Living in two worlds
As an immigrant or expatriate you may struggle with the richness of culture and the depth and breadth of knowledge that colour your existence. It doesn’t matter whether you come from the United Kingdom, Japan or Iran.
With this ongoing struggle in the background, it isn’t always easy to give form to your life, to make difficult choices or to handle setbacks. What points of departure and contact do you have? What advice should you follow?
Furthermore, you may be tormented by memories of what you left behind or would rather forget, or by what you unexpectedly experience here in the Netherlands.
Caught between two worlds. Feeling uprooted and out of place, longing for the very things that are out of reach. Homesickness, hope, fear, loneliness, bewilderment, detachment. Yes, you’re only too familiar with such feelings.
Working on such issues is tricky because it seems as if choosing for one option rules out the other. And you’d rather not do that. How do you deal with this dilemma? What is it that you really want?
A wound
South Africa is a wound within him. How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will he have to grit his teeth and endure before he is able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in South Africa but now I live in England’? J.M. Coetzee, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (Penguin, reprint 2003).
Rootless
There’s a burst of hearty laughter from the merry widows’ table and suddenly Mrs Dewaele starts … singing, ‘Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.’ Like a worn-out grammophone record, that melody of bygone days wafts over the deck and all the emigrees to Africa raise their heads in amazement. The captain smiles: ‘She always does that when she’s had a few too many glasses of kir’ …
That afternoon I suddenly realise why these people take the boat to Africa rather than the plane. After all these years they feel out of place in Belgium, but even Zaire isn’t what it used to be. On the boat, between those two worlds, the past lives on. Lieve Joris, Terug naar Kongo [Back to the Congo] (Meulenhoff, 1987), translation: Rob Stuart.
The Russian
I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my close friend for a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good-looking, but since his illness he had grown immensely fat from lying in bed.
Like most Russian refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which, according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter.
When he fell ill he was at the Hôtel Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a maître d'hôtel, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right Bank. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (Harvest Books, 1972).
Two worlds
But I discovered that I couldn’t tell my story without going back and writing about India. I felt that need as a writer, though for many immigrants it is reality. They suddenly realise – they themselves, or the second or third generation – that half of their story takes place somewhere else, that half of their emotional life is missing. And that’s not only a part of your past, but also your present. Kiran Desai, in Juurd Eijsvogel, Migratie is een ongelooflijk wreed proces [Migration is an unbelievably cruel process], interview in NRC Handelsblad, 7 October 2006, trans.: Rob Stuart.
Starting all over again
In the early eighties I had my first turning point. It was when I returned from South America, where I had lived and travelled for much of my life. … Back in Holland, I needed to reflect, to consider questions such as: what am I going to do, what am I going to give up, and what do I want to keep at all costs to go on with? … I had no job, no house, no qualifications, and only a few friends.
Several times I have had to leave a country without being able to take anything with me. I had become an expert in leaving everything behind. But this time it was different. I had to start all over again. Fleur Bourgonje,in: Het Leven is de Speelbal van de Tijd [Life is the Plaything of Time] (RM de Boer, Elmar, 1999), trans.: Rob Stuart.
For several years I lived and worked in non-western countries, mainly doing emergency relief work for organisations such as the International Red Cross. I know all about the problems you can have when you live somewhere temporarily, about the misery you can go through when you’re trying to re-integrate ‘back home’. I’ve been through it all myself. Peter Spelbos.