On identity

We research tuition fees, course specification, where we might live during term time, what we’re most likely to eat, and even entertainment available on campus or nearby. The support system for students leaving the country is growing every year and I am happy to see that current high school leavers know exactly what’s awaiting them in the world. Yet with all the emphasis on what changes around you when you move, very little is said about how studying abroad changes you. I have decided to write about identity when I realised some time ago that after nearly six years in the United Kingdom, I no longer feel like a proper Czech. In this post I would like to show that identity and even more so identity of young people who live abroad without their families is not fixed and changes over time. Sure, if six years of university education in Great Britain taught me anything is that anecdotal evidence means very little and I don’t expect you to take my opinion at face value. At the same time thinking about identity, doing a little before/after check, or getting ready for this somewhat neglected side of studying in a foreign country might be beneficial. Or it could be the more advanced alternative to counting sheep when you can’t fall asleep.

The first thing to notice is definitely language. It doesn’t take long before you start thinking in English, dream in it, or using English words in Czech sentences because they feel more appropriate. After a bit longer you’ll notice all of your electronics is in English because translating everything when your friend borrows your laptop is too tedious, so you just switch the languages. Then, if you stick abroad for long enough, you’ll realise you have lost the ability to express yourself properly in Czech. It starts to show first in your written work, because after the tonnes of essays you have to submit at university, your Czech can no longer compete with your English. And neither can your Czech grammar. After about three year in Britain I started to worry about my high school Czech language teacher reading any of my Czech writings, because very likely he would be appalled. Even now, I am writing this post in English first, because it comes to me more naturally than Czech. The second stage, however, is even worse. You come back home, talk to your family and realise that you’re forgetting how to speak Czech too. It is a frightful realisation when somebody points out to you that you’ve used the wrong preposition, got the declination all mixed up, or that the word order is a bit forced. You witness yourself losing something that you always believed to be natural, instinctive, a part of you. Suddenly it is no more and you begin to question not only your language skills but also how stable and strong your own identity is. If I lose my native language, do I also lose part of myself?

It’s not only the language. It’s the foreign cultural norms that you internalise and the one’s you thought to have always had simply disappear. I think this becomes most obvious in the first couple of days after you return home for the holidays and realise how many of the things at home seem weird to me, while at the same time you can sense the stares from “the natives”. For example, saying thank you in Prague to the bus driver as you leave the bus will guarantee you one very scared driver. Also the outrage when someone bumps into you in a supermarket and doesn’t apologise! Who are these people? Savages? It’s when you catch yourself swearing inside your head that you realise that six years ago you would have actually say the swearwords out loud. And the next second you think that six years ago you wouldn’t even have been upset about the lack of politeness in the first place. And this goes for many other things, the different attitudes towards what’s acceptable to joke about sense of political responsibility, or lack of sense of community. Before you left these things were ever-present and you took them as necessary (albeit negative) part of your life. Now, they genuinely upset you and you feel like it’s a whole different world you’ve never fully seen before. It’s as if a curtain came down and you can watch the specifics of your own country through foreigner’s eyes. So, have I become a foreigner?

Hardly. I still love the same Czech fairy tales, I have cravings for Czech food, I still don’t prefer tea to coffee, and the Royal family leaves my stone cold. But there’s no point in denying that aspects of me changed. After six years of living in the United Kingdom, I consider myself as being half way between a Czech and a Brit. It’s not particularly easy position to be in, because no matter where you are, you always tend to feel out of place slightly. I lost the sense of stability which before I drew from my national identity and can no more use it as a point of reference in an overwhelming world. Yet it gives me a heightened sense of objectivity on both nations as I am more likely to be able to detach myself. Most importantly however, once you stop dwelling on your national identity, on the things you were taught to like, you were told are correct, those things you had been doing out of habit, once you are allowed to leave all of this behind, you can see for yourself who you and your values are.