Chapter 2ARRIVAL ... about how newness enters the world. Discussing a proposed film about the Prophet Muhammad, the producer Sisodia (in Rushdie�s The Satanic Verses) proclaims that: �It is a film � about how newness enters the world� . We may also take it as a metaphor relating to migration and the process by which their �newness� enters the world of receiving nations. What is very evident is the rawness of most migrants coming in at the various ports of entry who often have very little idea of what they are about to come face to face with. The newness of the place may strike them as overwhelming, forbidding, sometimes welcoming, even encouraging. Much less evident is the fact that not only the newcomers but also the natives themselves and the whole host nation are about to change through the intermixing of the old with the new. Practically every nation on earth has changed to a greater or lesser extent through the effect of migration. Some of the newer countries have so depended on the migrant intake that their very structure is made of the various migrant skeins that helped form the fabric of the nation. The habits of nations have changed as a result of the influx of new migrants. The genetic newness they brought with them has flowered in the new environment to produce a hybrid vigour previously unknown. But that had to wait years, even a generation or two. Survival was their first aim, and that had to take precedence over everything else. Reactions/Emotions on Arrival One must not underestimate the psychological impact of migration. In his Story of the Warrior and the Captive, Jorge Luis Borges suggests that �leaving behind one�s previous way of life to embrace another that is significantly different is tantamount to undergoing a religious conversion.� Reactions to a new place vary tremendously from one person to another. Some are overwhelmed by a sense of excitement and adventure, others are more subdued and often quite anxious about what the new country has in store for them. The sense of freedom in the vast anonymous places can contrast with the often restricting atmosphere at home. A character in Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain declares that he �had crossed oceans to escape the strangling constrictions of home, to find a shining fiction called Adventure.� And for Arun, the Indian boy studying in America, in Desai�s Fasting Feasting, It was the first time in his life away from home, away from MamaPapa, his sisters, the neighbourhood of old bungalows, dusty gardens and straggling hedges where he had grown up, the only town he had ever known; he had at last experienced the total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, needs, requests, ties, responsibilities, commitments. He was Arun. He had no past, no family and no country. This sense of liberation was also felt by Edward Said on his first visit to New York. And New York�s tremendous scale, its toweringly silent, anonymous buildings reduced one to an inconsequential atom, making me question what I was to all this, my totally unimportant existence giving me an eerie but momentary sense of liberation for the first time in my life. Others find the glitter of the big city attractive. The character in Edna O�Brien�s Country Girls finds the �neon fairyland of Dublin� a great contrast to the countryside where they came from � I loved it more than I had ever loved a summer�s day in a hayfield. Lights, faces, traffic, the enormous vitality of people hurrying to somewhere. For evermore I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise. On the other hand, many find their new experience of a new country a source of worry. Even as the journey approaches its end, a feeling of great anxiety may come to the surface. The moment of arrival can be a frightening one. There are times when one wants the boat to keep going, the plane never to land, so that the future can be pushed back just a little further, and hurtful decisions postponed. This is made clear over and over again in the writings of V.S.Naipaul. He describes his own reactions on his first voyage, having left his native island for the first time as a young lad, excited at the prospect of pursuing his studies at Oxford, yet terrified by the spectre of separation. As the little plane droned and droned through the night the idea of New York became frightening. Not the city, so much as the moment of arrival: I couldn�t visualize that moment. It was the first traveller�s panic I had experienced. Again, in the The Enigma we are told: � the captain wakened his deck passenger and pointed to the city on the shore. �There, you are there. Your journey�s over.� But the passenger � had a spasm of fear. He sipped the bitter honey drink the captain had given him; he pretended to get his things together; but he didn�t want to leave the ship. Getting there, starting life from scratch, creating a new life, often out of nothing, is seen as threatening. When the passenger stepped on the wharf: �there was no mast above the walls of the wharf. No ship. His journey�his life�s journey�had been made�. Similarly, Mr Biswas in Naipaul�s novel of the same name �had feared the moment of arrival and wished that the bus would go on and never stop.� There is a feeling of going through a process of regression as one approaches one�s destination. Lorenzo, (a character in Miguel Delibes� Diario) travelling through time as well as space remarks: �We set our watches back another half hour; and I was thinking that at this rate, soon I�d be back to wearing knickers.� Even on coming back to visit one�s own homeland, one may even be struck with the fear instilled by the prospect of arriving. On that first morning I should have said: This tainted island is not for me. I decided years ago that this landscape was not mine. Let us move on. Let us stay on this ship and be taken somewhere else. Somehow, the prospect of arriving fills Naipaul with anxiety. As Paul Theroux comments: � there is a certain sense of futility, expressing itself as a fear, that steals into Naipaul�s mind, usually at the moment of arrival at a destination, when he decides to give up his journey and not go any further � for an instant he wishes to turn back. But he has no home to return to; the fear is expressed and then examined. On landing, there is usually the potentially frightening interaction with customs officials which may indeed be the most intimidating experience migrants ever suffer. Visions arise of open suitcases with intimate ware displayed for all to see, combined with an inability to distinguish in their mind what is allowable and what is absolutely prohibited, a vase with preserved fruit, a wooden crucifix, an apple, any or all may be suspect, and for any they might suffer retribution. Vitaliev reminds us that During the gloomy years of the White Australia policy, a dark-skinned migrant could be asked to take a fifty-word dictation test in any language he didn�t know (Swedish say) on arrival. If he failed� then go back home! There are invariably a number of pointless questions on arrival: �On Ellis Island the officials asked her, �What year did your husband cut off his pigtail?� and it terrified her when she could not remember.� Hanna Omiya, a �picture bride� from Japan, travelled to America to claim her husband: When she set foot on American soil at last, it was not in the city of San Francisco as she had expected, but on Angel Island, where all third-class passengers were taken. She spent two miserable days and nights waiting as the immigrants were questioned by officials, examined for trachoma and tuberculosis, and tested for hookworm by a woman who collected their stools on tin pie plates. This sensation of disempowerment is felt to some extent by every person passing through the borders of another country. The desperation associated with the process of getting there in the first place and then struggling to get a foothold in the new land is best illustrated in the this extract from Bharati Mukherjee: But we are refugees and mercenaries and guestworkers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer ... We are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines, landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly, barely wakened customs guards await their bribe. We are dressed in shreds of national costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage. We ask only one thing: to be allowed to land; to pass through; to continue. Even when one has nothing to hide, one can be intimidated by the forbidding atmosphere of the customs house, where entry seems to be regarded as a gift to be bestowed only if one passes some obscure psychological test. The character in Joseph O�Connor�s Mothers Were All The Same describes his own feelings on arriving in England: I told the customs guy I�d just arrived from Dublin, and I didn�t know how long I�d be staying. That was true all right. He glared under his peaked cap, making me feel guilty. He had a face like the �Spitting Image� puppet of Norman Tebbit, but without the charm. I mean, I hadn�t done anything, but the way he looked at me made me feel like some kind of terrorist, just the same � he told me to report my address to the local police as soon as I had one. I was going to ask why. But you don�t bother, do you? You�re so relieved that your name hasn�t somehow crept into their bloody computer that you just smile politely and say thanks very much. Once inside the country, the real effort to tackle the new life must inevitably begin. This may be a difficult step. Sheila, (the Barbadian in Neil Bissondath�s Dancing) arrived confused in Toronto: I force myself to look around. I see faces, faces round me faces. Some looking at me, some looking past me, and some even looking through me � I hear another voice calling me, �Sheila! Sheila!� I look around but didn�t see nobody, only all those strange faces. I start feeling small-small, like a douen � Again like in a dream. A bad dream. She finds it difficult even to countenance the little things of the new life: I just wanted to turn right round and say, �Take me back � I ain�t going to be able to live in a place where doors ain�t have no handle.� The capacity to cope with the new world seems to become affected. There seems to be a reduced capacity to deal with normal stresses and to take decisions. From the psychological point of view, Grinberg and Grinberg explain that: The insecurities of newly arrived immigrants are determined not only by the uncertainties and anxieties of facing the unknown, but also by the inevitable regression that accompanies these anxieties � The newcomer may be overwhelmed with all the foreignness with which she is surrounded. Paranoid anxieties can develop into true panic when the immigrant confronts the overwhelming demands that he must meet: loneliness, ignorance of the language, finding work and a place to live, etc. They continue: New communication codes, which the newcomer must incorporate and which are practically unknown or poorly understood during his first contacts, increase the level of ambiguity and contradiction in the information he receives. The immigrant thus may feel himself inundated by chaotic messages, or swallowed up in a strange and hostile world. All of this constitutes �culture shock�. The multiple chaotic and conflicting messages that engulf the newly arrived can be very destabilising. They can lead to anxiety, depression and an increased desire to stick to what is familiar and avoid change. This sort of reaction is well exemplified by Timothy Mo�s character Mui, a Chinese lady living with her sister�s family in London. For a considerable time after her arrival, she was �a nervous young woman who had not left the house more than a dozen times�and then only to go across the road.� The Grinbergs conclude: ... much time will elapse, even after they have touched terra firma, before they feel that the ground beneath them is truly firm. The �seasickness� of the trip does not easily vanish on land. Migration is such a long process that perhaps it never really ends, just as the emigrant may never lose the accent of his native land. The tendency to withdraw and regress, a common phenomenon associated with arrival in a new place, may relate to the need they feel for a mother figure, somebody they can rely on, and whom they had just lost. A newly arrived immigrant, like a newborn baby, is exceedingly sensitive. The need to feel welcome is such that any arrangement that works out or person who shows any interest whatsoever and is cordial and sympathetic makes the immigrant feel loved. A good dose of pioneering spirit is always welcome when faced with the primitive conditions experienced by many migrants on first arriving in a new country. Arriving in Australia in the 1950s for instance, they were often dumped in make-shift accommodation, surrounded by dirt roads that led from nowhere to nowhere. When the Jews started returning to Israel soon after the second World War, the conditions they found were quite primitive and couldn�t compare with those they left behind them in Vienna and other European capitals. The young child in Amos Oz�s The Hill of Evil Council remembers: Father used to say that the beautiful lands had vomited us up here in blind hatred, and that therefore we would build ourselves a land a thousand times as beautiful here. But Mother would call the land a backyard, and say that there would never be a river, a cathedral, or a forest here. It is often very difficult for the newcomer in a state of depression and deprivation to appreciate the beauty of the new land. Tourist attractions lose their glamour. The pristine natural attractions appear dull to Ewa, the 13 year old Polish migrant arriving in Canada: These peaks and ravines, these mountain streams and enormous boulders hurt my eyes�they hurt my soul. They�re too big, too forbidding, and I can�t imagine feeling that I�m part of them, that I�m in them. I recede into sleep; I sleep through the day and the night, and my parents can�t shake me out of it. My sister, perhaps recoiling even more deeply from all this strangeness, is in a state of feverish illness and can hardly raise her head. In this case there is nothing wrong with the surroundings as such�they are simply tangible evidence of the absence of the known and cherished landscapes and memories, and therefore cannot be appreciated in their own right. The feeling of alienation must be more marked on children at this tender age. This girl cannot see the beauty of the environment, because her soul has rejected it. Our concept of space and scale is also a cultural derivative, determined by imprinting as soon as we are mature enough to register environmental characteristics. In this sense it is a dimension of cultural heritage. We may be overwhelmed by the vast spaces that we are not used too, as most migrants would come from a smaller country than the continental expanses of the newer colonies. Trying to get to grips with the very geography of the place can be confusing. Such was the experience of Sheila: By the way, that was one of the first things I notice, how big and long everything was. And when somebody tell me that you could put Trinidad into Lake Untarryo over eight times, my head start to spin. It have something very frightening in that. Some feel completely lost in this new environment. Naipaul compares this feeling to being shipwrecked: Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more, that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by an encounter. Or else, upon finding themselves in a big metropolis migrants are struck by the difference between this brave new world and their own. They may be (over-) impressed with the way the natives look and behave. Naipaul on reaching New York is amazed by the Americans, thinking of them �as people not quite real, as people temporarily absent from television�. On the other hand, the glamour of London did not impress him, left him flat. The lights and the glass-and-concrete structures were no more attractive to him than the shacks of Trinidad. � it is the god of the city that we pursue in vain � In the great city, so solid in its light, which gave colour even to unrendered concrete�to me as colourless as rotting wooden fences and new corrugated iron roofs�in this solid city life was two-dimensional. The literature is full of comments relating to migrants� impressions and depressions on arriving at a new place. For instance, Pat Lenihan, a character in O Faol�in�s A Born Genius, saw in Twenty-first Street �merely a dirty, paper-strewn street, darkened and made raucous by an overhead railway.� Edward Said was also impressed by the difference between New York and his native Cairo on his first visit: The line-straight streets, the forest of tall buildings, the noisy but speedy subways, the general indifference and sometimes rude quality of New York pedestrians: all this contrasted starkly with Cairo�s meandering, leisurely, much more disorganized and yet unthreatening style. Similarly, the character in Richard Power�s Apple on the Treetop, referring to Birmingham says �It was a wasteland, this black city under the glacial street lamps, a moonscape where you could hear the constant throbbing of machinery, with never a let-up.� The character in Sara Dowse�s, Silver City concludes that, despite what they left behind, this Australia would take some getting used to. A lonely place with its weird vegetation, low wide-apart houses. The broad open sky � Even the people, what they had seen of them, seemed raw � not started, not finished. And for the newcomer, New Zealand appeared bleak and desolate: this city, this country, would be a barren place of exile. And, as you walk further into the maze of this city, these grey walls and floors of concrete and steel and stone, � the labyrinth � would eventually turn you into stone, for modern cities are the new man-made deserts in which man traps himself and bleeds himself of all his rich warm fertile humanity and goodness.� The humbling environment, as seen through the eyes of the person who �is not worth much as a migrant� can appear vast and prohibitive. It is easy to get lost in such an environment, to get �shipwrecked�. It would be almost impossible for the newcomer to imagine that this would eventually be tamed, that tunnels will be burrowed through mountain ranges and railway tracks laid in the deserts where hardly a tree can grow. For this, they more than anyone would be able to take credit. But in the first few months, most arrivals suffer from varying degrees of �culture shock�. Lewis describes this condition as a �fairly limited set of symptoms� which include: an inexplicable depression, withdrawal inward and isolation from others, somatic disorders that are difficult to locate and identify precisely, irritability, uncharacteristically eccentric and compulsive behavior, and unpredictable outbursts of aggression, among others. The effects of such a shock on the individual with the resulting psychological as well as psychosomatic problems will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter. Reactions by the Natives to the Newcomers Pioneering migrants did not expect welcoming parties on the wharves and at the airports waiting for the arrival of groups of migrants. Many a migrant arrives �in a state of great friendlessness.� With a little luck, there might be some friends or relatives, whose letters had given them the idea of migrating in the first place. There was also a time also when bosses, hungry for more workers, actually clambered onto the ship and offered jobs to the arriving migrants. There is no more cheerful sight, when arriving in a strange and forbidding place than meeting someone you know, a friend, a member of the family. This is so significant that, as Patrick Duffy remarks in his Reflections on Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, many stories of migrant arrivals include the reception by family or friends. Absence of such comforting faces can be felt very strongly by the visitor. Sanjay, a character in Vikram Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, finds that, in London, The streets were filled with people, but they walked with a furtive quickness that was strange to Sanjay, glancing over their shoulders and jostling each other �There was a strange feeling pressing at his heart, something so unfamiliar that he no longer knew what to call it�melancholy? Sadness?�but it made him unbearably lonely, the wish for a friend, a mother, a father, a need so like a cracking thirst � An antagonistic reception is perhaps to be expected from those who see migration at best as a necessary evil. For a long time, selective criteria (no Blacks, no Mediterraneans, no Asians) allowed only migrants who conformed to certain concepts of racial purity. The �White Australia policy�, which held sway until only a generation ago, is a case in point. Only grudgingly, and much later on in the history of migration, would the authorities acknowledge their own prejudices and broaden the selection criteria to make them less racist. A boat-full of migrants arriving at the Port of Melbourne, in 1947, just after the war, was met by a group of wharf-workers. The new arrivals were not at all sure what sort of welcome there were going to get. All those staring faces packing the bulwark from poop right through to the for�ard and well-deck, and not a cheer, not one hand raised in greeting, hardly a smile � They knew they weren�t welcome, and they watched us just as we watched them, full of doubt and suspicion and deep thought. Sometimes, as in this episode, the story ends happily, with the wharfies handing out ice-cream to the kids on board, almost causing a riot. This leads the author to the wishful conclusion that �racial prejudice is bad medicine, but it never runs more than skin-deep.� Such a happy ending is a welcome change, the more appreciated because of the rarity of its occurrence. Building up a community where differences based on country of origin are forgotten and ignored takes several years. Living next to a neighbour who objects to your very existence because you happen to carry different genes, or have acquired a different culture is not something one can reconcile oneself to very easily. Such a feeling hangs as an ominous pall which dampens relationships between the newcomer and the rest of the community. Differences : Comparison with old country The geography, the architecture, the landmarks and vistas all appear unfamiliar and foreign. To the newcomer, the houses in Vancouver appear so different to those in Cracow. �There�s no solid wood here, no accretion either of age or dust. There is only the open sincerity of the simple spaces, open right out to the street.� This is presumably a reference to the large glass bay-windows that are the hallmark of the double or triple-fronted houses that mushroomed in the immigrant countries in the post-war period. Some are impressed by the buzz and hub of activity. Others by the regimentation or even desolation of the place. Coming from a crowded environment, where everyone lives an open life subject to the gaze of every passer by, a metropolis can be an impersonal place. I failed to see in England one great distinction which is basic in my country. When I was there I was always asking myself, �Where are the people?� I did so because I was missing the populace, the commonalty, the masses � Some miss the openness of life back home, where everybody is everybody�s neighbour, and where secrets just do not exist. Even when they had to live their lives in the open, they seemed to be cocooned in an intimate sort of privacy. Naipaul describes the conditions he saw in Bombay, where families slept on pavements. He was impressed with their self-sufficiency even in the midst of poverty: � father, mother and baby in a trinity of love, so self-contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you � Perhaps what migrants used to �a land where all doors are wide open� find so depressing is not so much the crowding as the claustrophobia generated in cities where living in the open is frowned upon. Crowding in Bombay or Calcutta is of a different nature to living in a built-up modern city like New York or Toronto. Arnold Itwaru�s character Shanti, of Indian origin, was not used to living behind locked doors in her new home in Canada. For the first time she had begun to shut the door when she was in during the day. She had begun to lock herself in, to try to shut out an amorphous, lurking menace out there �In the villages of her life doors were closed when no one was at home, when someone died, and at night. Wooden, open to the sun, the wind, the neighbours, friends, relatives�even the mosquitoes and sandflies when they were in season�life inside embraced life outside. A sentiment echoed by the young male immigrant at a party in Toronto, who also sensed the cold breeze of unwelcome: �Is the warmth I does miss, and I not talking only about the sun but people too. Man, I remember Trinidad people always leave their doors open day and night, and you could walk in at any time without calling first. Canajuns not like that. Doors shut up tight, eyes cold and hands in pocket. They�s not a welcoming people.� One gets the impression that it is difference that is most felt as a barrier, and not so much the geography or the type of dwelling, whether open or closed, whether it is made of wood of brick. One may prefer the open spaces if that is the way one was brought up. Some prefer to be surrounded by hordes of people, others prefer the solitude and the privacy. In all cases, the main difference is whether one feels accepted or rejected. Living Conditions on Arrival Finding the cheapest accommodation in the least salubrious part of town, huddling together to save on rent and use what is left over to buy the most essential foodstuffs� this for many migrants, workers or students, is the picture of life they have known, at least in the early days after their arrival. James Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1955: I was then living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying chambermaids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long long dead. The same story is repeated over and over by the majority of newcomers to a large metropolis. Farid and Farida, a young Indian couple in London �lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from the English neigbors� cooking.� Make-shift accommodation, tin shacks, basements in a crowded metropolis, this was frequently what one could expect for the first few weeks or months after arrival. In London, Naipaul complains: I had never been in a basement before. It was not a style of building we had at home; I was like a man entering the world of a novel, a book; entering the real world. Similarly, the character in Lahiri�s Interpreter describes his experiences: I left India in 1964 � I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling to educate and establish ourselves abroad � We lived three or four to a room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table covered with newspapers. The character in Richard Power�s Apple on the Treetop, an Irish migrant in London of the fifties looking for compatriots, found accommodation in a lodging house owned by an Irish couple. There were up to thirty men staying there but I never saw half of them. Working the night shift most of them were � There were four others in the bedroom: C�il�n and the old man in the one bed, two Mayomen in another and I in the large double bed. I thought I�d have the bed to myself but I was awakened at two o�clock when somebody else pushed in under the same soiled quilt � I found out the next morning that he came from Connemara. Migrants tended to concentrate in selected localities of their chosen city, preferring to settle close to their own kind. The narrator in Sebald�s The Emigrants remarks: Until the First World War, the Bowery and the whole Lower East Side were the districts where immigrants chiefly came to live. More than a hundred thousand Jews arrived there every year, moving into the cramped, dingy apartments in the five- or six-storey tenement blocks. Being surrounded by a dozen nationalities is not a rare event in the new communities. The picture Tim Winton describes could have taken place in any of the major cities in Australia, or indeed any of the new colonies: When they first moved in, the young couple were wary of the neighbourhood. The street was full of European migrants. It made the newly-weds feel like sojourners in a foreign land. Next door on the left lived a Macedonian family. On the right, a widower from Poland. Building a new life in a foreign land often means starting at rock bottom, with minimal amenities, bread-line living, and sub-standard housing often shared with strangers. Superimposed on all this is the threat of losing self-respect which even in the worst economic circumstances was never an issue at home. Lack of Preparedness for the new land It is amazing how often migrants have no idea before they arrive of what sort of future the new country will provide for them. In the heyday of migration in the 1950s and 60s, it would have been far more important for the average migrant to take stuffed olives or sun-dried tomatoes to Australia than to be properly dressed. Hanif Kureishi describes the Indian man, walking off the plane in a cold London winter dressed for the Indian weather. �The man walking towards England, towards our curious eyes, and towards the warm winter overcoat that I held I my hands�. The impression often given is that migrants did not dress properly either because they couldn�t afford to do so, or more likely, because they had no idea what was an acceptable or practical form of dress. Twenty-five years earlier Seri Ayoun had come to Australia as a steerage passenger � He then was a dark, oriental looking character from Syria, with queer clothes that suggested a half-civilized Arab to the passengers on the more expensive part of the ship. Few migrants are really prepared for what they have to face in the new country. Problems with language and culture are often paramount. Baldwin notes: I had come to Paris originally with a little over forty dollars in my pockets, nothing in the bank, and no grasp whatever of the French language. It developed, shortly, that I had no grasp of the French character either. Local language and culture combine to form a formidable barrier to communication. The principal character in David Malouf�s An Imaginary Life indeed wonders whether there can be a society where there is no sharing of these essential characteristics. He wonders whether a society can be described as such when there is not social intercourse between its members, when I and these men have only the likeness of our humanity to share, and neither experience, custom nor tongue between us. Making a New Start Making a new start in a new country involves a considerable degree of bargaining, giving up a lot to gain a footing. One has to adapt to the ways of the land or go down�survival depending on flexibility and change. Achebe warns that �Africa never spared those who did what they liked instead of what they had to do�. This holds for all migrants in all lands. Adapting involves an enormous amount of giving way. Those who do not possess this potential are likely to be squashed as they resist change. �Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home.� The Darwinian imperative of environmental selection will ensure that only those who have managed to come to terms with the land will survive. It is a long way to total acceptance and accommodation. It also takes time before the new ways have an impact on the general way of life, from which a new nation emerges. Baldwin writing in 1960 says: � the old forms gave way before the European tidal wave, gave way before the rush of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Irishmen Poles, Persians � Everybody was here suddenly in the melting pot, as we like to say, but without any intention of being melted. They were here because they had wanted to leave wherever they had been and they were here to make their lives, and achieve their futures, and to establish a new identity. I doubt if history has ever seen such a spectacle, such a conglomeration of hopes, fears, and desires. Almost always, as they arrived, they took their places as a minority, a minority because their influence was so slight and because it was their necessity to make themselves over in the image of their new and unformed country. Welcome Some look forward to the new country with great expectations. Some enjoy a celebratory mood. Naipaul looked forward to his stay in London, his first love affair with a foreign country. �Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London,� he reflects. Some, like Vitaliev on finding freedom in Australia after leaving his native Russia, may idealise the country and the new countryfolk: I often wonder what makes most Australians look nice and kindhearted? I think it�s the way they smile. Not only with their lips like some English people do, but openly�with their whole face and their eyes taking part. Such hypomanic states, while they last, help to make one feel better, psychologically and physically. They provide confirmation that leaving the country was the right decision. As mentioned elsewhere, this also indicates an unstable relationship with the new country, an indication that a state of balanced equanimity has not yet been reached. Many feel that arriving is never an end point, but a process. We are always in the process of getting there. We never arrive, never quite let go. Madame Josette (a character in Amoz Oz�s The Hill of Evil Counsel) at a party given by the High Commissioner in Jerusalem compares the plight of her people, the dispossessed people of Palestine with that of the Jews who took over the land, displacing the former inhabitants. Take yourselves, for example. You have been leaving Europe for Palestine for forty years now. You will never arrive. At the same time, we are moving away from the desert toward Europe, and we shall never arrive either. Migration is a continuous becoming, a process which starts with a physical displacement from one country to another, goes through a psycho-social upheaval, and ends up in some sort of compromise between the person and the country and all they stand for. The process of settling is indeed a long and arduous one. Index to Chapter 3 Achebe, Chinua Arrow, 36 Baldwin, James, 34, 35, 36 Bisondath, Neil, 30 Bisondath, Niel, 28 Bissondath, Neil, 33 Borges, Jorge Luis, 25 Chandra, Vikram, 25, 32 Clacy, Ellen, 32 Connell, John, 31 Delibes, Miguel, 26 Desai, Anita, 25 Dowse, S, 31 Duffy, Patrick, 32 Faol�in, O, 30 Grinberg 1989, 28 Hoffman, Eva, 30, 33 Itwaru, Arnold, 33 Jhabvala, Ruth, Prawer East, 34 Kingston, M.H., 36 Kingston, Maxine, Hong, 27 Kureishi, Hanif, 35 Lahiri Jhumpa, 34 Lewis, T.J.& Jungman,R.E., 31 Malouf, David, 36 Mann, Klaus, 31 Mo, Timothy, 29 Morrison, John, 32 Mukherjee, Bharati Jasmine, 27 Naipaul, V.S., 33 Barracoon, 33 Biswas, 26, 33 Enigma, 26, 36 Mimic, 27, 30 O�Brien�, Edna, 26 O�Connor, Joseph, 28 Oz, Amos, 29, 37 Power, Richard, 31, 34 Rushdie, Salman Satanic, 25 Said, Edward Our of place, 31 Out of Place, 26 Schlunke, E.O., 35 Sebald, W.G., 35 Theroux, Paul Naipaul, 27, 30 Uchida, Yoshiko, 27 Vitaliev, Vitali, 27, 36 Winton, Tim, 35 References to Chapter 3
    
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