Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm here representing the element earth and Latvian identity.
And yet the person who stands before you
left her native city Riga at the age of 6
only to return to it at the age of 60
and to be elected president 8 months later.
President of a country without ever having belonged to a political party,
without having undergone an election campaign
which we normally think of as a part of a democratic process,
without having spent a red cent in election expenses,
[is] not exactly your typical political path.
However, the path that I did follow
has given me some unique experiences and insights.
And it is those that I'd like to share with you,
in spite of the fact that the earth on which I was born,
the ground that my feet were treading for most of my life,
was not that of my native land,
but was scattered across 6 different countries
on 3 different continents,
where in the course of time
I had to acquire 5 different languages
and drop a few on the way which I didn't quite master.
How in all this strange pattern
could one become president of a country
and an expert in its identity
would seem like a paradox,
but, alas, it's but one of three main patterns of identity
that the Latvian nation has developed
because of historical events
as a consequence of the Second World War.
After the first occupation and the annexation by the Soviet Union,
the following Nazi occupation,
involvement of Latvians in both sides of the warring parties
against international conventions,
and then three patterns developed.
Some, like my parents and those of my husband,
left and went into exile with their children, hoping to return
when the international community would ensure Latvia's independence again,
which of course did not happen.
Poor souls had never heard
of the protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
and even less, of Yalta and Tehran where the Allies had been involved.
The second pattern was of those who were forcibly deported to Siberia.
Their lives have been documented in films and documentaries;
if you stay in Latvia, you'll have the occasion to see
during our Song Festival which is upcoming in a few weeks.
Finally, of course, the majority of people stayed here in Latvia,
but stayed here in a country that was submitted to totalitarian rule,
to a foreign occupation and military presence,
and an imposed ideology and economic system.
I speak mostly, of course, from a perspective;
first of those who went into exile,
but then of those who returned and tried to heal
the various separate parts of our nation,
the branches that had been cut off from the common tree,
to remind them all that they do grow from the same historical soil,
the same past, the same cultural traditions,
and that those are the ones that essentially give us our identity.
But my own identity formation was by no means an easy path,
and this is why I spent much of my spare time
- apart, of course, from my career, my academic career
as a loyal, contributing, and reasonably successful Canadian academic -
I spent much of my time struggling to bring up my children,
born abroad from the Latvian point of view,
born in Montreal, native-born Canadians at that rate,
and other:
the children of many other Latvians in different continents
- South America, Australia, Europe, the United States, Canada -
to try and inculcate in them
a sense of what it means to be a Latvian and why.
And I came to the conclusion that identity is a complex process
where being Latvian,
or German, or American, or Chinese, or anything whatever,
is only one of the layers of something like an onion in your psyche,
where each of you, each of us
are a part of many groups,
conglomerates, associations, identities.
We belong to many, many people
with whom we can identify in a multiplicity of ways.
We are in fact more like the bulb of a lily than that of an onion.
Lilies having these different scales,
and those are part of different aspects of our personality.
But there are some essential elements of identity that remain constant.
One of them is what I call the automatic.
The natural, as it were, identity that the children acquire as they grow up
and are socialized by their family, by their immediate surroundings,
the extended family if they have one,
later kindergarten, school,
the other children on the street, society at large,
and nowadays increasingly
by the electronic media of communication of various sorts.
The child develops a sense of self.
Each child looks in the mirror and at some point says:
"Ah, that is little Annie," or little Susie, or little Tommy.
They know that they recognize themselves,
and they acquire a sense of who they are.
But it's much later that personal sense of belonging
- of belonging to mommy or daddy, or grandma, or grandpa,
or of living on a certain street, or in a certain countryside -
is extended to a larger group.
And this happens sooner or later depending on the circumstances.
For my generation, as exile children,
when we first encountered children belonging to different nationalities,
we developed what I have called a reactive identity.
When somebody points their finger at you
and calls you a dirty foreigner, or a dirty Polak, and you say:
"Hey, I'm not a Polak, I'm a Latvian,"
you realize who you are whether you would like it or not.
Sometimes you like it
because they're ready to play with you and they're quite friendly,
and sometimes you do not,
because they're ready to throw stones at you,
run after you and try and beat you up.
And you discover that not all people are equal,
and by much as among your own people, you have some who, for instance,
- in my case, going to a Latvian school in a refugee camp in Germany -
some are friendlier than others, and so it is with foreigners.
But when I befriended a little Estonian girl
who had a curious little knitted cap
with a geometric pattern and a sort of crown on top,
- something like Anne Boleyn if you can think of her portraits -
but a knitted cap with geometric designs,
I thought it was cute, and I asked her: "How come you have such a cap,
and I see all these other Estonian girls have such caps?"
I thought they were nice.
She said: "Well, Estonians wear them."
And when I asked my mother could I get a cap like that,
my mother told me: "Estonians wear them, Latvians do not."
It was as simple as that, and much as I liked the cap,
I was told: "No, you're not an Estonian,
that is for Estonian girls, Latvian girls do not wear them."
Later, in spreading across the different continents
for refugee camps were closed in Germany,
there were many almost tragic stories, certainly sad ones,
of little girls starting to go to school, say, in Middle America,
and being told by their mothers
that decent little girls when they go to school
must have long braids with ribbons
and dresses with white colours and cuffs.
When they arrived in school, they were shocked to see
that everybody was pointing fingers at them
and they were absolutely different from the other girls in school.
When they told their mothers that's not how American girls are dressing,
their mothers said: "But you are not an American, you are a Latvian."
And the poor child then had a choice to decide
whether to remain different and obey mamma,
and remain within the Latvian community,
or to rebel as soon as her age would allow it,
turn her back on Latvian society and Latvian identity,
and forget about it as quickly as she could.
What I spent my life doing
was trying to convince young people of Latvian origin,
starting with my own children,
but also convincing myself as I myself grew up
- since I did grow up abroad and not in my native country -
that there was a third form of identity which was a freely chosen one.
And that is the one where you realize that belonging to a certain group
- be it an ethnic group, a cultural heritage, a linguistic group -
you may define it in different ways, but that what it does
it opens doors to you that would otherwise be closed.
That learning the Latvian language
- practically you might say, spoken by so few people across the world,
you'd be better off learning Chinese, no doubt -
but for your identity and for your sense of well-being,
for your roots being accessible to you,
for that sense of belonging that comes from belonging to a community
in which you have birthrights, - you belong to them by birthright -
that is something that cannot be replaced by something else.
You can become a new Canadian,
an American naturalized citizen,
you can travel to many lands and make a good living,
and marry a local person, and fit in.
And I have met many, many Latvians who said:
"I married an American girl, I fell in love with her,
but she did not like my going with other Latvians
to various Latvian events,
she wanted me to turn my back on them, and I thought to myself,
'But she's turning her back on my identity.
She's turning her back on who I am'."
But who I am is not so easily defined.
One of the things that, I think, defines who I am in that ethnic sense
is, of course, that cultural heritage
to which knowledge of language, knowledge of history,
in our case, knowledge of folklore
- since that is a good part of our heritage -
those are the riches that are available to those
who open that door of belonging to the Latvian nation
quite freely and without having to make that forced choice.
Being different from the others, one can blend in very easily.
When you're a Latvian,
in the great many countries you can blend in very nicely,
nobody will ever know by looking at you
that you are a Latvian or of Latvian origin.
But you can keep
- and this is what I tried to convince
the youngsters from various countries that I came in contact with -
you can keep as it were your secret garden:
that Latvian identity that is your own.
And that, of course, we would be more than happy
to share with the rest of the world,
if somehow we could help them to overcome the language barrier
and they could get to know about what it has to offer.
In my own case, I have done that as well.
I have done my own small efforts, if you like,
in terms of writing scholarly articles and books
about the Latvian heritage, about the Latvian identity,
and particularly about what in our Latvian folk songs
makes them so extraordinary, so special,
and so worth getting acquainted with, and so worth analyzing,
and entering into that international non-material heritage
which UNESCO now for several years has been recognizing.
For those of you who are in Latvia for the next few weeks,
I quite recommend going to the Latvian Song Festival,
watching it on television, seeing it on video.
What we see in the Latvian Song Festival
is something that embodies the tradition of singing
which had been a pillar of Latvian identity
for a great many centuries,
before Latvia ever became a nation.
In the 19th century,
when Latvians were still largely an oppressed class of society,
they started singing in choirs.
When the choirs got together regionally and organized song festivals,
they came to realize
that one daughter was born in Riga and another was born in Valmiera,
but they were singing the same song,
and they asked themselves the question that one of the folk songs asks:
"Are they daughters of the same mother?"
And yes, they are daughters of the same mother
who is the Latvian nation.
The singing and the coming together was one element that allowed them
to become conscious of this Latvian identity.
It allowed them to become conscious of the riches
that that identity offered them
quite apart from the condescension,
and, in fact, the denigration that they had frequently suffered
at the hands of those who had occupied the upper levels of society
in the various occupying forces over the centuries.
The Latvians recovered their sense of pride in themselves,
not just their sense of an awareness of themselves as a nation.
And through that awareness, they realized
that they as a nation have the rights
that belong to nations worldwide.
And in many ways this coming together and singing
led to the thought of Latvian independence,
the creation of an independent Latvian nation,
and the tradition that managed to survive through various foreign occupations,
through various imposed ideologies,
that managed to survive in Australia, America, in Europe elsewhere,
behind the Iron Curtain, on the other side,
the tradition helped us to maintain
our sense of roots, our link with a past,
the sense of inheritance and entitlement
that being Latvian meant to us.
And this sense of entitlement, of course, makes us also fully European.
This is why as a president I worked so hard to ensure
that Latvia became a member of the European Union.
This is why since leaving office as president I have been
such an ardent promoter of European unity.
But I must say that in addition to that,
I find that from my experience as president of a nation
that I have acquired insights that are welcome elsewhere in the world,
and I'm part of at least 3 different clubs and of great many organizations
that have an international remit,
that worry about the condition of women,
that worry about transitions to democracy in various countries,
and I find myself now with my Latvian identity
laboring in the Lord's vineyards
which are really those of a citizen of the world.
So that having returned like Ulysses to the land of my birth,
having been able to truly express my Latvian identity
in a way that being born here should've predestined me for,
I find myself also becoming a very ardent European,
but, most of all, I find that all these experiences,
those of my nation, those of myself as an individual,
those of my compatriots who suffered by being deported or otherwise repressed,
all those sufferings,
that other nations both in Europe and elsewhere have gone through,
have contributed in each case
to developing our own sense of humanity.
And I would leave you with this thought
that be your identity what it may,
it must start with a sense of your intrinsic value
as a person, as a human being,
as a citizen of the world,
as a member of the human race.
It is this belonging, this sense of brotherhood or sisterhood
with people who may look entirely different from you,
who have different values at times,
certainly different experiences,
but who after all have the same life path that any human being has.
From birth through development,
growth, a career, experiences, joys and sufferings,
and then, of course, we leave the stage as Shakespeare says,
having been but actors on the stage.
I wish you all to spend your life
looking for that solid ground under your feet,
which is what your identity gives you.
And remember, you don't have just one of them, you have many,
and constantly, in the course of your life, you keep having choices.
You can construct who you are and who you want to be.
Godspeed to you all.
(Applause)