Interview #4: Francesco

Interview #3: Elya

Interview #2: Orhan

 Part 1

 Part 2

Interview #1 - Axel

Translating Pain - Madelaine Hron

Hron's critique in her article Perversely through Pain - Immigrants and Immigrants Suffering begins from the assumption that both in fictional and authentic narratives of migration, the theme of immigrant suffering is more often that not left out or minimized. From my little knowledge of migration literature, which is limited to the readings we did during the course and few articles I found on the internet, I have to agree with Hron that "in our age of multiculturalism and globalization, we prefer to extol the difference, hybridity, mobility of the nomadic, cosmopolitan hero, rather than fixate on the sufferings of the unhappy immigrant". 

Bhabha, Derrida, Said, Kaya (only to mention few), all talk about various aspects of the phenomenon of immigration, from third spaces and hybridity to hospitality via crossing boundaries and mingling cultures, from foreignness to statistics about the perception of self vis-à-vis Other, but I do not recall much insight of the "human", emotional side of leaving one's country and having to adjust and function in a new one... that is to say the pain/suffering/loneliness/frustration felt by the "hosted". Hron points out that most literature of immigration does not differentiate between kinds of foreigners - thus blatantly ignoring that a foreigner can be (a)an immigrant, (b)a refugee, (c)an exile and because of this difference different feelings are involved.  

On a sociological perspective there is a distinction between immigrants and refugees on the basis of voluntary and unvoluntary migration (Hron). The perspective that sees refugees as people forced to leave their homes and immigrants as people who had chosen to do so in seek of whatever better future they had in mind, attributes to the firsts a certain "right" to suffer while downplays and obscure the the position of the latter. Assuming that pain is a prerogative of refugees means ignoring that most hardships a refugee goes through when in the host country - a new language/culture/unfriendly people  -  are probably the same an immigrant experiences too.

But in any case, her stance is that no matter the generalization, the popular opinion underrates the immigrants' suffering in the first place.  Why so? The author suggests two reasons: first, apparently - and we should blame a whole literature about migration for the misleading message which brings- we do expect immigrants' lives to be poignant with suffering.  "Going through pain" looks like a fair price to pay for a new-comer to adapt and be accepted in a new country, it is part of the process. After all, even students who want to be accepted in certain University brotherhoods have to embark upon a whole series of unpleasing tests to demonstrate they deserve to "get in", one might think. 

Secondly, it is thought that whatever the suffering of the "immigrant" at home, it should disappear as soon as they set foot on the new soil, as if together with a residence permit they obtained some sorts of magic painkillers protecting them from the "hardships of the  adjustment" (p.4) and started a new comfortable life full of joy. 

I believe this assumption ignores the fact that the distress felt by the stranger is not only due to his/her own difficulty to deal with a new place, phase, faces and the longing for those left behind; I think partly it is brought by the projection of the locals on him/her, a projection which reminds him/her every day of his/her otherness: in other words, it is not only his/her own otherness to make the immigrant feel miserable, but also the many ways in which a society can "otherize" a stranger. I think this is what people call "reflexive mirroring". 

Of another opinion is Julia Kristeva ( harshly criticized by Hron), for whom alienation brings happiness, more precisely "extranged happiness". She sees foreignness as a liberatory state of being, a "privileged position" from which, thanks to the interaction with the Other, an individual can develop the sense of his/her own diversity and uniqueness. This is what is called the deconstruction of home and belonging.

Adorno goes further in claiming that "the highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home", perhaps implying (I am not sure) that when "at home", we are in a place where our identity is never challenged thus we cannot ever know for sure who we are, and this is no good.

Assuming this is what he really means, then home is the place of the ones-of-the-like, where there is no flow; it is static and never-changing. It's the place where we can comfortably make predictions, expect which things to happen, create a routine. Does he mean we are like robots at home? Like thousands of photocopies of the same lame identity? Actually, If self-awareness is generated through the interaction with otherness, I see why he feels discomfort towards a place in which one doesn't have the chance of questioning his/her one's own identity, in which one cannot become aware of him/herself entirely. In this sense, I partly agree with Kristeva's notion of "extranged happiness", which I rather would call more generally "extranged self-awareness".

I believe one chooses to leave home for several reasons. I might have left mine specifically in an attempt to find parts of myself which could only come forward thanks to the interaction with Otherness. I might.

There is much talk going on about the dangers of living in an environment of the people-of-the-like, like that our perception of ourself end up being based on other people's projections and ideas of us...or at least contaminated by these projections.

So I once more wonder: is the perception of ourselves accurate? Or is it contaminated and strengthened day by day by the opinions other people project on us? Are we manufactured selves?  How can we know? Perhaps what we think we are is, in fact,  what we want to be.  Perhaps what we want to be is a product of the common opinion of what is "worth being". And is "what we want to be/worth being" what "we would like to be" were we born somewhere else? Is identity a virgin component of us or is it contaminated the moment you inhale your first breathe? 

Then I had one more thought: Suppose you, as a child, leave home and move to another country/society different from the one of your nationality. Still your identity would not be "virgin". Sure it won't be contaminated by the standards of your own community, but it would be by those of the new community. Or take Third Culture Kids, their identity is not shaped by a single country, they are loose in the world, but still the ever-changing atmosphere, the airports, the sense of elusiveness shapes their identities somehow. 

So is it really possible for one to build an identity for oneself? I came to think that identity is a product of the environment around you and it has some components of your "intimate" nature too, but I am not sure in what proportions.

Maybe, for one who has spent much of his/her life in one single place, an interesting option to challenge oneself would be to get lost and start anew somewhere else, as a nobody, nameless, pastless, faultless. Embracing and cheerishing his/her own foreigness.

And of course, aware of the pain one might go through, s/he should read Kristeva, maybe the journey would be more conscious, thus more appreciated :-)

This is the last post I am writing for the course Cultures of Migration. Maybe I will write some more. Now we are all connected, so whenever someone posts we all receive notifications, and I like to think that one day, when I will post, some of you will receive an alert and read my blog again :-) 

Thank you very much for the time together and the discussions we had, they were a real opportunity to grow up and I am glad I was there with all of you.

Keep in touch!

Laura

P.S. Interested in the anxieties of the stranger, an in particular on the figure of the Almanci and his/her in-betweenness?  Find Ruth Mandel's Cosmopolitan Anxieties. 

It's quite something :)

Night time's delirious notes (which don't make much sense and of which I had absolutely forgotten in the morning)

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT

My project focuses on multiculturalism, hybridity, crossing borders, both physically and metaphorically. It is a picture of foreignness of the here and now, a spaceless and timeless shot, an irriverent question: where is home. 

I always found it interesting to ask to the foreigners I met, after making sure they spent a reasonable amount of time far from their "worlds", stupid questions like "in what language do you think?". Thankfully, I never got to the point of asking (though I heard it many times) "in what language do you dream". How would I remember? I remember feelings in my dreams, words do not exist, they only, altogether, give flavor and mood to the dream, but I have no idea in what language I dream. Never did. 

This were the questions that I used to ask. After a while abroad (and here I feel Northern Exposure a lot) I began instead asking "Where is home for you?". I was still in the rejection phase of my re-entry, so I was convinced that for most people, once they go through the path of foreignness and they make it to the end, home became the host country, as if, after months, perhaps years, of struggling to integrate and to make locals acknowledge us as "one of them", the least one could do was to feel at home. It was the mean to an end and it was the ultimate end itself. 

Some more experience abroad deconstructed this first policy I had stuck to and made me see that foreignness is composed by different layers of consciousness. 

One does not necessarily choose between here and there. Between host country and home country. And still, does host country imply that you will always feel like a guest? And does home country mean home? The aim of my paper is to offer an additional insight in the phenomenon of belonging, and try to demonstrate that foreignness builds a spaceless and timeless space which blurs our eternal concepts of home and gives a brand new meaning to belonging. In doing so, it works on one's identity, keeping the core safe and depriving us of some external layers, and once naked, we rebuild ourselves and our identities and we become what we are here, now, today. Because we cannot say who we are if we do not look back at who we were. True, we cannot say who we are, but we can feel what we have become.

I. FOREIGNNESS VS HOME

Stating that there is such a thing as foreignness implies that there is something as a quintessential "foreignness" and "home-y". 

What is home? Why we feel "at home" when at home? Related to this: why being a foreigner is initially a hardship?

*CRAIG STORTI - THE ART OF COMING HOME

II. WHEN HOME DOES NO LONGER EQUATE WITH HOME-COUNTRY

*IN-BETWEENNESS 

*THIRD-SPACE

*COMMUNITY OF-THE-LIKE

FINAL PAPER PROPOSAL

“In a sense, it is the coming back, the return, 

which gives meaning to the going forth. 

For we really don’t know where we’ve been until we come back to where we were.

Only, where we were may not be as it was 

because of who we’ve become, 

which, after all, 

is why we left.” Northern Exposure

"When I got back, I found out that I was no longer a round peg in a round hole, but a square peg trying to fit a hole that didn't seem to be there at all" 

New Zealand aid worker

“I had the chance to live three times in London, and every time I felt like you know I was taking back from where I left. My person was enriched by the experience I had meanwhile… but my person was not the same person that lived in France or Italy… it was like going back to the Axel that lived in England. And that s why I feel like coming back home when I go to places I once lived cause in some ways my person goes back to the person I once was there.” Axel Polimanti - Hong Kong

When I first wrote about belonging, and specifically about in-betweenness (and I also titled my blog as such), I thought I was making up a new word. I even checked out in an on-line dictionary how to spell it correctly. At the time I did not know much about it, indeed I didn't know it is a phenomenon widely discussed in discourses of migration and transnationalism. The reason why I used it in my blog is that that was simply the way I felt, the way I had been feeling ever since I left England after my first experience abroad, five years ago. When I was "back home", back to the place were I was born and raised, and where, technically and theoretically, I belong, I used to define myself as an alien, an outcast, an outsider  And despite it harbors several people that look tremendously like me, how can I call a place home, if when I am there I feel like I was a foreigner?  How can I call it home, if when there and I speak my language I feel more of a stranger than when I am abroad and I communicate in language that I acquired years after acquiring my driving licence?

Nobody ever taught me about the tricks of the "coming back", the reverse culture-shock, about the difficulties of the re-entry, and, especially, no one ever told me that there is an entire scholarship out there about concepts such as "home and away" and "belonging". Thanks to the course I took in Culture of Migrations, I could finally detect and name each one of my feelings, each one of my demons. Besides, I have to say, my perspective has changed, slowly but irreversibly. 

I found out that in-betweenness is not the only one alternative to the feeling of being home. The consequences of migration are tremendously diverse, and so are the feelings emerging from it. There are factors such as third spaces, multiple identities, communities of-the-like... I am not sure that I would have been able to do discover all of this otherwise, and to grow up and expand my knowledge, and for this I need to thank my professor. 

Although, as I said, several scholars, writers, journalists have researched about notions of "home and away" and its implications before I did, I would like to give my contribution with a little research I did myself. In my final paper, I am going to explore the ways in which foreignness can dilute and re-shape one's identity. I begin here. In the first part of my paper I will take into consideration people who left their countries of nationality as young adults, and I will explore whether/how their perception of where they belong becomes nebulous. Once homesickness leaves room to enthusiasm and one settles to the paces and lifestyle of the new country, does their notion of "home" changes? Are they enriched by the new experience, or divided? Have their feelings of where they belong changed or they have remained the same? I argue that foreignness changes us irreversibly and that our notion of home changes after we adapt to a new place. I will then move on trying to provide a definition of "home" , intimately related to "belonging", and formulating hypothesis as to why our perception of where we belong changes over time and space.

With this in mind, and with the aim of reinforcing my arguments, I will refer to previous scholarship about the topic of migration and belonging. Particularly interesting at this regards are the essay "Home and Away" by Sarah Ahmed, "The Art of Coming home" by Craig Storti, some chapters from Michiel Baas' "Imagined Mobility: Migration and Transnationalism among Indian students in Australia", particularly ch. #1 "Departure, Migration, Transnationalism and what lies in-between", and ch.#3 "Learning how to work in-between". These texts together categorize different "places of belonging": In-betweenness / Third Dimensions (or Third Space) / Communities of foreigners, and so on.

Equally useful, I believe, will be to consider Lara Markova's essay "Mapping In-betweenness" and Hron's "Translating pain", about another layer of migrating: the suffering of the migrant. I will combine these arguments with the answer provided by diverse students (who have changed their countries of nationality for different reasons) in several video-interviews that I shot and that I will include in the bibliography.