The Death of Nationality

Two things happened recently, which made me aware of something I'm trying to address with my young adult novel 'Simon & Sally' (working title). The first is the World Cup in South Africa where the Netherlands has consistently been winning matches on, what I think is, sheer luck. Although I am Dutch I find myself routing for the other team, whomever Holland may be playing against. The second was 4th of July. My wife, being American, bought tickets to the Independence Day celebration here in Bangkok, and I found myself being very resistant to going, feeling the event was hypocritical and past the line of indoctrination. Although you would think that the common factor in both these events was my resistance to patriotism and nationality and although this is true, the underlying reason is far more profound. I believe in people, in the collection of skillful, positive traits that supersedes the destructive, negative traits.

When I plotted Simon a long time ago, I found myself tired of reading about heroes and heroines being British and their adventures always taking place in and around London. Although good stories in themselves (Harry Potter, Un Lun Dun, Bartimaeus Trilogy etc.) something irked me about them being so limited to the British Isles. Artemis Fowl and His Dark Materials were already better, traveling across the world, but even they and the slew of American-based novels (Sisters Grimm, Twilight, FabelHaven, Percy Jackson etc.) never failed to root the hero in one culture or the other. I felt Simon and Sally needed to be more global. They would start off in Brookfield and Saxton, two places that could be in either the UK or USA, leaving them nicely nationally ambiguous. Soon they would be swept off into adventures making it irrelevant where they came from. With the lack of commitment towards slang in dialog and usage of either the metric or imperial system of measurements I would not tie myself down to any form of origin country.

But here too, my motivations were not strictly to deny nationality. You can't just be against something, there has to be a reason and then an alternative. Well, the reason was simple. I am a third culture kid originally, so my allegiance to any given country is counter intuitive. I also consider myself intelligent enough to realize that nationality is a man-made way to control individuality and free thinking, just like religion and culture - the reason why I don't integrate these two concepts either in my series. I am amused whenever people state that they sacrifice in name of their country, god or cultural roots, because then I just think: do you even know what they are? And is that relationship mutual? Does your country help you when in need? Or your church?

The more I started traveling the broader my perspective became to include similarities between people across nations, religions and cultures and see the artificiality (and ignorance) of the man-made institutions they claimed to adhere to. Kids understand this. When you ask my kid where he's from he'll just blurt out where he is living at the moment. But his passion and commitment is not to Thailand, or Sri Lanka, or Ireland or Holland. Yes, we lived in all of these places, but who he loves to be is a person made up of positive reinforced values that are rewarded with attention from those around him, not some institution. We all work like that until we raise the flag so much we can only feel good when we see red, white and blue. Or until the only connections we can make is in our local church, mosque and temple. Or until we shop, drink and eat on our holidays and festivals mistaking direct sensory pleasure for a love of culture.

When we grow up and stay inside the same institutional pillars of control, we become extremists. We will defend the values we get bombarded with every day until we are willing to die for them. There is an anti-dote: traveling. Meet new people, new experiences and soften the paradigms we grew up with. And then you see the true factors that unite us: we all dream the same dreams, we all want to be safe, healthy and happy, we want to love and be loved. These are the positive meaningful traits that we all share. The negative destructive traits like greed, hatred, apathy, envy and pride are always self-defeating. They seem strong because they are fanned by the flames of nationality, religion and culture - to serve those who stand to gain from it.

That is why Simon and Sally will battle these forces, in the shapes of Vampyrs, Werwulfs, Djinns, Monsters and Demons. That is why ultimately it matters not if the heroes are from England, America or any other country, we are all guilty in what drives us to be zealots, but we also share the stronger notions of love, friendship, cooperation and hope. I am no longer a Dutch guy living in a Thai culture as a Buddhist. Those are just labels. Like Simon, Sally, Nancy and Alex. Like you and everyone else I am a loving person of planet Earth, one of many, who strives to be compassionate, wise and happy.

Visual Aids

I finished writing the prologue yesterday. It was quite a delivery, mainly because I hadn't written it yet and also because this chapter deals with events that occurred over 80 years ago in the storyline. Add different characters and a distinctive Indiana Jones feel and I couldn't be further away from the main story in terms of style. Still, I had one thing to help me. Back in 2003 when I was volunteering in Eritrea, Africa I already had ambitions of writing young adult stories. I started then with a concept of a young boy who finds out he's a descendant of the ancient Greek Gods. The gods have been imprisoned for two millennia and the walls of their prison are breaking down. All that stands between modern day life as we know it and the return of an all-powerful pantheon of beings is this boy. Sound slightly familiar? Two years later Rick Riordan brought out Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Oh well...

Anyway, the point being that I had a first chapter of how the gods' prison had been breached by this archaeologist back in 1910. That initial chapter I still had floating around somewhere on the crashed hard disk of my old laptop, so I retrieved it, read it and adapted it to accommodate Simon & Sally's story. I added a sidekick to the archaeologist, a young boy called Mick, who will turn out to be Simon's granddad. The tomb they discovered I rewrote as a temple in the Amazon. What sends the archaeologist there in the first place is the discovery of a cultural anomaly, an object that by all means should not have been found in Meso-American cultures. When this archaeologist, who I named Brittany "Bret" Dubois - he was named after the family cat (sic), discovers the main chamber he discovers a site that would blow open the scientific community...if not for the catastrophe that follows next.

Greed is the main theme of Book 1 and Bret, unlike the pulp fiction heroes of the 30's he's based upon (and his more famous movie-cousin Indy), is not shy of taking a golden statue or two. Of course this defiles the temple and the nature of adventure-tomb-mechanics demands that the temple turns into a deathtrap. The only problem was that the way I had described it originally included so much symbolic imagery related to Olympus and Greek Mythology I couldn't possibly re-use it. So I deleted most of the text that followed and stared at the blank page. I couldn't for the life of me wrap my head around how the temple should reveal it's traps so I did what I always do, when I need to think things through: I drew it.

I actually came out of it with some nifty symbolic traps that start when the forbidden object is stolen to the ultimate end, when the temple is lost forever. We know Bret's sidekick makes it out alive, but what about Bret himself? And what is the symbolism of the temple? Well, I can't reveal that because that would spoil events that happen later in the book, but I can give you the drawings I made. Enjoy!