Chapter 1 LEAVING A catastrophic birth Leaving one�s own country is not a decision to be taken lightly. It has been said that migration constitutes �a catastrophic change�. and that, moreover, the �possibility of migration represents a threat to disintegration�. This is indeed strong language from psychoanalysts who have seen migration from the point of view of patients who required treatment as a result of the process. But these must represent the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of migrants do not fall into this category, either because of their immense capacity to adapt successfully, or merely because they did not have access to this kind of treatment. For many migrants, leaving home is an adventure, a new beginning. Indeed, �The time before a departure is a splendid thing.� It is a time of excitement, urgent planning, ensuring that all the little details are seen to. O. Henry tells us that �The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.� They do not know and cannot explain why they feel this urge to wander. Thomas, a character in V. Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, arrived in India, having jumped ship, and wondered what made him leave his homeland. �Why? I asked, and all I can say even now is that for some the unfamiliar holds the promise of love, of perfection.� He continues, �I wondered why I had to go on, from one unfamiliar vista to another � but already I knew there was no returning. For some of us there never is.� Some have tried to hagiologise this process, making new heroes out of migrants, seeing them as frontier people who break through barriers and build bridges and cities for their children to inhabit. They create a new land. As Peter Hal�sz points out �For the exile by the mere fact of leaving his country, has accepted full and total responsibility for the shaping of his fate. Whoever emigrates, plays God.� Mobility has now become the hallmark of citizens in any developed nation. What used to be the exception is now the rule. The proportion of people who are born to die in the same locality is diminishing rapidly. S.C.Wong devotes a whole chapter of her book Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance to �The Politics of Mobility�, the mobility of migrants and their descendants. However, the mobility induced by necessity is of a different nature to that of the local American whose mobility is considered as 'extravagance'. It is a sort of mobility that is visited on migrants� children and grandchildren who never cease in their quest, their search for 'ghosts'. Indeed, the hallmark of the new countries and continents (with their large proportion of migrants) is the restlessness of their young inhabitants, the new generation of wanderers who cannot live in peace until they have �done� the world, an odyssey sandwiched in between university years or embarked on immediately after. Commenting on V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux says that There are two sorts of intrepid travellers. The first are the travellers from a great and famous city or a prosperous country �The second sort � are homeless; some are former colonials, transplanted people who can claim no country as their own. They travel because they belong nowhere; they cannot settle, they are constantly moving�in a sense they never arrive�and much of their travel is flight. Rootlessness is their condition; it is the opposite of those for whom being metropolitan is a condition. It is not adventure that the average migrant is after. Need, economic stability, a home, food to eat�all these are legitimate reasons for leaving. Adventure, rarely, if ever, is. The journey is merely a necessary evil, a way of getting there: �the migrant can do without the journey altogether it's no more than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive.� The vast majority of migrants are forced to leave in a search for better living conditions, a decent wage, sufficient to support their (often extended) families travelling with them or staying back home. Sheer hunger was the force behind the mass migrations from Ireland and Germany to America during the 1850s. Failure of essential crops year after year transformed their usual meagre living into a famine. They left to escape droughts and famines, wars, inter-racial disputes, or indecipherable acts of God. Most migrants over the past century do not belong to these extreme categories. Most of them were on a poor but just adequate diet. Bernard Malamud makes the telling point in one of his short stories: �We didn�t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was.� This was indeed a very valid reason for many migrants to leave their country! In other situations, the financial conditions may not be desperate, but expectations arise, and with them the need to claim a bigger slice of the cake. A character in George Lamming�s The Emigrants complains that: � every month they leave the right way, paying a passage in search of what: a better break. That�s what the others say. Every man wants a better break. I�ve heard of others fleeing, but it seemed something quite different. Their flight was always a conscious choice, a choice even to suffer. But this isn�t. This is a kind of sudden big push from the back; something that happened when you weren�t looking. And now here in mid-ocean when decisions don�t mean a damn because we�ve got no reality to test their efficacy; only here and now we realize telling ourselves with an obvious conviction, we want a better break. A better break. So many people wanting a better break � The urge to emigrate is seen as part of the urge of the West Indian to discover an identity, a place and a purpose. Once the floodgates open, everybody feels they should share in the bonanza and reach for El Dorado. Some merely follow the stream, or as happened in the 1950s, an avalanche of migrants who left the old established countries (e.g. Europe and Jamaica) to try out other less congested countries, like the USA, Canada, Australia, and South America which were less burdened by history and people. �In this savage new land�, says K. Granville, �they wanted everyone: carpenters, cooks, governesses, dentists and hopefuls of no defined skill.� They want to leave, but at the same time want to stay, or at least come back again soon. This yearning is expressed by Beatrice, a character in Cyprian Ekwinsi�s People of the City: �Let�s go to the Gold Coast. I have always wanted to go there� There was a plea in Beatrice�s voice. �Yes. We want a new life, new opportunities � We want to live there for some time�but only for some time! We have our homeland here and must come back when we can answer our father�s challenge! When we have done something, become something!� The search for El Dorado, (here represented by the aptly but perhaps misleadingly named: �The Gold Coast�) is the basis for much yearning and dreaming by migrants. But the most relevant point is the emphasis on temporality, going for a short period of time, during which they would have an opportunity to prove themselves, do something, become someone, and then return to their historic roots as soon as possible. This same feeling is expressed by the young man from the Dominican Republic in Nicholas Mohr�s The English Lesson. He was also very clear in his mind why he had emigrated to America. So I come here from necessity, pero this no my country � My reasons to be here is to make money, man, and go back home to buy my house and property. I no be American citizen, no way. I�m Dominican and proud! That�s it. That�s all I got to say. Some need to escape. When they decide the environment is strangling them, they call it quits and go. The urge to leave becomes overwhelming, urgent, demanding. Salahuddin in Rushdie�s Satanic Verses felt that �he must also escape Bombay, or die,� �reminding one of Voltaire�s predicament: when he declared that he must leave England or die! The little Indian girls (in Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain) wanted to know why foreigners came to India at all. Their mother asks the Irishman, Mr Thomas: �Thomas Sahib, my little daughters here are curious: Where do these tall pink men come from, and why?� � [And Thomas answered] �I was born in a place called Tipperary, in Ireland, where it is always cold and the fog drifts over the moors. I lived well, and my family ate and drank to satisfaction, but always I felt a little empty a little absent, as if something was missing; always, I thought of places I could go where everything would be new, and when I thought like this, for a while, that feeling would vanish.� Some lose faith in their homeland. As Naipaul said: �I had given up the island.� Some even find the air they breathe has become suffocating. For Shimon Susskind in The Last Mohican the reason for leaving Israel was simple: � the desert air makes me constipated. In Rome I am lighthearted�. For others there are much more urgent reasons requiring them to leave their country of birth. James Baldwin states: I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here � I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro, or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them. He left because he felt he could not develop his talent as a writer unless he escaped from the suffocating atmosphere of being a black person in America. Interestingly, he chose Paris, though nowhere in his book does he actually state why. That Paris was the Mecca for African writers was no doubt clear to him, and perhaps his voyage to Paris was his attempt to locate his African roots. In America, he could see no future, or, worse, he could see only a future that loomed more and more bleak. Migration becomes a desperate act. I could see this too. I saw it all around me. There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows that he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention. I fled. I didn�t want my Mama, or the kids, to see me like that. Baldwin considered America was too hostile a place to live in. In his extreme view: �There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution.� Grinberg and Grinberg stress that migrants may actually be running away from a place rather than rushing to get to another. � In other cases, rather than heading toward the unknown because of the good or betterment one believes it has to offer, departure is a matter of escaping from the known place and its bad or persecutory experiences. Escaping from family can be another reason for leaving. �In my case�, Baldwin writes, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others � The best thing that happened to the �new� expatriates was their liberation, finally, from any need to be smothered by what is really nothing more (though it may be something less) than mother love � What Europe still gives an American�or gave us�is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the American artist who achieved this without first becoming a wanderer, and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly distrusted of men. There are also those who believe that in order to achieve wider appreciation, one has to leave the relatively sheltered environment of their own country and try the wide world. Fred Eng in The Year of the Dragon thinks there are many Asian Americans who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have to choose between being �somebody� in a closed, suffocating ethnic community and being �nobody� in the larger, more hostile white world. The better educated want to leave to share in the cultural development of their adopted country, not just its wealth. Prakash, Jasmine�s young husband (in Mukherjee�s Jasmine), dreaming and preparing to go to America before he was tragically killed by a bomb, reflects: When I go to work in another country, it�ll be because I want to be a part of it. Can you imagine working in a place like Qatar? That�s blood money they pay you. You come back a rich slave. Some leave in search of a spiritual renovation. Many, having experienced all the material comforts that the West could offer, still remain unsatisfied and unfulfilled. They turn to the East for mystical experiences, solace, inner richness. The narrator in Heat and Dust explains the situation to an Indian who does not understand the continuing attraction of India to the English visitors: Many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the East, we have come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life. For some, emigration is a yearning for the old order rather than a search for change or a challenge by newness: �Sometimes, the impulse to emigrate arises from resistance to change � They depart in order to avoid change.� Can one distinguish the personality of a migrant from that of the person who prefers to stay at home? It is possible that the person who finds it easiest to up and go is also the person who will find it difficult to settle anywhere for any length of time. Among migrants there is always a proportion (which can be quite significant) who will return home. People with schizoid tendencies (Grinberg and Grinberg argue ) might rush to a decision to migrate partly because of the difficulty they have of making lasting relationships and of striking roots anywhere. They are also therefore more likely to find settlement difficult, and to have psychological problems later on. The ability to make a successful settlement may require other psychological characteristics, including the capacity to be alone and to value the new relationships, as the Grinbergs argue. Those with a strong ego and stable family cope well with migration. Indeed Ginberg and Grinberg summarise those criteria which may distinguish the potentially stable migrant from others: Stability of the marital couple and of the emigrant�s family establishment is one of the factors that favors suitable migration, as are professional skill and job satisfaction � Thus individuals belonging to family units described as agglutinated or enmeshed or epileptoid, which seem to swallow up their members (for whom separation is enormously problematic), will find it difficult to emigrate. On the other side, family units of the schizoid type seem to vomit out their members, who tend to distance themselves from one another and to disperse. Saying Goodbye The worst, the most heart-rending part most migrants would rather do without is the moment of leaving. Not untypical is the description we find in Naipaul�s The Enigma of Arrival. That family farewell was the last of the big Hindu or Asiatic occasions in which I took part�those farewells (from another era, another continent, another kind of travel, when a traveller might indeed never return, as many of us, or our grandfathers, had never returned to India) for which people left their work, gave up a day�s earnings, and travelled long distances to say goodbye. And not really to say goodbye, more to show themselves to be present at a big clan occasion, to assert their membership of the clan; in spite of the fact (or because of the fact) that there were now such differences between various branches of the extended family. At times, this could also be a reason for a bit of a celebration: The women came in their brightest clothes and best jewelry and, though only twenty miles from their villages, looked exotic. Heedless of stares, they stared; and made comments in Hindi, unusually loud, unusually ribald, because in the city Hindi was a secret language, and they were in holiday mood. Then comes the actual moment of departure, when the last good-byes are waved: Owad started to kiss, strangers first � He kissed each sister into a spurt of tears; he shook the men by the hand, � whistles: waves from ship, from shore: the ship edging away: the dock less protected, the dark, dirty water surfaced with litter. And soon they stood quite exposed in front of the customs shed, staring at the ship, staring at the gap I had left behind. The gap that is left behind widens, and not just in the water. Why should separation be so painful? The character in Joseph O�Connor�s Mothers Were All the Same admits: I never knew the folks would be so upset about me going, either. When I told them first they were delighted. But the morning I left it was a different story. Tears and scribbled addresses and folded-up tenners in the suit pocket. The whole emigrant bit. You�d have sworn I was going to the moon the way they went on�On the way out to the airport I actually thought my father was going to tell me the facts of life. It was that bad. The confused reactions that flow to and fro between migrant and those left behind linger for a long time after the actual moment of departure. After the emotions settle down, those left behind may also wonder whether they could have done anything to prevent the departure, whether they too were to blame in some mysterious way for this leave-taking. Grinberg and Grinberg remind us that �Those who remain feel overcome by sorrow and depressive feelings and are not free of hostility toward the departing person for the suffering he is causing.� There is anger and criticism of the move to abandon the familiar faces and objects. They may feel angry, betrayed, annoyed. They may underestimate the seriousness of the process of separation. Alternatively, they may develop paranoid feelings. Not uncommonly, melancholic reactions accompany the self-reproach. Yet again, hypochondriacal reactions may lead to psychosomatic disorders even as serious as heart attacks. Children who are left behind may be particularly at risk of developing reactions including unconscious attempts to hurt themselves, or unreasonable crying and complaining. In one particular case analysed by the Grinbergs, Marisa fantasized the prospective separation as castration, weaning, and birth�situations involving the danger of death: migration for her was going to be a �catastrophic birth�. In fact, �As the date of her departure drew nearer the depressive anxieties became so intolerable that her need to escape again into dissociation and projective identification intensified.� The process of migration, then, affects not only the people who leave but also the whole fabric of society of which they formed a part. As Griffiths comments: From time to time the islands have had to bleed themselves to survive. Thus emigration is an experience shared by several generations of West Indians, and a pattern etched deep into their communal memory. The metaphor of roots, rootlessness, and uprooting have been used repeatedly to refer to the condition associated with leaving. �Pattern is the soil of significance; and it is surely one of the hazards of emigration, and exile, and extreme mobility, that one is uprooted from that soil.� Some may indeed deplore the very idea of searching for roots, describing it as the �desire to nuzzle once more at the benevolent teats of the mother country.� Although meant as a cynical comment, this statement reflects fairly well the lasting need that a large proportion of migrants feel towards their mother country. For many of those who left, particularly in the days when transport was difficult and hazardous as well as expensive and unaffordable, leaving was a long term decision. The chance of seeing parents and friends again became pretty remote. Describing the exodus of the Irish to America, Maclaverty remarks: That first time the children had to be wakened to see their father off. They appeared outside the house tousle-headed and confused. A mini bus full of people had pulled into their yard and their Granny and Granda were crying. Handshaking and endless hugging watched by his wife, chalk pale, her forearms folded against the early morning cold. He kissed her once. The people in the mini bus didn�t like to watch. His case went on the pyramid of other cases and the mini bus bumped over the yard away from the figures grouped around the doorway. Commenting on Lamming�s In the Castle of my Skin, Griffiths says: As the boy prepares to make his necessary journey into exile the old world behind him is crumbling and breaking down. He is conscious that his journey is a journey in time as well as space and he reflects that he is involved in a process of loss as well as a gain. He �had seen the last of something� � As he goes forth to seek the identity and the inheritance which he has been denied he is aware that he and his world have changed forever, and that in a more than simple sense there is no going back. �The earth where I walked was a marvel of blackness and I knew in a sense more deep than simple departure I had said farewell, farewell to the land.� Many would share the bewilderment expressed in Lamming�s The Emigrants where a group of migrants on their way from Trinidad to England seem to be completely bewildered and confused about the whole idea of migration, having to leave their native land against their wishes. �This blasted world,� said Tornado, �Is a hell of a place. Why the hell a man got to leave where he born when he ain�t thief not�in, nor kill nobody, an� to make it worse to go somewhere where he don�t like�. Griffiths comments: By leaving their islands they have chosen to become part of a modern world in which identity and values are subjected to a continual, battering strain. The possibilities of self-discovery and for the forging of a new unity are not denied. But Lamming forces his characters, his readers and himself to face the full implications of the process, and its costs in human life and suffering. Many migrants, and particularly accompanying wives and children, had to leave against their will. In Montreal, on starting the last leg of a long journey from Poland to Vancouver, the child migrant was also afraid of the unknown and wondered where it was all leading to: And so begins yet another segment of this longest journey�all the longer because we don�t exactly know when it will end, when we�ll reach our destination. In their heart of hearts all have the same niggling fear that this venture might also lead to nothing. � � I knew that my own journey, scarcely begun, had ended in the shipwreck which all my life I had sought to avoid.� Migration has been seen by some as a failure, something resorted to by those who could not make both ends meet in their own land. As one lady who had never left her native island once said: 'Thank God I never had to emigrate'. Naipaul puts it in a slightly different way: Our transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us � For those who lose, and nearly everyone in the end loses, there is only one course: flight. Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness � Escaping from one makeshift society to another? Flying into a greater disorder of the new land. From the frying pan into the fire. To many, and for a long time after arrival, the new land is indeed a final emptiness, until it is filled, populated, families are generated, and new cities sprout where none were before. Enforced Migrations The history of migrations includes shameful episodes where millions of people were forced into slavery, a process condoned by princes and churches throughout the world. It is only relatively recently that the concept of forced migration has become abhorrent, and it was only due to the untiring work of a few individuals that nations were eventually persuaded to change their minds. �No words,� Herder once wrote �can express the sorrow and despair of the bought or stolen Negro slave, when he leaves his native shore.� Even though slavery was officially abolished a couple of centuries ago, today�s migrants still suffer from a certain degree of enforcement in one way or another. Migration is often a response to unbearable circumstances, even though there is no physical coercion, no chains, whips, or ensnarement in the middle of the night. Many migrants would rather not embark on the journey at all. �It was a journey that ought not to have been made,� Naipaul writes at the end of An Area of Darkness �It had broken my life in two�. The unnamed narrator in Miguel Street leaves Trinidad for England, walking toward the aeroplane, �not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.� The shrinking shadow reflects the perception of self-diminution, as one leaves behind the familiarity and the sense of belonging to start a new life, as a baby almost, tiny, insignificant and utterly powerless. The effect of migration on children is particularly devastating�suicidal even. This aspect has not received the attention it deserves. Interestingly, the first section of Eva Hoffman�s book, Lost in Translation, is subtitled 'Paradise' (referring to the time she spent as a child in her native Poland), and this is followed by one called 'Exile' (as a migrant in Canada and USA): the contrast couldn�t be made more forcefully: �I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. It�s a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world. � Some feel a personal antagonism towards the country that has rejected them, like the character in Sean O�Casey�s Inishfallen Fare Thee Well: � on the deck of the mail-boat, feeling her sway and shyly throb beneath his feet; watching the landing-stage drift afar away, getting his last glimpse of Eireann�separated for the first time from her, and never likely to stand settled on her soil again. It was bitterly cold, with a fierce, keen wind blowing, and soon it was sending sharp sleety hail and salty spray into his face, stinging it deeply� Ireland, spitting a last, venomous, contemptuous farewell to him. The sense of grief is a lasting one, something that remains submerged throughout the lifetime of most individuals, suppressed most of the time, though bubbling to the surface when subliminal stimuli re-evoke the experience. Karim�s father, the 'Buddha' in suburban London, had no idea when he set off [from India] that he�d never see his mother�s face again. This was the great undiscussed grief of his life, and, I reckon, explained his helpless attachment to women who would take care of him, women he could love as he should have loved the mother to whom he never wrote a single letter. As Vitaliev rightly says, People never leave their native lands and their loved ones for fun or leisure � There is nothing more bitter for a country than an exodus of its citizens. There is nothing more bitter for a man or a woman than bidding farewell to a home where they lived�forever. Emigration is the end of all the previous life, while the future one hasn�t started yet. The end of any life is death � emigration is still a rehearsal of one�s own funeral. This, one might say is an extreme view. It is one, however, which evokes memories of the ancient myths of Africa where exile and distant migrant lands are considered places where the soul rests between this world and the next. Migrancy and the concept of dying In African myths we find the metaphor of death as a state of migrancy: There are those who believe that to die is only to change places on this earth. The deceased continues in existence in another country or region far away from his former home. He settles down in his new environment by beginning life all over again, until he either dies again or moves because his whereabouts have been discovered by people who knew him in his former life. We find similar concepts in Amos Tutuola: � then I thought within myself that old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. We see here the concept that the dead are not really dead, but merely exiles. The idea of starting a new life after death, originally a Hindu concept, is also emphasised in African myths of migration. It is easy to see how the metaphor can been turned back to front so that migrancy becomes thought of as a state that is closely to be identified with death, a condition which is about half way between life on this earth and that in the next. The concept that the condition of the exile (or migrant) is closely associated with death has been around since Boethius. Related to this is the practice of providing a 'wake' for those who are about to migrate, common in Ireland towards the end of the nineteenth century. It took the form of a farewell party on the night of departure. Patrick Duffy comments that the American wake frequently took on the ritualistic qualities of a wake on the death of someone, symbolising the enormity and finality of the departure. Ireland had the lowest rate of return migration of all European emigrations to America in the last century, so in most cases the departure was regarded as final. Moreover, when Irishmen, settled in America, decided to return to Ireland, the reverse 'wake' occurred, �with a good bit of keening [lamenting] too�. In many myths we find also the association of death with rebirth. This concept has also become associated with migration. As Rushdie comments, �The notion of migration as a form of rebirth is one whose truths many migrants will recognize � The immigrant must invent the earth beneath his feet.� Part of the myth of long distance travel, whether it is to another far away country or to the next world, has involved arming oneself with food, trinkets, belongings and other paraphernalia which might be of use on the journey. The Egyptian mummy or the present day migrant, feel more confident with these objects. The desire to take a portion of their past with them has always been a feature of migration and a real headache for customs officers, who officiously ensured that each bottle of preserve and every sausage was destroyed before it entered the country�for good reasons no doubt, but with very little appreciation for the feelings and needs of the traveller. Yet so many left, taking everything�beds, brass vessels, musical instruments, images, holy books, sandalwood sticks, astrological almanacs. It was less an uprooting than it appears. They were taking India with them. With their blinkered view of the world they were able to re-create eastern Uttar Pradesh or Bihar wherever they went. Naomi, the young girl in Joy Kogawa�s Obasan was confused with all the people and their belongings as they waited for the start of their journey. On certain days when I go to town I see the trucks. They are full of children, mothers, fathers, boxes, old people, suitcases, furoshiki�all the people standing because there is no room to sit. The day we leave, the train station is a forest of legs and bodies waiting as the train jerks and inches back and forth, [on their way to exile] Wherever they went they wanted to recreate a little home, with the same roses, roaming rabbits, architectural details, even the same town-names (Roma, Brighton, New York, New South Wales, etc), or the names of people who were well-known at home (Sydney, Melbourne), anything to retain the memory and the connection. In many languages, the voyagers squeezed into their cabins had spoken of hope, of futures, of the blank sheet of new possibilities waiting for them. They had left behind them the squalor of cities so old the very cockroaches were descended from those that had been crushed beneath the buckled feet of Goethe and Shakespeare: they had come with a few plates or bits of embroidered garments, leather-bound books with silverfish in the endpapers, or an engraving or two of Tower Bride or the Danube, with a pair of candlesticks or their grandfather�s chased silver double hunter, with their love of dumplings and pale ale, with their heads full of things in dark forest and wolves on cold plains, or of the way the Thames looked on a spring morning at Wapping: with all this useless baggage they had come, bursting with hope, to the Antipodes for a new life in a new land. There is a basic psychological need for one to keep one�s belongings, the �non-human environment� as Denford (1981) called it: losing and being deprived of one�s nonhuman environment and the specially valued objects in the old environment play a large part in the immigrant�s development�as decisive as losing or being deprived of the presence of loved ones � This would help explain why many emigrants try to take all their belongings with them, irrespective of their utility. There is an incalculable value in objects, in reminiscing, in histories and geneologies. �Stories cling to the thing, haunt it like unrestful spirits. They are part of the object.� Absence of belongings to which one is greatly attached can lead to psychological upset. Grinberg and Grinberg refer to the case of a patient requiring psychotherapy. She complained that: Ever since I got here my dreams have been completely crazy, they didn�t feel like my dreams, I didn�t recognize them. I had never had dreams like those. It was as if I wasn�t myself. But a few days ago my dreams went back to normal. I think it started happening the day my furniture arrived: I felt like I was around my things again � Every object brought back memories of a situation, a moment, a past. I felt more myself. However, a stage is often reached after years of settlement when these objects start to lose their significance. This is presumably associated with a degree of feeling at home and a reduced dependence on the mother country for one�s identity. At such a time, one can start disposing of belongings which were once very intimate and meaningful, but which now seem have lost their significance. A fairly typical situation is that of the ageing Japanese lady in Susan Nunes� short story, A Moving Day, who suddenly decided to divest herself of all her treasures. Now she wants to give everything away. We have to beg her to keep things. Dishes from Japan, lacquerware, photographs, embroidery, letters. She says, I have no room. You take them, here. take them. take them or I�ll get rid of them. � She only wants to keep a few things�her books, some photographs, three carved wooden figures from Korea that belonged to her father, a few of her mother�s dishes, perhaps one futon. � It had begun slowly, this shedding of the past, a plate here, a dish there, a handkerchief, a doily, a teacup, a few photographs, one of grandfather�s block prints. When there is no further need to keep close ties with home, memorabilia do not mean anything anymore. When the spirits leave the object, it turns into dust. It might be argued that clinging to objects is a denial or a defence against death, as if life could be transported in them. The shedding of objects could then be seen as having arrived, and they are therefore no longer needed for the journey. Humiliations Migrants prefer to forget the frustrating, often humiliating, experiences involved in seeking a home in another country. To be pushed back in their forgettable unconscious is the experience of getting there, often painful, sometimes disastrous, never luxurious. Kate Grenville, described the ship bringing the migrants to Australia: This was a ship built for the transport of many in cheapness rather than of a few in luxury. It was a mean and cramped ship, a ship of tiny airless cabins with peeling walls, cracked ceilings, and dripping pipes in the corners that conveyed other people�s plumbing with a rush and a rattle late at night. Boori Ma, a character in Jhumpa Lahiri�s Interpreter of Maladie, a �sweeper of the stairwell� originally from Bengal, and resettled in Calcutta after the 1947 partition, gives her account �of how she had crossed the East Bengal Border, with the thousands of others, on the back of a truck, between sacks of hemp.� Even after arriving in a new country, the journeying is not quite finished. There are still hurdles to overcome, distances to be covered. One of the most marked phenomena of recent years, affecting particularly the more advanced nations, is the degree of internal migration, in an effort to improve one�s standard of living. These can be no less arduous journeys than international voyages. Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan." Rushdie concurs: Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon [of migration]. In many ways, given the international and increasingly homogeneous nature of metropolitan culture, the journey from, for example, rural America to New York City is a more extreme act of migration than a move from, say Bombay. In his recent book Out of Place: A Memoir, written as he was recovering from leukaemia, Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, remarks that: To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years. Moving is always a painful experience, and requires an enormous amount of energy to get going, to overcome the difficulties and possible objections. Throughout his life he admits �that he has always had an overriding feeling of being �out of place� The fear of poverty and destitution away from home is a monstrous threat. Poverty in a big city can be particularly cruel, a degrading life not comparable to anything experienced in one�s own village, however poor. The fear and humiliation of having to come back empty-handed is also at the back of the minds of many would-be migrants. All my friends they go abroad and come back and say what a wonderful time they had. But I note they all come back. I tell you, boy, this place is a paradise ... I suppose you going to do like all the others and come back with a whitey-pokey ... Fresh air! Escape! To bigger fears, to bigger men, to bigger lands, to continents with mountains five miles high and rivers so wide you couldn�t see the other bank, to journeys that took two days and a night. Good bye to this encircling, tainted sea! The promise of greater things is counterbalanced by the anxiety of leaving, and with the worry that one would constantly feel the everlasting pull of the homeland. Many a mother would have warned her son that: It is better to live in want among your family and your friends, who love you and care for you, than to be unhappy surrounded by vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and big shiny motor cars. Many a parent worries that a son�s migration would mean that the family business would come to an end. The ideal of every father who had built up his business from scratch is to pass it on to his son. You call yourself a son of mine � with all this property that I leaving back for you? You come telling me you going to Canada as a�immigrant to be a stranger? Some would point to the natural beauty and attractions of the homeland as an argument against leaving. Mrs Deschampsneufs, (a character in Naipaul�s The Mimic Men) a lady of French origin, living in Isabella, was convinced that there is nothing to compare with the beauty of the West Indies. �It might be of course, because I�m French. But I don�t think anyone from Isabella can get on with those people. We are different. This place is a paradise, boy. You�ll find that out for yourself�. These are all good reasons for staying at home. External pressures from family and friends are added on to the natural internal reluctance to leave. In the end, however, many overcome all these resistances and move on. There is the related situation of migrants who would like to return home. They have to decide whether to stay on in a life they have more or less become accustomed to, or to leave once again and start all over again back home. This also can be a very difficult decision to make. Some simply stay put by default�they simply cannot make up their minds whether they should go or stay. Tusker (a character in Paul Scott�s Staying On) writing to his wife explains: I know for years you�ve thought I was a damn� fool to have stayed on, but I was forty-six when Independence came [to India], which is bloody early in life for a man to retire but too old to start afresh somewhere you don�t know. I didn�t fancy my chances back home, at that age, and I knew the pension would go further in India than in England. I still think we were right to stay on, though I don�t think of it any longer as staying on, but just as hanging on, which people of our age and upbringing and limited talents, people who have never been really poor but never had any real money, never inherited real money, never made real money, have to do, wherever they happen to be, when they can�t work any more�. Suddenly the powers that be say, Right, Smalley, we�re not wanted here any more, we�ve all got to bugger off, too bad you�re not ten years younger or ten years older. I thought about this a lot at the time and it seemed to me I�d invested in India, not money which I�ve never had, not talent (Ha!) which I�ve only had a limited amount of, nothing India needed or needs or has been one jot the better for, but was all I had to invest in anything. Me. Retirement in particular can hold particular hazards and threats to those who have not had the opportunity or inclination to save for the rainy day. Particularly poignant is the situation where one has to keep up appearances, particularly if it costs money one hasn�t got. Tusker resorted to writing notes to his wife because he was too ashamed to talk openly about his financial position. Perhaps for a white person being poor in England�s better than being poor in India, though by average Indian standards we�re rich if not by the standards of the Indians we mix with. They suffer from relative poverty. They start to feel that their living standards are falling and that they cannot compete with the nouveaux riche within the Indian population who used to be their servants. Perhaps more significant than economic poverty is the fear of being engulfed in a spiritual poverty. There is the fear that migration may change the individual, producing a degeneration, a loss of integrity. Hari Lal, a character in David Rubin�s: Longing for America, is a young boy of 18, studying in Bombay, anxious to go to America to study English Literature, who finds resistance from his parents, mainly his father, who warns him: To leave India is defilement. Pundit Pandey�s daughter went to London and has never come back. She is married to a Christian, she eats meat, even beef, she smokes, she drinks. Hope and Fear The migrant walks out into the wide world always full of hope, often full of fear. They face cultures which are different and often conflict with the one they are used to. Like Sally in The Mimic Men we could say that the average migrant �went out into the contamination of the wider world and was absorbed in it.� Their new life involves distancing themselves from the old: All migrants leave their past behind�it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorns of strangers upon whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging. Whether their expectations are eventually fulfilled or not, they certainly become different people, changed through their experiences and their reaction to them. One may indeed lament the need for such a drastic solution to economic problems within a country. Some have commented on �the cruelty of a system which efficiently dispersed family members � submitting them to a life lived far from family, friends, neighbours and relations.� It is merely flippant to suggest that the process of migration could or should be stopped without dealing with the root cause of the problem. There is only one means to stop emigration: to make life in one�s motherland better than in exile�happier, freer, safer and more worthwhile. And at least there should be enough food. When one looks at the grim statistics over the past couple of hundred years one can see that the rate of migration has varied enormously, more than 30 per thousand population in Ireland in the 1850�s and even higher levels, up to 35 per thousand in Malta in the 1950s. That the rates in both countries have dwindled to near zero levels goes to show the variability of those factors that promote migration. Index Chapter 2 Baldwin, James, 10 Price Ticket, 10 Bloom, Alexander, 19 Bolger, Dermot, 12 Bolger, M.Keith,, 13 Brown, W., & Ling, A.,, 9 Campanaro, Giorgio, G, 20 Chandra, Vikram,, 7 Chandra, Vkram,, 9 Claasen, Jo-Marie, 16 Coulson, Anthony, 8, 10 Duffy P, 16 Duffy, Patrick, 21 Ekwinsi, Cyprian, 9 Gorlier C & Zoppi I.M., 20 Gorra, Michael,, 15 Green, Julien,, 10 Grenville, Kate, 9, 17 Grenville, Kate,, 18 Griffiths, G, 13, 14 Griffiths, G., 8 Grinberg & Grinberg, 10 1989, 12, 13, 17 1999, 11 Grinberg & Grinberg, 1989, 18 Grinberg, L., & Grinberg, R., 1989, 7 Grossman, S & Brodsky, J, 18 Hal�sz, Peter, 7 Henry, O, 7 Herder, J.G. von, 15 Hoffman, Eva, 13, 14, 15 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer Heat and Dust, 11 King , R., et al, 16 King, Bruce, 9, 16 Kogawa, Joy, 17 Kureishi, Hanif, 15 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 19 Lamming, George Emigrants, 14 Lamming, George, Castle, 13 The Emigrants, 8 Lewis,T.J.,& Robert,R.E., 21 Maclaverty, Bernard,, 13 Malamud, Bernard Short Stories, 9 Stories, 8 Mistry, Rhoniton, 20 Mohr, Nicholas, 9 Mukherjee, Bharati Jasmine, 11 Naipaul, V.S. Barracoon, 17 Biswas, 12 Mimic, 19, 20, 21 Naipaul, V.S., An Area of Darkness, 15 Mimic, 7, 9, 14 Naipaul,V.S. Enigma, 12 Nunes, Susan, 18 O�Connor, Joseph, 12 Rubin,David,, 21 Rushdie Salman Satanic, 18 Rushdie, Salman Homelands, 7, 16, 19 Satanic, 9 Satanic Verses, 8 Rushdie, Salman, Shame, 21 Said, Edward Out of Place, 19 Scott, Paul, 20 Theroux, Paul,, 7 Thieme, John, 13 Thieme, John, 9 Thieme, John,, 17, 20 Tutuola, Amos, 16 Vitaliev, Vitali, 16, 21 Whelan, K, 21 White, P, 13 Wong, S.C, 10 Wong, S.C.,, 7
    
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