Alien

For most people in the world, aliens are those little green creatures that may come from Mars, or somewhere else from space. For English speakers, aliens are everyone and everything which is foreign. So, yes, everyone is an alien the minute they leave the country where they were born. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, alien comes from the Latin word (via French) aliēnus, meaning “belonging to another”. Foreign comes from the Latin word (via French) foris, meaning “from outside”.

Both concepts reinforce the idea of “us and the others”. “We” have a certain culture and the “others”, from the outside, have another. That is pretty obvious in the stories of extra-terrestrials. The little green creatures are either violent (they want to dominate the world and exterminate humans) or naïve (they want to understand humans and become one of them). In the latter, the extra- terrestrials are “accepted” only because they value humans’ culture and see it as better than their own.

Naturally, this is not only applied to people from different countries. It is widely known the controversy a member of Buckingham Palace initiated when repeatedly asked a person where she was from and she kept replying she was from London. This can come to a surprise to many people, but it is actually very common in the UK. For the British, everyone who hasn’t had a family that has been born in the UK since the beginning of time is a foreign and they will always be, regardless of how long they have been living in the UK. There are British people and there are aliens. Both don’t mix.

On a larger or smaller scale, this happens in all countries that used to have an empire and had colonized other countries. They “dominated” the aliens… or they were the aliens that invaded those countries to dominate them? In any case, although colonization has ended, there is still a feeling that there are those who were the colonizers and those who were colonized. Of course, theoretically at least, everyone is equal now and everyone is trying to get along, living side by side as if nothing had happened. However, this is not working very well.

Yet, there could be aliens among people from the same country. Like in the movies, when aliens take a human body and possess it, there are also fellow countrymen that belong to another culture. This can be a different social class, a different subculture, a different regional perspective. Strangeness within can be as real as they were from a different country. Or the strangeness may be even greater because those people should be “like us”. The fact they aren’t can be problematic for some people, especially when aliens are seen as monsters.