­tions and ways of doing things. And this dif­fers from other coun­tries and cul­tures I have lived in, such as the US, and my own na­tive cul­ture, the UK. I also fully un­der­stand why this is the case: it is the nat­ural out­come of a his­tory of re­pres­sion.

But what I’m try­ing to say to the na­tives of my adopted coun­try is that in order to fos­ter the much-de­sired co­ex­is­tence that we rightly hear so much about, it is im­por­tant to make cul­tural ex­change a two-way street. Per­haps more for­eign­ers here would learn to speak Cata­lan and take more of an in­ter­est in Cata­lan is­sues if in­clu­sive­ness more re­sem­bled what I have tried to ex­press above. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve met plenty of Cata­lans who have shown them­selves to be very open to for­eign in­flu­ences, but the bal­ance needs to tip more in that di­rec­tion if stag­na­tion is to be avoided.

Now I’ve opened that lit­tle can of worms, let me just say that my – now adult – son thinks my views apply more to older gen­er­a­tions of Cata­lans, and also areas out­side the me­trop­o­lis that is Barcelona, rather than the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion; that being said, many of my non-Cata­lan friends who live in Barcelona agree with me on this one. Ei­ther way, it is worth not­ing that none of the above is a state­ment of fact or truth, merely the ob­ser­va­tions of an out­sider who has lived here long enough to be able to make them with some con­fi­dence.