points of view
Brand new home For migrants ‘home’ is a metaphor. It is a compilation of memories, emotions and experiences. Although they are physically ‘here’, emotionally they are still ‘there’. The ‘home’ is deconstructed on departure from their homeland and then constantly reconstructed as the migrant life progresses in a new country. Irena Falcone
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mmigrants are all too often seen as a problem, unwanted individuals on the national landscape. Yet Britain, and especially London, has been a magnet for immigrants for hundreds of years. Economic opportunity and, until the twentieth century, an open door policy towards newcomers, were playing a major role in this situation. Although the twentieth century has seen a gradual closing of that open door, migration is still happening. Immigrants are still looking to make their homes and future in Britain.
Metaphorical home
Home is about belonging, about being rooted, having a focal point, about hope in returning. It exists for a very long time in the memory, which is inevitably coloured. That memory is continuously manipulated in order to create the new home and to create the new identity. This home building process, building a new home abroad, is an opportunity for rediscovering and reinventing yourself as well as re-rooting. What migrants leave behind is, after a while, just a myth, a distorted memory and often what they find on return, when they visit their homeland is that home as they remember it, no longer exists, both it and they have changed. Lots of children of migrants that were born in a different country report having been disillusioned by what they found on returning to their parents ‘home’. What they have been told by them has nothing to do with the reality. The stories they heard are memories tinted with the need of holding on to their identity, glorification of the ‘home’ that they have left behind. Erasing nearly all of what made them leave in the first place and recreating the imaginary ‘perfect home’ on a different land, holding on to all traditions and culture that they view as a representation of who they are here. What are some of the tools that are used to achieve this, to recreate ‘home’ as they want to remember it?
Language
Language is a base of interaction and creates a platform of communication both in the public and private lives. However, as we all know, it can also be a barrier and alienate outsiders unable to communicate in the language of the receiving society. The language builds two worlds: inside and outside. Outside, it is all that is alien and freighting; inside is known, warm, and secure. For
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many migrants holding on to this separation through language is a way of holding on to their dream of returning ‘home’. There is no need to learn the outside language, as it is a temporary situation. For some of the migrants that are not so well educated in the first place, learning a new language when they hardly have any education is an enormous and overwhelming task. Lots of the migrants, especially initially, treat their language as a foundation for their new homes in an alien society. But eventually when the hope of returning ‘home’ fades away, children are born, the need and necessity of learning the outside language is obvious and becomes urgent. Eventually the necessity reverses, teaching your own children your ‘home’ language is set as a priority, and the outside becomes an inside world. Also the fear is different, it is about separation of identities between the generation that come over here and the new one - your own children as they are now at ‘home’ in what was your alien environment.
Food
Food is one of the most powerful activators of memory. We all experience when a smell or taste of a certain food brings back memories of childhood. Newly arrived immigrants very often seek to reproduce the diets from ‘home’. For example, for Polish people Bigos is a stew made of cabbage and sausages, and reminds them of eating it in their childhood homes. The demand by migrant communities for the
The Migrant at home / AUGUST 2010 / www.migranthome.co.uk
traditional foods from home has encouraged the opening of retail outlets and it has at the same time created economic opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs. But what is inevitable is the food fusion, for immigrants it is another world for compromise, combining what they want with what is available.
Home is where your roots are
It seems that irrespective of time and place immigrants have employed language, diet and religion to construct their home. But their old ‘home’ is only a snapshot in time, a captured life in memory but the reality is different. Our century brought television, radio, audio- video equipment, internet, mobile phones, therefore we can follow changes at ‘home’ and keep in touch on a daily basis with our families. The ‘home’ left behind is more real yet more distant. By witnessing those changes within, and back at home, and not participating in those changes ‘the old home’ becomes foreign. For a migrant, what he could take with him were those metaphorical roots; religion, language and food, and it is his image of the home that he is trying to rebuild in this new landscape. As for the roots, with time the weak ones go and the new ones are created, and are imbedded strongly into a new landscape. And once everything is in place there is only one-way forward and it is to blend into the landscape by bringing an exotic and beautiful element to it - a brand new ‘home’.