the city on a hill - or my obsession with the idea of America

When I was 11, we returned home to New Zealand from a year's sabbatical in the UK via a two-month trip through the States. We landed in New York City on Halloween, 1988, and drove slowly north towards Niagra Falls and through to Toronto, where my father had business at one of the universities, through the first few days of November. We stayed in Motel 6's and ate at Denny's and were simultaneously awed and bamboozled by well, the Americaness of America. My father was 46, my mother was 44, my brother was 14, I was 11, and my little sister had just turned 6. We'd travelled before - my parents lived in London for most of the 70s, we'd had sabbatical in the UK in 1980, we'd been to Disneyland on our way to the UK the year before.

But our experience of America had been of the tourist West Coast, or of academic conferences in various large cities. Now we stayed in small towns in upstate New York where the music stopped when our family walked into the restaurant and the waitress drawled 'you're not from round here, are you?' One night we arrived at the motel my parents had booked, to find pretty much the Bates motel -run-down cabins on the outskirts of a no-horse town on the road to Niagra. No-one else was booked in, and they'd allocated us the cabin furtherest from the office and main house. I'm pretty sure my father sat up all night awaiting some kind of spectre from a horror movie.

1988 - Dukakis lost to George Bush and in 1991, as I entered fourth form, the US led a coalition into Iraq/Kuwait. My social studies teacher kicked me out of class for arguing against her support of the US invasion. My parents, bless them, did not require me to apologise to her, which is what she asked for.

Today America votes, and the rest of the world waits. Sometime between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the USA became the synedoche for what has been variously called 'the free world', 'the first world', 'the developed world'. I have a lifelong obessession - fuelled in part by that two month glimpse of the ever present schism - with the evidented dichotomy that is America. As a deeply middle-class Pakeha teenager in Palmerston North, I listened to The Goats & read Lakota Woman and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and discovered who Leonard Peltier was.

I listened to Jello Biafra on late-night student radio, and talked over the weird wonderfulness that is America with my friend, the American exchange student from San Luis Obispo. I read Hunter S. Thompson, and Salinger, and Emily Dickinson, and listened to my parents' folk records, and wondered at this amazing country that is both the New Jerusalem and the New Babylon. I read The Winthrop Woman. I played California Uber Alles too loud in my room.

In fifth form, one of our history curriculum topics was Black Civil Rights. I stole the textbook from Palmerston North Girls' High because I couldn't give it back. I needed to keep it with me, like a talisman of what I wanted to be and do - a person who fought oppression. This is the new cover - but this topic is still on the year 11 curriculum.

I majored in American Fiction at University. My thesis is a melange of all these influences - Native American history, the role of women in colonial America, slavery, faith, the American Dream and the American nightmare. It's called "Signifyin' Slavery: the literary and historical influences of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Today America votes. Today, once again, I hope - audaciously - that Langston Hughes' dream deferred is not our future reality:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

This had better be to be continued: there's a whole lot more I can try to explain about the ways in which I have been enagaged with the idea of America. Suffice to say, voting matters. If you are an American citizen and read this, vote. People died so that you would be able to.Every time you vote, you honour their memory. This is Medgar Evers. He was murdered in Mississippi in 1963.

Vote for him. He never got to.