Football brings us home
In fact, the coffee shop was the busiest business in a row of establishments in the station. Every seat was taken. Customers lined the walls. Even the employees were watching what was happening on the one small TV screen where Germany and Sweden were duking it out in the first knock-out round. It wasn't as if it was even a close game, yet it was extraordinary to see how every face was upward turned to the television. Nor was it as if the US were playing, or Mexico, or Trinidad. There were certainly no German jerseys or Swedish helmets among the crowd. It was a tiny, anonymous coffee shop, as antiseptic as they come, and yet it was packed out.
New York has never really belonged to America anyway, but it is deeply apparent during this World Cup. While the rest of the country seems to seep itself in benign indifference to soccer, there is a different sense in this city of eight million, jammed as it is with so many races and cultures.
The World Cup seems everywhere.
At a Korean church in Queens the local pastor installed two giant TV screens for his congregation to watch the games. Drummers led the fans in cheers. Almost 1,000 people attended the service, but not even prayers could save them from Switzerland. When Trinidad and Tobago played against England, the Sugarcane bar in Brooklyn was packed to bursting point. In the "In God We Trust" African restaurant in the Bronx, a social centre for the city's Ghanaian community, each game day has had the place overflowing. On Sunday, the English supporters packed out Nevada Smith's, a downtown bar devoted only to soccer.
The World Cup has always been a way of going home. It's an age-old story but, then again, it's not just football.
New York, possibly more than any other city, invites the immigrant to simultaneously destroy and embrace his or her cultural heritage. It's easy enough to leave your past behind, drop your nationality, take on a different accent, move on without looking back. But the city also invites you to continuously go home.
Most emigration – when it's not forced at gunpoint, or at the sword of the church, or the prong of the state – is prompted by hope. It undoes the meaning of the old world. When the old returns – and, more often than not, it is beamed in by satellite – it is embraced even tighter than it ever would have been before. In absence, our accents become stronger. We use our names as home. We build a shelter of the past. Of course, sometimes, this can be pretty ugly, but one of the reasons I love New York is the fact that so many people from such a wide net can live in relative calm packed right next to one another, while still somehow dreaming of home.
The novelist Briain Moore said that we knew where we came from when we knew where we want to be buried. Moore – who left Ireland for most of his adult life – chose, as a burial spot, a little patch of land overlooking the sea in Northern Ireland. Even though he had lived for decades in Canada and California, he knew who he was by where he wanted to end up. He also knew that the truth is not written on the side of airplanes nor ferries.
I often scoff at the old nostalgia that you find on the building sites of London, or the in dark Blarney Stone bars of New York. I find it embarrassing to be amongst people whose only reason for living is what they have left behind. I'm not too fond of the sentimental pain. Every emigrant carries in her or him a desire to be wounded. It's the nature of leaving in the first place.
And yet there also is that strange beauty of being gone, or having left. One of the functions of memory is to depict – and therefore to make as if continually present – what is absent. We learn to make up for what is lost, even in the tiny moments, in the little cafes in the bus stations of America, when we look up to see a banal soccer match, amongst forty or fifty strangers, from all over the world, and suddenly, brightly, if even for just a moment, we are brought home.