Age

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Age has always been a concept that’s presented consistent confusion for me. I remember so many instances where I observe people like my older brother or others with only a few years or even a single grade separating us and feel like that age difference changes so much. Then I reach that age myself and remember how I had previously perceived that time and how I really feel no different despite the time that’s elapsed and the new privileges that entails. For example, I remember the first time I was out at McCool’s with my dad and brother after JJ had turned 21 and to me it was just so strange that he was able to have a beer there. Now I’m more than 6 months past that point myself but I can’t honestly say that the concept seems any less foreign to me or like so much has changed to afford me such a privilege. I remember driving as a sophomore in high school but then just two years later as a senior watching the fresh 16-year-olds drive and being frightened that I was sharing the road with such young people. Age is all relative.

I’ve been thinking about age a lot just in the past few months and I guess the story could start back in Dar or even a couple years before that. I remember entering UBC and finding that some of the other people on my floor were still 17. Fast-forward to UDSM and some of the students in my same year are 25 and this isn’t unusual at all. The real stem of these thoughts tonight really begins on a train heading west from Dar-es-Salaam as Dylan and I were watching the scenes along the track unfold. It seems like everywhere we passed in Tanzania, along every length of track through every town, was inhabited completely by youth. Pre-pubescent people greeted us through every segment with bright smiles and waving hands (though at some points solemn faces and hand gestures that said “feed me!” instead.) Dylan was the first to comment on it and say how we were really seeing just how youthful of a country Tanzania is. This is true and any demographics class will tell you the same story for most developing countries with population pyramids to prove it. This one little comment though was one of four or so small things that people have said in the last three months that have just got me thinking much about the idea of age.

It is definitely true though that Tanzania is a young country. As part of my internship, I was lucky enough to be allowed to join in on a workshop/brainstorm session for this international NGO that is starting a campaign to end child abuse in Tanzania that they call the “50% Campaign”. Why 50%? Because 50% of the population in Tanzania is under the age of 18 which in many contexts constitutes them as adults. I have to admit that it is pretty blatantly obvious that the people here are so young as at any given moment on any day of the week (weekends included) there seem to countless groups of kids in their school uniforms along every street. Or maybe you’ll see several other kids that are too young for school still out playing or in the arms of their mothers. It’s true that it’s everywhere. Most of the volunteers and people working here that I know are doing something that involves kids in some way or another, most often directly. That’s where the second bit on age comes in.

I met my friend Hannah here one night and she invited me to come out to this open mic event they were holding at her work to say goodbye to the place they could no longer afford to pay the rent on. She teaches art at a center (now closed) that also offers some music classes and I took her up on the offer, arriving the next evening to a scene of a bunch of 12 and under kids and their parents. It was a little odd to me but I’ve played that middle ground before enough times at family reunions as it seems like all my cousins are older than me and their kids too young for me to really know what to do with. At some point I commented on all of the kids to Hannah and she replied by saying something about how it must be to be one of those kids. This really threw me, to the point where it still just blows my mind a month-and-a-half later even though I can’t remember the exact words.

It was on that same train ride that I reread Siddhartha and it got me thinking about fatherhood a lot for some reason. I was just feeling like I was at a point in my life where I’ve made enough mistakes and accrued enough wisdom to be a patient and understanding dad to some kid and I was appreciating my own dad or the challenges of fatherhood. My friends are getting to the age where they’re getting engaged and married and I know people with kids now which is pretty strange. This is a monumental shift in thinking though where you completely gear your mind towards something else that I think most people refer to adulthood. Adulthood, by definition, is just the polar opposite of childhood and here is where things start getting really confusing.

Aging does not follow a linear progression. Maybe physically it does, but there’s a huge disconnect here between physical maturity and social/mental maturity. All of my childhood, I was led to believe that we were all on a path towards adulthood which as I said earlier is everything that childhood is not. They tell you that you’re an adult when you’re 18. They teach you that these people are adults and these people are not. Strange, but to me even 19 felt a lot like 17. Even weirder is that I get to know these people who are older than 30 but they seem to act a lot less mature than I did when I was 16. In my own head, it’s really confusing to deal with the realities that are in conflict with the expectations I remember holding. A lot less people live truly independent from their parents than I expected and a lot of them are older than I thought was appropriate. Even then, the parents don’t seem to mind and encourage this. Then I think about how I expected 20 to feel and it’s true that some of the expectations were fulfilled, but so many other things felt no different at all. That’s what it is. “Maturity” and “immaturity”, just like “adulthood” and “childhood” are just a way of polarizing things which grossly oversimplifies the reality.

No “adult” ever fully embodies “maturity” or else no one would enjoy being around them (I would say something about lawyers at this point, but I met lawyers here and several of them had some very severe “immature” aspects about them so I guess it’s only that stereotypical view from TV and movies that applies here.) We’ve just classified everything as being either this or that which is okay for certain characteristics, but when you use these labels to describe people and not just their activities then it gets challenging. So I’m at a point where I feel very mature in some ways, but there are some other things that go against everything I was ever told to believe composes an “adult”. This has confused me for years now.

The third thing that has stuck with me is what one of my housemates said about Arusha and the expat community here, how it is just a vortex of age. When we’re out at expat hangouts, I’m usually at the bottom of experience list at 21 but there are other people there past 50 and I’m sharing a table, a drink, and a conversation with them. People I consider friends. In some ways the people I meet seem less together and less mature than I feel even though they’re more than 20 years older than me. If I were at a bar with this crowd at home, it would be the oddest place I’ve ever been. People of this age range just simply don’t mingle in that other context. Yet here it just works. One of my former housemates who recently moved out is in here early 30s but she just moved in with her boyfriend who is over 50. Age in this expat community just isn’t the same thing.

So my physical appearance and my behavior from time to time has allowed me occasional glimpses into the world of “adults” finally and here’s what I discovered: the veil gets lifted and with a grin they tell me “we’re full of shit!” This whole “adult” act seems to be just a way to control children or exercise some sort of authority over them or something. “Adulthood” is just an in-group that only is enforced when trying to make others feel insignificant, inexperienced, or just like they have any less of a right to be empowered that you do. So even though I have been allowed to peek in at this secret world, there have still been wayyyyyyyy too many other times along the way when people to draw that “adult” line between myself and them.

I’m just about the youngest person in this expat community here and somehow I’m even younger than a lot of the Tanzanians I interact with frequently. For some people, this means nothing but for others for reasons I can only guess it becomes an issue. I’ve had to defend my maturity so often here and especially now that I’m doing my internship and trying to do it in a way that I have been taught to believe is “professional”, I alter my actions to fit the impressions I have had of what this entails. This has been another huge shift in terms of the way I think and have to think just to uphold this image. (It’s not just an image though, it’s something that I am living and embodying.) So as I’ve been in a position where I start changing my mind to think more like an “adult”, it threw me completely when Hannah made that one little comment about being a kid.

Everything else seemed to be saying that it’s time to start thinking more what it’s like to have a kid instead of thinking like a kid. I think this is the greatest tragedy of “maturity”. We put so much stress on being a mature adult that one is forced to break all ties with thinking like a child that we forget completely. Then, as is the next step in social stratification, we forget that we forgot. I was in this process when I got bucked off the horse and thank God that happened. Remember elementary school how you used to hate the teachers that you thought had completely forgot what it was like to be a kid? Remember when you hated your parents for acting like they were never a kid but rather were born adults and never made mistakes and never did anything independently but rather always did exactly what their parents wanted them to do? Remember just how awful it was being told what to do and how to be by people who think they know so much about you but really have no idea anymore? Well I do now.

I remember thinking about how I would grow up and teach elementary school because I knew I would be nicer to the kids than my teacher was being. I remember vowing to never be like the adults who I called out for forgetting what it is like to be a kid and then claiming that they didn’t (I don’t blame people for this because everything in society tells us we’re supposed to but I think too many adults say that they remember even though they just think they do.) I remember clearly how I felt towards adults who thought they understood kids and used their “knowledge” to exert authority over them and were so much more empowered because they knew how to do things like write checks and drive cars. I know we glorify childhood a lot and innocence but I think we should glorify children for their knowledge instead. I’m realizing now as I write this just how dead-right I was at times and how we fought the good fight even though the system was so stacked against us. Society is designed and controlled by “adults” and children are possibly the most marginalized group you can find, hardly a tier above animals in terms of decision-making. The system is set-up to enforce that all notions of “adulthood” are correct and all adult knowledge is superior to that of children. Kids talk, people hear “cute” things. Kids talk, but people don’t listen. People preach about listening, especially to children, but no one ever actually does it.

There is just so much to say about the topic of age and I could go on forever. I feel bad that I didn’t organize this in a nice thoughtful and coherent way or even really complete most of my thoughts but there is just really too much to say on it all. Today, my former housemate who is dating the guy who is 49 or something stopped by my work to help present this gift to the kids and take photos. She said “Ooh I love children” and I waited for the “I want to have some” to follow next. But it didn’t. “I want to be one” she said. Blew my mind again. That’s at least 4 times now so here I am typing up something I think about a lot and have had so much to say about for so long. Four times is just too many though so it’s time I stopped thinking about it and actually sat down and wrote some things out. Unfortunately one thought just led to another before I could finish typing the other one and we’ve got this big jumbled mess on our hands now. And I’m not even done!

It’s all relative! I felt young a few years ago around people who were the age that I am now. Now I can make other people feel young who are that age. Those other people from before can still try and make me feel young but I’m not as foolish as I once was. I know that I’ll get there in a couple years and it’ll hardly feel any different than it does now. I’m not even letting 36-year-olds play that on me anymore. I’m not going to be disrespected, I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of authority, and I know that you can be humbled by somebody who’s older than you. I respect those who are wise and experienced, but this makes no one superior. That’s the same type of belief that supports racism, classism, and too many other –isms that you can consider if you want.

What is a year, anyway? So you’re a year older? How do you know? You trust a calendar? Why are there seven days in a week? Why are there 12 months? Why do some months have 31 days and some 30? So you’ve been around the sun how many times? How do you know where we are around the sun right now? Have we really ever been in the same point in space for more than a split second? Isn’t the whole thing in perpetual motion, the sun too? I get that there are seasons, whether winter/spring/summer/fall or just wet/dry and I get that we’ve created a system of numbers that we can use to count them. Isn’t it just a little much that we’ve assigned all of these other unrelated traits and abilities to these numbers? Sure it’s easier but don’t act like it doesn’t create other problems.



Okay, out of steam now. Don’t oppress me because of my age. Don’t oppress anyone because of their age. Age is just a concept. Age is relative. It’s a social construction and the more you treat it like a real thing, the more real it becomes. It is only as relevant as Santa Claus. People are still people. We can put numbers on them and give those numbers meaning and if we believe in them hard enough, then they’ll matter enough. We can tell other people they matter and then they’ll change themselves to fit what they’re supposed to. But for some of us we just can’t do that and it’s confusing when it doesn’t work out the way everyone’s pretending it does.

And with that, like always, listen to “My Back Pages”