EMIGRATION
BREAKS RELATIONSHIPS.
The modern city is a place where
everyone’s a stranger, so it seems, on his way to somewhere else…Yet what makes
an airport especially curious is that its look-alike settings are the scenes
for the most emotional moments in our public lives. People break down at
departure gates…Part of the pathos and stress of the airport is that lives are
being changed irreversibly, and people have nothing to steady themselves with
but a Coffee People outlet, a Sky Plaza…all the comforts of home, made
impersonal. (The
Global Soul. Pico Iyer)
In school in the 1950s our teacher
national school pondered on emigration seeing it as a failure of the Ireland he
belonged to. It was as present as the rain in the area in which I grew up.
Every family had someone who was an emigrant and would be an emigrant. They
were resigned to a future that would see the past repeated. I didn’t understand
his anguish about emigration. The returning emigrants that I knew were home on
holidays, well groomed and dressed and with money in their pockets. I wondered
why the anguish about emigration and the traumatic, grief-laden departures.
The village seems strange; this
is separation as if my beloved
has left it.
The grief of separation is so cruel
that it is not scared of anyone;
(Shahzeb Faqir. Poetry of the
Taliban)
In October 1956 I was at Galway
railway station waiting for the Dublin train that would take me back to college
after playing a rugby match. The station master announced that this train was
bound for Dun Laoire and the mail boat to Holyhead. As people made their way
into the station my attention got locked into a group in front of me. The group
was comprised of a man, woman an three children, a family. The man carried a
small suitcase indicating that he was travelling. They stood close together and
carried on a conversation that was for themselves only. The children were
huddled between both parents giving the impression of a clutch of chickens.
Eventually, the station master announced that those with tickets should board
the train. The scene changed. The wife, mother, picked up the suitcase and
handed it to her husband and children’s father. In doing so she was asserting
her new role as both father and mother. She gave the suitcase to her husband.
He took it and left it at his feet. She beckoned the children to give their
father a hug which they individually did and then she did the same. She said,
Dia Leath and he replied Dia Liv. She took a handkerchief from her pocket,
wiped his tears as he stepped towards the train. She then wiped the children’s
eyes and lastly her own.
As I stepped on to the train I too
cried. There and then I understood the full meaning of emigration. Primary
relationships broken, husband without wife, wife without husband, children
without a father, a father without his children. A mother playing two roles.
All separated, gone and left behind.
As I travelled back on the train I
pondered the scene at the station. Having left home to go to boarding school my
own goings and comings over the previous few years flashed through my memory.
Homecomings were happy occasions, departures were heart rending, not just for
myself but for my mother and father. We were all losing something of each other
that only afterwards we could articulate. It wasn’t just me that was hurting at
losing them. They were hurting too on losing me. There was loss on both sides
and all of us had to deal with loss in our own way. There were no lectures
about leaving home, emigrating. Anything we knew about leaving home was picked
up by observation at moments of departure, going away parties, American wakes.
It was an awkward time. Indeed, there were some would could not deal with
departure by the front door, so to speak, they just left without saying goodbye,
by the back door. Leaving by the back door was a cause for greater grief
because parents were left to wonder if the silent departure was their fault.
This grief took a much longer time to heal as parents were left to ponder why
they were rejected, abandoned. The song, Steal Away, depicted that.
Years later, retuning on holidays
from overseas I was visiting my neighbours. Emigration had begun again. In one
house I visited three children had just departed. A cloud of grief filled a hole in the house.
All of a sudden a father and mother were left behind. One could touch the
emptiness. They were trying to understand the causes of emigration and at the
same time deal with the porousness of their emotions. In the conversation one
of them said, “Ah, the houses are quiet now” and the other said, “sure, and the
countryside is quiet too.”
That said it all. Those who left had
to deal with the hole in their hearts, culture shock, the discomfort of the unfamiliar and the fact that they were not at home any more Those left behind,
the bereft, had to realise that those who had left were not going to be at home any more All, those at home and away, were on their own now. Primary
relationships were broken. They would not be the same again. New aspects of
these relationships would have to be invented. Those having left would develop
tourist brochure memories, of home, parents and friends, that they would in
times of confusion seek shelter in. Those left behind would do likewise. The
danger of frozen tourist brochure memories is that they can become prisons of
nostalgia that are difficult to break out of.
Sadly, governments and other
institutions of society are slow to get involved in enabling people with
relevant information so that the emigration experience be productive and
healthy for all concerned. It is not a lack of knowledge that has kept it away
from people. Unfortunately, emigration is looked at through the lenses of
economics, loss of a national asset by the emigration countries, the gain of an
asset for free by those nations that receive them. Immigrants are commodified
as units of labour needed in economic prosperity, discarded in economic
failure, and worse still scapegoated as was the case in the recent French,
American and Greek elections.
Since the demise of communism new
enemies are needed. This time immigrants are portrayed as a risk generally
mentioned in the same media sentence as terrorists and drug traffickers. Emigration, a journey of hope of the heart in
the internal landscape of the soul, was always a risk and still is. Why, turn
on those who generate economies away by their work and at home by their
remittances? European history has a history to scapegoat the weakest minority.
Is the only certainty we learn from history that we do not learn anything from
history?
The task of migrant nations, like
Ireland, calls for at least an awareness of the emigrant condition and to
recognise the contribution they make at home and away. It is important to
remember that it was the success of those Irish abroad that gave confidence to
the people at home in the past. Irish emigrant remittances between 1950-65 from
Britain was the equivalent of seven billion £s. Yet, the Irish government was
slow to involve itself during difficult times in the Irish Diaspora. Also, the
Irish government does not hesitate about running to the Diaspora seeking help
having bailed out those at home that caused the economic malaise.
Emigrants deserve decent services,
objective information and recognition.
Tommy was my neighbour in Montego
Bay. A fine looking young fellow. His mother saw no future at home. When Tommy
was five she left for the United States leaving Tommy in care of a relative.
She sent back money for Tommy’s education. I got to know him because he asked
me to write letters to his mother in New York. The relative did not value
education leaving Tommy illiterate. He also had a serious stammer. Neighbours
related that his stammer set in after his mother emigrated. They believed that
Tommy’s stammer was caused by the shock and loss of his mother’s departure.
Grace Nichols, the Jamaican poet,
catches the grief and loss of those left behind. In small populated island
nations, branch economies like Jamaica and Ireland, emigration to the trunk
economies is always on the horizon.
His cane-shot eyes
his voice cracked as he wails
what his bones know for certain:
‘Nevaar to meet again
Nevaar to meet again.’
Come, Hanuman,
only your many arms
can help console this man-
still waving to an empty sky
the white flag of his handkerchief.
(Grace Nichols, Jamaican poet.)
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