Reflecting on Exile's Repatriation: Recognition and Identity

I've been trying to think through a few things over the last couple weeks since Exile's been home.  Not that the conversations I have with my cat are particularly useful, but there's a certain perspective one gets from having a small predator in the house.  Having gone through an ordeal to repatriate her, those memories linger with me every time she demands food in the morning.  For her, I'm not sure if it even registers, though she does realize small differences.  We're not going to be moving back into the basement until early August, but she still goes to the basement door expectantly as if to declare "This is wrong, I know where I live."  Of course, like I'm sure most pet owners think, animals have a way of letting us know.  I'm not going into language here, but I would like to ask her what she thinks about having been transformed so many times.

To me, every transition in this story makes her into something else based on the people involved.  Of course, she continued to be a cherished pet to myself and to V, and the norms we acknowledge as a society would allow me to infer that most people would look at a cat and think 'pet' more often than not.  However, there is a fondness for animals that isn't universally held, and there are more powerful forces at work which may well take precedence over personal conviction.  So, I think that Exile was minimally made into the following.

• Cargo/Property
• Risk/Uncertainty
• Unknown/Responsibility

I can't exactly make a claim to her behaviour through the transitions, but part of my demarcations here are due to an assumption that she wasn't able to be herself.  For a comparison, it's not unfair to consider ourselves - we are all animals after all.  While humans may put more energy into establishing ones identity, we can't say that we feel ourselves or act ourselves at every moment in every circumstance.    No?  You're the same person at work, as you are driving, as you are at the gym, as you are with your family?  I absolutely beg to differ, because to no small degree who we 'are' runs in tandem with where we are, what we're doing, and with whom.

In my case, when I was at CBSA in Coutts trying to explain the misery that lead me to that moment, I was still a graduate student with a plan and with proof following weeks of trying everything else short of bankruptcy or flying into the danger zone.  Which, let's be honest, the USA qualifies.  However, when faced with a man in a uniform representing the authority of the State, where was I?  If you're familiar with the story, I burst into tears.  If you're familiar with me, you know that I don't do that.

• Yes we can talk about stress and we can talk about heartache, but I'd been managing that for months by this point without losing control and losing track of myself.  I left a LOT out of that story, so you'll have to go with me on this assertion.
• Yes we can talk about hope, but hope is expectation without certainty.  I had expectations, but they were never certain.  If Exile had arrived at the border in ill health, they could absolutely have denied entry on that reason.  To me, hope was irrelevant.

These considerations are not causal though they are the contributing factors to my inability to regain any sense of myself for about a day and a half.  While I struggle to use the word normal, it might be appropriate here.  Regardless, something had to incite this change and invoke my otherwise unlikely response.  

However strong I may consider myself within my own identity, I am but one of billions on an insignificant plant around a plain star amidst an incomprehensible vastness.  Now, do me a favour, and try not to have an existential crisis.  I hold this statement to be true for a reason of perspective, because we don't always attend to these thoughts as the recipients of a type of freedom or liberty.  While I have held, for many years, that we are merely free enough, I've found this a rather unpopular view.  So, I tend not to think of myself as having an existence unburdened by the State.  There are processes and rules to be followed with penalties imposed if not.  Though I'm unfamiliar with the origin of the term, I know that I am a docile body, and I typically act in the appropriate manner despite my thoughts which exist in opposition.

Having done my due diligence to act responsibly as a citizen free enough to do so, I was met with a conflicting response by an institution structured to enforce the rules of an entire country.  My thoughts and my ability to rationally protest were dismantled.  The self... the identity that I had walking into that building crumbled in response to authority.  In the absence of being able to lean on anything tangible that I understood about 'Meghan Engele' yielded completely to the realization that I had the audacity to think that I - with my planning, with my calling ahead, and with my government websites pinned to my phone's home-screen for accessibility - had any control or power here.  To the man I unaffectionately refer to as having the poop face, Exile was somehow more of a risk than the dozens of freight trucks and handful of campers I saw crossing unimpeded.

Through a few twists and turns it took people that I haven't met in Montana to recognize me as something more than a subject of State power.  I was back to being a person that just wanted to get her cat back home.  Before I made that call, how did they view the cat in their precinct?  To some, perhaps she was simply the unclaimed pet, the nuisance (because she will chatter or argue with you), and the responsibility with an unknown outcome.  Maybe we can send her back with the detained individual.  Maybe the shelter will have a new resident.  Maybe any number of things...  After I made the call, they were able to recognize her as Exile.  She is the pet belonging to the distraught Canadian.  Maybe given the circumstances, as the Sherrif, I can arrange for CBSA to repatriate this pet?

This all comes from a process of thinking that helps me work through concepts and find a path to empathy for people that may not experience it.  I've been reading a lot about political anthropology and identity politics in the context of (what I think I can call) a sociological ethnography called 'Strangers in Their Own Land' by A. R. Hochschild.  I won't summarize it here, but she speaks about the deep stories of various persons in Louisiana that have come to epitomize something called the great paradox.  Loosely speaking, this is when people's political views and actions tend to diverge with their personal values or well being.  As an explanation, Hochschild makes the case for the overall feeling that other people have been cutting in the proverbial line for realizing the American Dream.  All these people are being recognized and uplifted simply by being a member of a certain group: women, migrants, refugees, etc...  

I can hear a parade of social progressively minded people in uproar, but take a moment to displace from your reaction.  We're talking about people with their own opinions about the workings of the world just as we are just people with our own opinions about the workings of the world.  It doesn't necessarily make one or the other right or wrong to not care in the same way about the same collections of knowledge. 

It wasn't exactly clear to me, on my first or even second reading, that part of the problem is the manner by which we try to achieve recognition, even if we don't exactly know... where from?  It still means something even if we don't acknowledge or agree with a particular organization of power.  I'm certain that there's something important here to poke at.  I just haven't made the connection yet.