Who am I?
The question of identity lies at the core of the complexity relating to migration. Let's start a conversation on the question, "Who am I?"
Sarah Dadush:
Who am I? Nationality-wise, there is some room for confusion: I was born in Italy, but I am not Italian. I grew up in London, but I am not English. I am French because my mother, who grew up in Morocco, is French, though that mainly happened because her mother is from Algeria. My father is French because he married my mother, but he is from Libya originally. We are Jewish. None of us has ever lived in France. Do I identify with my nationality? Well, my brother and I attended French Lycees in London and in Maryland, and French is my mother tongue. My grandmother and aunt live in France now, and I visit them regularly. That might be the extent of my French-ness. Though I do make an effort to follow political developments in France, I don't participate in local elections, for instance.
While it is sometimes confusing to be root-less, the nationality story remains an exciting one to tell. But increasingly, when I tell it, I wonder how different things would have been if my grandmother hadn't been French, but Algerian. Or how differently the story would sound on a day-to-day basis if my passport, rather than bearing the European Union gold lettering embedded on the now familiar burgundy, had been Moroccan, or Libyan. Could it be that I am the happy accident of legal systems that aren't terribly good at discerning who and who not to extend protections to? Could it be that these rules will in fact come back to hurt me in other ways, like not being able to stay in the United Sates, the country I now identify as home more than any other? Who do immigration rules help and who do they hurt? How can they be re-worked so that the gap between who one is and how one is interpreted at the border isn't quite so wide or harmful?
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Sarah is a lawyer, currently working as a research fellow at NYU School of Law's Institute for International Law and Justice, where she administers the Financing Development Program and conducts research on topics related to the privatization of development assistance.
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Fascinating! What really
Fascinating! What really makes a difference is whether you come from a developed or a developing country. Try having a Mexican or Brazilian passport and trying to renew your driver's license every year if you live in the U.S.
Here is a simple answer: I am
Here is a simple answer: I am human. Remove your colored glasses, see things as a human would and nationality, religion, caste, race, sex become irrelevant. How about What am I in this world for?
Sarah story reminds me of the
Sarah story reminds me of the saying "the more things change the more they remain the same"
The movements of people has been happening from the beginning of time and will continue to happen. Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, Irag, is the father of all Jews, the Englishman of today was the Frenchman from Normandy one thousand years ago, the peoples from France, Germany, Sweden, England, Ireland and so many other places are todays Americans.
Nationality is transient, to be changed as required. My two brothers are Jamaicans by birth, yet my two brothers are today Canadians by nationality. Their children are Canadians by birth. Who can tell what nationality they will be ten years from today
Sarah is in good company.
I don't know
After being IN so many places (geographical, cultural, political) but not truly OF any place, I figure that if at my age I still haven't figured out where I really belong (except perhaps the World Bank, where everyone properly eludes classification -- I can't even see myself working at another international organization -- isn't that sad?), then I will never know and have resigned myself to feeling permanently displaced and somewhat ill-at-ease.
Having failed to resolve it for myself, I now project the sad dilemma on to the next generation. On the one hand, I want to spare my child this radical sense of dislocation, from the practical worries of visas and diploma equivalencies and work permits, to the affective chill that sets in when people who seemed to you perfectly civilised and cosmopolitan suddenly tell you something parochial or borderline offensive or downright racist, and you realise they assume you share their views; I want her to have certainties in life, FAMILY around the corner, to feel that she has helped to build a place, a culture or a community, PAID TAXES SOMEWHERE, and therefore has a right to feel strongly about things that affect the space she inhabits (e.g., elections, interpretations of history). On the other hand, I am not sure I want her to feel self-satisfied or nationalistic or so invested in one place that she has no qualms about the need to keep other people out.
One virtue of working at the Bank is that you get a comparative perspective, which is something politicians and voters alike could use more of; the flip-side is that in the end, no place remains sacred, and serious Weberian disenchantment takes place.
finding yourself
As an immigrant also calling America 'home' and having a relatively convoluted familial history, which I suppose many Jews must admit to facing in their sense of self, I have often asked the questions that Sarah raises and find them to be equally vexing.
I would like to offer up that my personal form of identity-seeking has been to understand OTHER immigrants. I'm heading towards academia to understand the impact of remittances and how people use migration to make sense of their lives by exploring the choices that people are making to find stability and identity wherever their lives have taken them.
But it's actually an effort to ground myself, to understand myself by coming to terms with how uprooted I feel. By talking, engaging, helping and being with other migrants, I can feel part of a community that doesn't actually exist in a rooted, local space wherever I happen to be calling 'home'.
I'm from nowhere
My mother and I, both Dutch nationals to this day, came to America when I was five. It was 1970, and the man my mother married - (who also retains his Dutch citizenship at the age of 87) - had left the Netherlands in 1946 for the last fitful years of colonialism on the island of Sumatra.
I remember vividly the Magilla Gorilla picture book I mastered in English on the way over to New York's Kennedy Airport, the fringe leather boots that were the hallmarks of an epater-le-bourgeois sensibility that were part and parcel of the post-1968 sensibility and the throng of immigrants like me at customs.
I grew up in Connecticut, attended a private school and an exclusive college on scholarships and financial aid, moved to New York City, married a "Smithy" and loved the whole charade of this American life.
Long divorced, I am forty four now and live with my dutch lover. She came to America via the Stefan Batory, an old Holland-America line boat that had been sold to the Polish State in the early seventies.
We are now all holders of the burgundy EU passport and, while none of us are naive enough to think we are still 'dutch', it seems obvious from the tone of this note that national identity clings to us like some sort of battered carapace. We live a good life, carry on, heal up and move back toward the yellow line, knocked to the eastern shore by one nation and back across the divide by the another state.
To imply, as 'I am' does, there is no need for identity is just not true. I would venture that all of us reading this blog have worked mightily to forge some sort of tribal tie. The E.U, the World Bank, the new citizen, isn't it all an effort to forge identity?
Maya-Aztec-Spanish roots mix with American-European ingredients
Being raised in Mexico City, I learnt that I am Mexican as if Mexico was a single homogeneous entity. Life has taught me I am more than that.
Traveling 2-years from Baja California to Yucatan, Mexico, I discovered its cultural differences result of the mix of original native groups and geography diversity. However, seven years in Belgium made me realize that I am more American than my European fellows. And very close to European as my Spanish friends.
I was raised in a city with big cars, where kids from rich families were taking to Disneyland in summer, families go shopping to San Antonio in Texas and in my family Super Bowl has always been an important event. On top I learnt English with American pronunciation not the Brit as Europeans try to speak.
As Latin American I feel at home not only in Buenos Aires, Cartagena or Santiago, but also in Madrid, Barcelona and even in Los Angeles, California and San Diego. I feel very comfortable with Spanish people, South Americans, Texans and Californians. All this help me conclude that I am result of a Maya-Aztec-Spanish European roots, and that I was raised as Urban Mexico City person with Latin American-American-European ingredients.
Does it make sense?
I can't figure it out either.
I can't figure it out either. But, the trade of the rootlessness is an empathy. Perhaps you also instantly feel the hurt and sadness of others in a way others cannot contemplate.
Anyway, I wrote a poem about my sense of displacement, and perhaps this may reflect how others feel...
WALKS
The man with no homeland walks,
Always moving,
Sometimes I call it traveling.
Trying to be part of something,
Each town - I want to make it mine,
A place where I have memory or family, Or a lover.
Each country, I beg it to be mine, to claim me,
To wrap me tight in its flags,
So I can cheer and sing its songs.
But there is always some difference,
And I can't feel part of anything,
Sometimes it's the way the light shines on my shell,
That makes me separate,
Or that I have no history there,
Or no person.
But I share its peoples' life, this same air, and dirt,
It drapes over my shoes.
Something keeps me apart,
So I keep walking, looking.
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