The existential ambivalence that haunts immigrants

I have often wondered, in this blog too, on what home means in such a modern world where moving around is not unheard of.  Though we relocate and make our lives in completely alien settings, we more often than not forget that this is a new practice in human history.  Through her first forty-plus years, my father's mother barely got around to even forty miles away from her birth place.  Forty miles!  And her parents knew a world that was even smaller.  And here I am ten thousand miles away from all those settings.

The two book reviews that I did recently completed were also about the lives of people making a home for themselves in places far away from the Subcontinent.  One book was about home here in the US, and the other was about the Caribbean.

Life is not always easy when we are far, far away from our original homes.  There are moments, yes, when it hits me hard that I am an immigrant. The reminders coming through remembrances of things past, of places and people and foods and music and everything else.  As the author of this essay notes:

Still, no matter how settled, a queasy unsettledness, an existential ambivalence, haunts the immigrant.

An existential ambivalence.  How wonderfully she has articulated that emotion. Damn these writers who can write so well!

The author is no novelist. She, Ruth Behar, is an academic. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan.  A daughter of Cuban immigrants, Behar writes:

I have surprised myself by ending up becoming more of a rooted creature than I ever imagined I’d be. I have held on to the same job, the same house, the same address, the same husband (I, who never expected to marry). I gave my son, my only child, who is now the age I was when I thought I was never going to settle down, the gift of an immense stability – firm and steady ground on which to stand.
But when I travel and a stranger asks if I’m from Michigan, I immediately reply: ‘I live there, but I’m not from there.’ I feel compelled to tell everyone about my immigrant past: ‘I was born in Cuba, my ancestors were Jews who spoke Yiddish and Judeo-Espanyol, and I grew up in New York. I live in Michigan because it’s where I work.’
I suppose I fear that people might get a mistaken impression of me if they think I am from Michigan. It’s a desire to tell the truth of who I am, to assert I am a person of many diasporas, I come from somewhere else, I don’t have a firm allegiance to any single place. I am passing through, grateful for a place to rest my wings.

This existential ambivalence might not understandable at all to those who have not moved around a whole lot.  But, it is real.  It is an everyday struggle even if one has merely moved from "home" in one part of the country to another.

When I lived in California, an acquaintance missed her home so much that she quit her job and returned home to Chicago.  She missed the "home" that Chicago was, even though it was merely a couple of hours of flight away.

The existential ambivalence can haunt one in other ways too, like with the "descendants of enslaved people in the Americas."  The author of that essay writes about her sense of belonging after taking "a heritage-focused trip" to Nigeria and Ghana.

There are many ways to nurture a healthy cultural identity, but a journey “home” — to a place that makes you feel that you truly belong — is an especially effective one. 

We are people of many diasporas struggling in our ways to deal with the existential ambivalence.

The coming elections will be nasty ... and critical

It was from my life in California that I understood the place-based politics that I have been worried about forever since.  Life in the Central Valley was nothing like the California that people have in mind.  I used to tell people that the SoCal versus NorCal (Southern California versus Northern California) was an incorrect framework, and that the realistic one is coastal California versus inland California.

Coastal California is urban, cosmopolitan, and everything that we think of when we think about the state.  It is liberal in its politics and culture.  People have no hassles relating themselves to the world.

The inland communities and people gave me a very different taste of the Golden State.  When What's the matter with Kansas? came out, I could easily relate to the discussions there because the dynamics were similar to what I had experienced in the southern San Joaquin Valley. 

Moving to Oregon reinforced the place-based understanding.  It turned out that the state being described as liberal and full of hippies was one hell of a gross caricature.  There were--and are--some hard core conservatives, whose outlook was/is no different from the population in California's Central Valley.

All these are why I never dismissed the possibility of tRump winning not only his adopted party's nomination but also the general election.  And I was worried sick about tRump, even as the "progressive" Berniacs were enthusiastically beating up on Hillary Clinton.

I was thinking about all these as a result of reading this compelling essay about the gilets jaunes (the yellow vests).  When we think about France, we think in terms that are comparable to reducing California to its coasts, or Oregon to its liberals.  As much as there is a lot more in these two states, there is plenty more to France as well.  The neglected are pissed off, and for good reasons; the "populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere"

To most of us--yes, including you, the reader--the world is our larger home within which we have a physical address as our "home."  We ask ourselves "in an age of massive displacement and global travel, does the concept of home even make sense anymore?"  But, this is not a question that tRump's base or the gilets jaunes or the Brexiters ask themselves.

This struggle is bound to worsen in the US if the economic benefits from all-things-global are not accompanied by constructive redistribution policies and programs.  Unfortunately, the party that fuels and funnels the rage of the "rooted" is also opposed to redistribution of any kind.  Let us see if any of the Democratic contenders are able to overcome this important challenge.  I hope they will.

Hit the road, (Union) Jack

For all the angry anti-colonialist that I am, even I can't believe that I am cheering Britain.  Cheering for Britain to exit the European Union.  Brexit, Brexit, Brexit!

This New York Times report sets up the context:

underlying all the dire predictions of doom — that staying or going will cause Britain to fall apart in various apocalyptic ways — is a deeper emotional issue that speaks to the country’s sense of self. Who does it think it is, and where does it think it belongs? Has it ever felt like it’s part of Europe?

It is a "deeper emotional issue" about whatever it is that provides value to people.  In the brief time that we get to live on this beautiful planet, we handle our existential crisis in so many different ways.  We try to answer the question of "who am I?" through many affiliations and ideas,  When people search for meaning, there are different institutions that provide them with comfort.  Even though I seem to be getting more convinced about my evidence-based atheistic framework, I do not go about criticizing what people believe in their respective faiths because I understand--and appreciate--how their religious beliefs help them with making meaning of their existence.  And especially about that great certainty that awaits all of us, irrespective of the beliefs.

The political identity also plays an important role. While I personally and intellectually recognize that the political identity is a freakish accident--being born in a country--it is very much like the accident of being born in a family that practices a particular religion, speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, listens to particular music, ... All these accidents together help with understanding our own place in the cosmos.

We err when we conclude that those institutions that give us various identities are irrelevant.  It is a huge mistake to force people into behaving as one.  It was along these lines that I blogged two years ago about Scotland's (failed) effort to break free; I wrote then:

We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out how to understand each other and engage in constructive cross-cultural relationships even while holding on to the identities and without making those identities as a metric for hierarchical comparisons.  The solution is not to erase the identities but to understand that we can create a much better future even as we tightly embrace whatever identity that we want to hold on to.

Trust me, it's a blessing to be a foreigner everywhere!

A few years after moving to Oregon, I authored an op-ed on how I have come to appreciate one part of my identity as India's ambassador.  Unlike early in my American life when I used to tire of people asking me inane and profound questions about India just because I look and speak like one from that country, I later started enjoying that foreigner status--an irony that the wisdom dawned on me after gaining US citizenship.  At least then it dawned, eh!

I know well that I am almost always viewed as an "Indian" at work, at stores, and even in my neighborhood.  A foreigner who is an American.

When visiting India, this "Indian" is again a foreigner--on the streets, in the stores, and even in my parents' eyes.  The other day my father said "you don't know things here.  You are talking like an American." ;)

Of course, when I visit Costa Rica or Ecuador or any country, I am a foreigner.  It is not about how I feel, but about how I am perceived.

Why is this an advantage?  There is no way I will be able to articulate the idea like how Pico Iyer states it:

It’s a blessing to be a foreigner everywhere, detached and able to see the fun in things.

The older me does not worry about it the "foreigner" that I am, and in fact views this special status as a tremendous advantage.  :

As some are born with the blessing of beauty or a musical gift, as some can run very fast without seeming to try, so I was given from birth, I felt, the benefit of being on intimate terms with outsiderdom.

Of course, my travels and experiences are nothing compared to Iyer's, but his essay absolutely speaks to me.  

It’s fashionable in some circles to talk of Otherness as a burden to be borne, and there will always be some who feel threatened by—and correspondingly hostile to—anyone who looks and sounds different from themselves. But in my experience, foreignness can as often be an asset.

My op-ed that I am an ambassador for India, for instance, is the "asset" statement that Iyer makes.  When students ask me whether I am burdened by the otherness, they almost seem ready for me to trash the system and talk about the horrors of being an "other" and are then surprised when they hear me talk positively.  But then, when younger, I would have offered only criticisms ;)

nearly everywhere I knew was foreign, which meant that nearly everywhere had the power to unsettle and surprise me, forever.

Exactly!

Damn these writers who can convey ideas so well; I wish this "iyer" could write like that Iyer! ;)

The foreigner iyer in a "veshti"