Settlement Process
I am talking about the ethnic universe.
Introduction
In recent history, migrations have assumed massive proportions, affecting millions of people round the world. Movement from one place to another, one country to another, has become the mode of existence for a considerable proportion of humanity. Indeed, it can be said that �The immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century.�
Migrants and settlers represent a challenge to themselves and to the receiving society which, it has been suggested, may lead to a revolution in the minds of both. �The colonial, of whatever society, is a product of revolution; and the revolution takes place in the mind.�
On the other hand, revolutionary changes are bound to create problems. Levin, a character, in Bernard Malamud�s A New Life is said to have had one such difficulty: �His new existence does have a serious flaw. It hangs � on an old soul�.
The first flush of excitement on arrival at a new destination may pass away quickly or linger on and last hopefully forever. For Westerners settling in India, for instance,
There is a cycle that [they] tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm�everything Indian is marvellous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvellous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on.
There are those who are filled with endless wonder. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, describing her own experiences of settling in India, is still full of wonder and excitement
I need hyperbole to express my feelings about those countless afternoons spent over what now seem to me countless years in a country for which I was not.
Walking on ground hallowed by history, seeing buildings, palaces, monuments read about since childhood�these can give an initial thrill and make the journey worthwhile. Moses in Selvon�s The Lonely Londoners reflects that it is enough
� to have said: �I walked on Waterloo Bridge�, �I rendezvoused at Charing Cross�, �Piccadilly Circus is my playground�, to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world.
There is the excitement of experiencing personally places which had made an impression long before they were actually seen, through reading, television, cinema etc.
The very first contact with the new culture can be crucial. Eva Hoffman asks:�How do you talk to an alien?� and then answers: �Very carefully.� Contact involves the use of language which may or may not be adequate, which will almost certainly give one away, and which exposes a whole scenario of difference and potential difficulties
Mourning
The natural reaction to a serious loss is a period of mourning, a process all migrants have to go through as an essential part of settlement. Loss of homeland, family, friends, memories, all this has to be worked through over a period of time which may vary considerably in length between individuals. In addition to mourning for lost objects, one feels grief for the �lost aspects of the self�. Grinberg and Grinberg say that
The concept of mourning implies a complex, dynamic process involving the entire personality and including all the functions, conscious or unconscious, of the ego, its attitudes, defenses, and in particular its relation to others.
The principal character in Eva Hoffman�s Lost in Translation tries to come to grips with this mourning:
Underneath my carefully trained serenity, there is a cauldron of seething lost loves and a rage at the loss. And there is�for all that�a longing for a less strenuous way to maintain my identity and my pride.
There is an element of guilt in all those who have consciously decided to leave their loved ones behind. The Grinbergs talk of two kinds of guilt, the persecutory and depressive types. The former can often lead to melancholy, psychosis or somatic disorders. Depressive guilt on the other hand is more often manifested as worry and sorrow and has a better chance of healing quickly. [See also chapter on Isolation]
Finding oneself in the new environment
The most urgent question for all migrants relates to how quickly they can become assimilated within the texture of the new society. Assimilation means a complete melding, and forgetting the past so it would not be a barrier to living the future. It was naively thought that this could be done easily and without any long-term effects, rather like shedding a skin. But the question posed by Eva Hoffman is this:
In a splintered society, what does one assimilate to? Perhaps the very splintering itself. Once I enter college, the rivulet of my story does join up with the stream of my generation�s larger saga � It could be said that the generation I belong to has been characterized by its prolonged refusal to assimilate�and it is in my very uprootedness that I�m its member. It could indeed be said that exile is the archetypal condition of contemporary lives.
The individual life, which started from a different vantage point has joined the main river, with its many different streams of origin. Hoffman makes the point that a modern society is no longer homogenous; it is multifaceted, 'splintered' and therefore more accommodating to diverging points of view. This should allow, in theory, for a greater degree of tolerance.
The point that exile is the archetypal condition also makes sense. Society as we know it started 10,000 years ago and was immediately associated with widespread migration. Hypermobility renders less significant the difference between one segment of society and the other. Mobility has become a condition for success. Upward mobility is correlated with lateral mobility. Moving up requires that you move from place to place. So the movement itself has become an expected and necessary condition of life. Like Hoffman, many can say:
I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted away from my center. There is no longer a straight axis anchoring my imagination; it begins to oscillate, and I rotate around it unsteadily.
Ending the section on exile, Hoffman comes to a rather terrifying conclusion:
From now on, I�ll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments�and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant.
She believes that this fracturing will remain, the whole is merely a mosaic made up of the fragmented parts of her past. While not an obviously disfiguring �scar�, the long term effects will remain evident to all, but especially to herself, her �consciousness�, to witness for the rest of her life. Once a migrant, always a migrant. Rebelling against the status of migrant she declares:
As for me, I want to figure out, more urgently than before, where I belong in this America that�s made up of so many sub-Americas. I want, somehow, to give up the condition of being a foreigner. I no longer want to tell people quaint stories from the Old Country, I don�t want to be told that �exotic is erotic�, or that I have Eastern European intensity, or brooding Galician eyes. I no longer want to be propelled by immigrant chutzpah or desperado energy or usurper�s ambition. I no longer want to have the prickly unrelenting consciousness that I�m living in the medium of a specific culture.
The culture of youth, whether immigrant or not, also involves rejecting the past. However, the two situations are quite different. In the case of native youth, rebellion is against the establishment, the norm, an effort to be different from the previous generation. In the case of the migrant youth, there is the additional problem of having to eradicate any trace of the alien culture which distinguish it from the dominant, host culture.
Self questioning is a continuous and necessary process that goes on throughout life, but particularly within the migrant�s life. One questions one�s decisions, competence and abilities to cope. One questions the role and power of others whose actions inhibit or prohibit any progress. Naipaul�s soul searching led him to believe that �my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in �� This is the strangeness of one�s own identity in a foreign land, together with the peculiarity of the environment around them; as Anthony Coulson remarks, �The exile and migrant must live between identities, negotiating with a strangeness that is both within and around them.� It is only through such negotiations that a balance may be found, one which is the result of an evaluation of both one�s personal qualities and those of the host society.
Perceived self�worth
The feeling of helplessness, particularly on arrival, and for a varying length of time thereafter is well described by Martin Grotjahn.
Life after immigration repeats the experience of infancy with its helplessness and of adolescence with its uprootedness � The experience of immigration contrast man�s basic hope for recognition with his fear of failure � Slowly I discovered the truth that in the new world I would have to proceed in personal isolation.
The newcomer is so often underestimated that we frequently find surprised references to people excelling themselves, doing better than expected, being better than they look! Helen Buber in Malamud�s The Assistant observes �There was more to him than his appearance. Still, he hid what he had and he hid what he hadn�t �� This concept of proving that �he is better than at first thought� is a recurring theme in migrant literature. The migrant is always underestimated and has to prove himself. Even his qualifications are questioned. When he eventually proves to be �more than he seems�, people are surprised.
The migrant often feels that he has to work harder than the locally born person merely to stay in the race. Denes Sugar has formulated a �rule� that appears to apply to many a migrant: �Every exile must work twice as well and for half the pay as a native if he wishes to reach the same level as the native-born.� However, when migrants try to impress with their hard work, they invariably produce the undesirable effect of antagonising their colleagues who obviously do not want to be shown up in this way.
It is difficult to maintain self-respect when everywhere you look you are faced with reminders of your own perceived inadequacy. Klaus Mann has noted: �Opportunities to earn an income are scarce, since you are not worth much as an emigrant.� And Benjamin Abel, exiled in a little room in Amsterdam, writes: �Why am I here in this alien city, I have been degraded and have become a pariah�.
This denigration and devaluation of credentials is bound to have long-term effects. Rasche comments that �Countless little humiliating, painful and frustrating experiences accumulate and leave their psychological scars, like the loss of self-respect and the feeling of worthlessness.� This self doubt, this questioning, seeking out the new self, is an integral part of the settlement process. From it arises the new person, one who has had his capacities questioned, evaluated, and accepted. From a feeling of worthlessness comes a sensation of scoring little victories, because migrants are always aware that �There are unseen victories all around us � it�s a matter of plucking them down�.
A migrant is �a new human being�, Rushdie believes:
The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves�because they are so defined by others�by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.
Indeed, one of the greatest battles that had to be won by migrants was the recognition of qualifications obtained in their home country, which were often found to be worthless or significantly devalued in the host country. Trade unions and professional registration boards in particular have insisted that their primary role is to protect their own members, particularly from the challenges posed by foreign workers. A fair balance has to be struck between, on the one hand, the protection of the native population from unscrupulous practitioners and, on the other, the fair assessment of the qualities of those who have been accepted as new members of society.
Customs and characteristics differentiating migrant from native
A poly-ethnic society represents a conglomeration of customs and habits brought together in a new environment, customs that had originated years, sometimes centuries earlier in valleys, cantons, steppes or cities all over the world. The cultures migrants bring with them will have to be adapted and modified as they go about their eclectic acceptance and rejection of local culture in the new land. This is all the more urgent and relevant in view of the undeniable fact that, as Ralph Sing in Naipaul�s The Mimic Men suggests, all terms of value and of reference are dictated by the new society�they are alien to the world they had been used to.
It could be said that the easiest way out is to accept without question the new rules, customs and habits. Mr Tivari (a character in David Rubin�s Longing for America), tells his son that �The first law of happiness is to accept the world as it is and things as they have to be.� And yet, it is very hard to shed long-held beliefs. Often migrants see no reason at all why they should change their beliefs, their food, or their way of life, which to their mind is as good as, or even superior to the one they find.
A good illustration of how the old culture remains intact even when surrounded by quite different cultures and influences is the life of the Indians in Trinidad (in the 1930s) mentioned above, where generation after generation of Indian �migr�s have held on to their traditional way of life. As Gorra remarks,the characters in Naipaul�s A House for Mr Biswas,
have the values of one land, [yet] they must live in another, estranged from their origins, in an ever more restless world of conflicting and interpenetrating cultures. They will never quite get over it.
Others are more ready to learn the new ways. The Chinese in America, for instance had to
learn the barbarians� directness�how to gather themselves and stare rudely into talking faces as if trying to catch lies. In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans.
Moreover, they may learn to defy the accepted ways and express their personality through maintaining traditions: The old Chinese lady �plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods� because it is the practical thing to do. Lawns are decorative. Vegetable plots provide sustenance for life.
Migrants have to get used to the myriad little differences and customs.
The supermarket did not carry mustard oil, doctors did not make house calls, neighbors never dropped by without an invitation, and of these things, every so often, my parents complained.
It is these and countless other little variations in the lived existence of the individual that highlight differences between cultures, though they are differences one must adjust to.
Materialism versus spirituality
The clash of cultures brings to the fore basic differences relating to philosophies of life. R.K. Narayan notes that
Indian philosophy stresses austerity and unencumbered, uncomplicated day-to-day living. America�s emphasis, on the other hand, is on material acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity � The Indian in America who is not able to live wholeheartedly on this basis finds himself in a halfway house, he is unable to overcome his conflicts while physically flourishing on American soil.
Vitali Vitaliev is impressed by the abundance of consumer goods in his country of settlement (Australia) compared with their availability in his country of birth (Russia), and more specifically with the quality and size of beds with their promise of luxury: �They made not only birth and love but even death look attractive on their wavy springed mattresses.�
In many western countries, consumerism is the new religion, and its ministers are those who have managed to build up the largest empires, the fattest bank account. The original culture, however, is undeniably important and can provide fundamental support in the settlement process. As Alexander Bloom remarks,
For other Jewish immigrants set adrift in an alien world, the maintenance of a European tradition�religious, cultural, or political�helped compensate for the general isolation.
Many living in the �advanced� modern societies of the West are disappointed and unsatisfied with their world and search for old spiritual values. Unfortunately, in a search for �otherworldliness� some manage to find only "our bruising gutterworldliness".
A few are so convinced about their convictions and so worried about the absence of grass roots spirituality that they come to a new country with the sole aim of converting the natives to a new level of spiritual existence. For generations white missionaries made this their obvious point of departure. A more recent variation on the same theme is that of Owad, a character in Naipaul�s Mr Biswas. After an education in England, where he graduated as a doctor of medicine, he returned home to convert his Hindu family and friends as �an Indian who had abandoned his religion for a recent superstition that was being exported wholesale to savages all over the world (the doctor was a Christian).�
Others offer religion as a solace, to be indulged in almost like cakes from the supermarket. From a cynical point of view, one could say that the search for spiritual peace assumes greater personal significance when one fails in the material world. In Jhabvala�s East into Upper East we find the story of a young Indian couple who spent ten years in London trying their hands at various jobs, and failing in all. Eventually, Farida decided to go to India, become a guru sitting under a tree dispensing peace of soul to the crowd who came to visit her. As she became famous, she was enticed to leave the peace of India and go back to England where she could make a fortune dispensing happiness.
Religion often means a great deal to the traditional migrant. In the first place there is often a tendency to refer to the supernatural whenever one is passing through a bad phase, a disaster, a hard time�not an uncommon experience in the life of the average migrant. Secondly, the church, as a physical and accessible building (and not necessarily the associated religion) is often the only place to provide continuity with life in a previous existence at home. The age-old ritual of religious practice provides a solid foundation familiar to the average migrant. This was particularly the case with the Catholic tradition where services (particularly masses) were said in Latin, the erstwhile lingua franca of the Catholic church. Although hardly understood by the majority of the congregation, it nevertheless provided a comforting background, a continuity, not available these days when services are carried in the vernacular. The church is also likely to be a place to meet like-minded people, possibly from the same country, speaking the same language .
It is important that we understand how profoundly we all feel the needs that religion, down the ages, has satisfied. I would suggest that these needs are of three types: firstly, the need to be given an articulation of our half glimpsed knowledge of exaltation, of awe, of wonder � Secondly, we need answers to the unanswerable � And, thirdly, we need codes to live by, �rules for every damn thing�.
A religious view of life, Nirad Chaudhuri writes
emphasizes our lone coming into the world and our lone exit from it and induces us to judge values in their relation to the individual voyager, the individual voyage, and the ultimate individual destiny.
This explains why religion can play a significant part in the life of the migrant, particularly in the early days of settlement.
Class distinctions
The class distinctions that have grown and accumulated over the centuries in Europe and Asia are in sharp contrast to the �classless� society of the new world. The situation in India with its caste system, is the most glaring example of class distinction, but the practice is not unknown elsewhere. For example, Baldwin emphasises that �European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been.�
Many Europeans find this apparent classless society in the new colonies refreshing and encouraging. Eva Hoffman finds a degree of fluidity and mobility in such a society which makes settlement that much easier:
I�ve heard American expatriates and other immigrants to Western Europe complain that societies of England or France are stratified, closed, and impregnable from the outside. When I begin the process of my Americanization, I find myself in the least snobbish of societies and the most fluid of generations. It�s that very mobility�upward, horizontal, and of some topological varieties not described in classical symmetry�that makes assimilation an almost outmoded idea.
The old-fashioned, European societies, being more stratified, are more impregnable and understanding them requires a deeper knowledge of the various strands that make up the social web. In these societies, penetration is almost impossible. In America and other �newer� societies, where class structure is far less obvious, there is theoretically less difficulty penetrating into society: In these countries mobility is the norm, and with it we find anonymity, a reduced importance of ethnic background and more reliance on individual performance.
It is not that distinctions do not exist in the new communities as well�they are merely based on other criteria rather than inherited position, titles or caste. It is more of a meritocracy based primarily on wealth, and secondarily on other characteristics such as belonging to certain professions. On further acquaintance with American society, Hoffman says, �I discover that the social landscape which seems so homogeneous at first is divided into complex configurations that everyone recognizes through subtle signals which are quite lost on me.� It takes time to distinguish the minutiae and fine dividing lines, the infinite gradations of grey, which mean so much within a social milieu. These distinctions are not made merely through language, but through subliminal signals to which one must be attuned or else miss the connection completely. Ability to receive and understand these signals is another measure of acceptability.
The Chens, a family originally from Hong Kong residing in London, found that it takes a long time to learn all there is to know about a new society:
The Chens had been living in the UK for four years, which was long enough to have lost their place in the society from which they had emigrated but not long enough to feel comfortable in the new.
For this to happen, one needs to find one�s own niche within the new society, and become accepted by at least one group within it.
Black-white
Colour is the most obvious, the most immediate, and it would appear the most long-lasting marker of difference. One can change dress or food, or even switch to a new religion. Given a good diet in childhood, one can even expect to add a few centimetres to one�s height, compared to that of one�s parents. But changing colour appears to be beyond the reach of everyone. Describing his reception at a remote village in Switzerland, (in 1953), Baldwin remarks:
there is a great difference between the white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.
Reflecting on the power of colour in controlling one�s life chances, Baldwin contrasts the Irish with the Black �migrants� in America: �the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking.�
But should colour be considered as a �problem�? Not so, thinks Rushdie:
But I�ve saved the worst and most insidious stereotype for last. It is the characterization of black people as a Problem. You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems � But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem, It�s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem. And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multiculturalism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.
Over a period of time, it is conceivable that the clear distinction between races begins to fade away slowly. This process has been referred to as �A process of gradual creolization�. They tend to lose their identity, mainly through intermarriage, a process which is usually faster in smaller ethnic communities than those with more sizeable numbers of migrants. However, it is far more difficult to envisage it happening in places like the USA where the intermarriage rate between Blacks and whites is only around one per cent.
Reading/intellectual
The �astonishing pluralism of the cultural sphere� found in the polyglot societies of the west can be quite impressive to the newly arrived migrant from a smaller community, or a community not usually given to intellectual pursuits.
The habit of reading is fostered early in colder climates which encourage indoor activities. On the contrary, living in the open lends itself to myriad possible pursuits, especially the opportunity for children to meet and play together in the great outdoors.
Naipaul complains about the lack of bookshops in his native cities. �Great cities possessed bookshops�just as they had cinemas which showed French films. Colonial towns or settlements like my own didn�t have bookshops.� Maybe reading is a predominantly northern activity. Reading a newspaper in the underground railway on the way to work or even while having breakfast is a typical English custom quite foreign to Mediterranean culture.
Nothing is more pleasurable, or more tricky to set up, than reading and eating at the same time, satisfying both body and mind at the same time. And nothing could better distinguish the English mentality from the Italian �
Dress
Dress is also a distinctive marker, which unlike colour is readily put on and off. Often it is a way of emphasising difference. Sometimes, as on national feast days, it is a way of declaring a link with a previous culture. On special occasions, as at a party given by Mrs Aurora in Jhabvala�s Poet and Dancer, one could delight in the display of national dress, where the guests� �outfits reflected their cross-cultural good taste and each expertly appraised what the other was�.
On the other hand, �inappropriate� dress has often been a cause for comment. For instance, great polemics have raged as to whether Muslim girls should be allowed their traditional head covering at school. Arriving in a new country, particularly from a warmer climate, one may be very unprepared for the inclement weather of England or Canada. As mentioned earlier, the type of clothing, light weight and free-flowing, ideal for a hot climate like India becomes completely non-functional and inadequate in England. The point to be made here is that, in addition, dress becomes an obvious marker of one�s own particular history. For instance, we find in Naipaul�s The Enigma of Arrival,
� a young man of Asia, small and small-boned, with a pale-yellow complexion, with glasses, and an elaborate, Asiatic dressing gown that was too big for him in the arms; the wide embroidered cuffs hid his hands � Was he Siamese, Burmese, Chinese? He looked forlorn, far from home�as yet � I did not make the same judgement about myself.
Dress is often the means of expressing a sentiment or making a statement. However, the interpretation of such messages in one place may be completely at odds with that of another. Naipual describes how �From the road the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white.� In Europe, black would be the appropriate colour.
What constitutes proper dress, what is allowed to show and what must be hidden, varies tremendously from culture to culture. In one situation the right thing is to take off one�s shoes, or hat. Others have to put on their shawl or head cover. Some are obliged to cover practically all of their bodies, others are content to cover the bare minimum. Mrs Thomas, in Anita Desai�s Fasting, Feasting, enjoyed sunbathing in her garden and could not appreciate the fact that in the eyes of Arun her Indian lodger, she was in a state of embarrassing near-nudity.
�Hi!, Come and enjoy the sun?�
The very idea appals Arun, if it means the baring of flesh in public. He has never seen so much female flesh before. Then to see it scarred and wrinkled, shrunk or sagging with age fills him not so much with disgust as with distress. His body shrinks and closes upon itself, affronted. Averting his eyes, he tries to slip past unnoticed.
General way of life
Lifestyles are often the result of climatic conditions as well as racial or religious practices.
It is a matter of climate. In a warm country life is conducted out of doors. Windows are left open, doors are open. People sit in open verandas and caf�s. You know your neighbour�s business and he knows yours. It is easy for the visitor to get to know the country. He is continually catching people in off-duty position. In England everything goes on behind closed doors. The man from the warm country automatically leaves the door open behind him. The man from the cold country closes it: it has become a point of etiquette.
Speaking too loudly has been attributed to living in open spaces, common in warmer climates, whereas in northern climates, where living indoors is the rule, one cultivates a lower tone of voice.
The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village where they called their friendships out across the fields � Chinese communication was loud, public. Only sick people had to whisper.
Talking aloud, gesticulating, using more lebensraum than absolutely necessary�these are frowned on in a closed space, but become possible and acceptable out of doors.
Many migrants miss the close proximity to one�s neighbour which at home is taken for granted. They are there in happiness or in grief, to commiserate or gloat, but they are there.
At home that is all you have to do. Not everybody has a telephone. But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements.
Living close to others means that you have to participate in their daily life. The contrast between Black and Indian communities living in close proximity in Trinidad could not be more clearly demarcated.
The other tenants were all Negroes. Mr Biswas had never lived close to people of this race before, and their proximity added to the strangeness, the adventure of being in the city. They differed from country Negroes in accent, dress and manner. Their food had strange meaty smells, and their lives appeared less organized. Women ruled men. Children were disregarded and fed, it seemed, at random; � Yet all the children had fine physiques, disfigured only by projecting navels which were invariably uncovered; for the city children wore trousers and exposed their top, unlike country children who wore vests and exposed their bottoms. And unlike country children, who were timid, the city children were half beggars, half bullies.
Working
Over the years, migrants have been selected for specific jobs, and this has often meant they are not necessarily representative of the population at home. Moreover, the needs of the receiving countries differ, and with them the emphasis on selection criteria. Whereas nowadays computer literacy is a must, half a century ago it was the ability to work on the cane fields or on the production line in factories that was the most sought after criterion. Many countries made sure that the type of migrants they received belonged to the right category, ready to take up the available work. There was a time when the physical examination of potential migrants to Australia included inspecting palms for calluses. This same selective process is seen in Barbados which has provided more than its fair share of London bus conductors:
London Transport send men down there in the West Indies to get fellars to work on the tube and bus, and it look as if they like Barbadians, because they didn�t go to any other islands.
In Sebald�s The Emigrants, the narrator reflects on the work done by generations of migrants.
The Manchester Ship Canal � was begun in 1887 and completed in 1894. The work was mainly done by a continuously reinforced army of Irish navvies, who shifted some sixty million cubic metres of earth in that period and built the gigantic locks that would make it possible to raise or lower ocean-going steamers up to 150 metres long by five or six metres. Manchester was then the industrial Jerusalem �
The same may be said for migrant workers throughout the New World, who blasted tunnels into mountains and laid railway tracks across continents of America and Australia. And again later on, Sebald comments:
Manchester is an immigrant city, and for a hundred and fifty years, leaving aside the poor Irish, the immigrants were chiefly Germans and Jews, manual workers, tradesmen, freelancers, retailers and wholesalers, watchmakers, hatters, cabinet-makers, umbrella makers, tailors, bookbinders, typesetters, silversmiths, photographers, furriers and glovers, scrap merchants, hawkers, pawnbrokers, auctioneers, jewellers, estate agents, stockbrokers, chemists and doctors � Throughout the nineteenth century, the German and Jewish influence was stronger in Manchester than in any other European city.
It was brawn rather than brains that was in highest demand. The new migrants in Dowse�s Silver City were warned on their first day:
No tell them you are educated�Vill be vorse for you if you do � This is a country where peasants do vell. You have to learn to think like Polish peasant � America vant brains. Australia vant muscle.
The plight of manual workers has been amply illustrated in many books and descriptions of hardships and exploitation abound in literature. Commenting on the situation in the South African mines, Jonathan Crush says:
The poverty and degradation of their existence is portrayed in frank yet sardonic, language. Miners seek casual labour but not for more than a day or two otherwise they might miss a mine contract; they beg, discarded food is richer they compete furiously for everything including ultimately, they borrow, and steal any food they can; they scavenge through dustbins of Maseru West; they sell their blood to the Hospital in exchange for cash; and they compare the size of their faeces in a desperate game of one-upmanship to demonstrate that they are eating better than their peers and therefore experiencing the indignities of their situation less acutely.
Restrictive practices, permits and regulations relating to working hours, use of premises and so on strike the newcomer as strange. A group of young West Indian women migrants in London, waiting their turn for a hairdo, chatting freely and comparing notes find these practices irritating:
You know you ain�t suppose to do it without a licence, an� I ain�t think she got any licence. �Tis different from back home where you could set up a little place an� it ain�t nobody�s business. Here every damn thing is something for papers, permission, and signing here an� there, an� the income tax an� all that. You got to be so careful.
Chil� I never know so much botheration myself. Livin� here in England is like having a job, ah mean a�job apart from your work.
Work is crucial for everybody, but particularly for the newly arrived migrant. Apart from being an economic necessity, it is essential to allow a person to come to terms with oneself within the new society. The Grinbergs emphasise the social and integrating value of employment:
The enormous importance of work as an organizing and stabilizing factor in psychic life cannot be overemphasized�. [W]ork makes one feel that one has a place in the new society. And, at a deeper level, work allows one to draw on one�s creative capacity, with reparatory benefits to the self and its lost or abandoned objects.
And Erich Fromm also believes that:
There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.
How often have migrants been accused of working too hard, be it at manual or intellectual work (study). It is not acceptable to appear too hard-working or overly studious. The custom of glorifying sport above everything else has reached absurd levels in certain Anglo-Celtic cultures yet is unknown in most migrant-providing countries. However, this ethic has not been applied to ordinary work in many modern societies. �The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear to be favoured by the gods.�
For the average migrant, work seems to take the whole day, penetrating even into the hours of the night, into what used to be the still and silent dream time. The old migrant (in Kingston�s The Woman Warrior) still finds it difficult to adapt:
I can�t sleep in this country because it doesn�t shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants�always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. Here midnight comes and the floor�s not swept, the ironing�s not ready, the money�s not made. I would still be young if we lived in China.
The preoccupation with work has meant that lifestyle has changed completely to accommodate new time-tables.
Saving
One thing migrants are well prepared for psychologically is the need for work. They are convinced that the way to move up and achieve a worthwhile existence, away from the often humbling poverty they left behind, is to work hard, save money, invest in a house, ensure a good education for the children, send some money to the old folks at home, and put aside whatever is left over for a rainy day. Writing about Indian immigrants in US, Mukherjee states that �They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room stash their savings under futons in Queens, and before you know it they own half of Hoboken.�
In fact, in places like Australia for instance, home ownership is much higher among the migrant population than the native-born. This is bound to give rise to a certain degree of hostility and jealousy against migrants �who worked too hard and were guilty of the social crime of saving, thereby threatening the Australian way of life.�
Entertainment
One clear advantage older communities have over the newer ones is their apparent ability to be happy with a rather modest mode of entertainment, created by themselves, requiring no props or set-ups. Jhabvala writes:
It is true that Indians are gregarious in so far as they hate to be alone and always like to sit together in groups; but these groups are clan-units�it is the family, or clan-members, who gather together and enjoy each other�s company. And again, their conception of enjoying each other�s company is different from ours. For them it is enough just to be together; there are long stretches of silence in which everyone stares into space. From time to time there is a little spurt of conversation, usually on some commonplace everyday subject such as rising prices, a forthcoming marriage, or a troublesome neighbour. There is no attempt at exercising the mind or testing one�s wits against those of others. The pleasure lies only in having other family people around and enjoying the air together and looking forward to the next meal. There is actually something very restful about this mode of social intercourse and it certainly holds more pleasure than the synthetic social life led by Westernised Indians.
Rural communities in general indulge in this sort of pastime and relaxation. Physical work during the day is rewarded by restful sitting or lying back watching the stars. They do not need the �synthetic social life� or plastic pleasures organised for them by others. They, and this includes children, can take care of themselves, invent their own relaxing activities or even enjoying their non-activity, an ability that is all but lost in the Western world.
The importance of the family in all this is emphasised by Daniel Bell:
the personal environment of the immigrant generation was defined by a pervasive love that emerged out of the concreteness of family experience, since ritual and social life were one.
Contrast this sort of life with that of the Chinese migrant in London in Timothy Mo�s SourSweet. In her boredom, Mui spent all her time watching television:
She watched with a fascinated interest that bordered on a special kind of horror. She was unable to catch more than a few scattered words of the dialogue, which was colloquial, compounded with regionalisms, and couched generally in a more demotic mode of the language than that which she had heard from her employer �
Life revolves around a lifeless box, cut off from all social life involving contact with real human beings.
Poverty and migration
Migration and poverty are often closely associated together at least initially, being almost inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon. Migrants often come from countries where poverty is not unknown and, particularly during their initial stages of settlement, it is therefore a question of not whether, but to what degree newcomers suffer from poverty.
Malamud in his short stories gives us several examples and insights into this predicament. In one situation one look was enough:
When I looked on the little girls I knew what [their mother] didn�t tell me. Their faces were white, they were thin, they were hungry � The girls I was afraid to look at. I could see in their faces their bones. They were tired, they were weak.�
Sobel, a Polish refugee, another character in Malamud�s short stories, had no schooling but was a voracious reader. He was taken on as an apprentice by Feld, the shoemaker, and was prepared to work for a pittance. His room was
a small, poor one, a low single window facing the street. It contained a narrow cot, a low table, and several stacks of books piled haphazardly around on the floor along the wall.
The narrator in Selvon�s The Lonely Londoners could not understand how migrants, �catching their royal to make a living�, could exist in such sub-standard accommodation. �staying in a cramp-up room where you have to do everything�sleep, eat, dress, wash, cook, live.�
Living in a single room was common practice, particularly in the older days of migrant settlement when the lone man left his family at home and struggled for a couple of years by himself to earn sufficient money to go back to his homeland, preferring in the meantime to live in abject poverty, which makes no ethnic distinction. The Chinese in America could be just as hungry. �Their chronically impoverished life results in a hardness of demeanour. I know the hard color of his eyes and the tightness in his jaw. I can almost hear his teeth grind�
Witnessing the distress induced by poverty in a foreign country becomes twice as poignant with the realisation that the beggar bears some sort of blood relationship to oneself, even if it is only one of having belonged to the same class. This was the reaction of the narrator�s mother described in Rushdie�s Midnight�s Children when she finds an Englishman begging of her in Delhi:
a white man, who stretches out a raggedy hand and says in a voice like a high foreign song, �Give something, Begum Sahiba �� and repeats and repeats like a stuck record while she looks with embarrassment into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose�embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white people.
A variant of this situation occurs when the erstwhile post-colonial returns to England and comes face to face with poverty in a class of people he had always associated with riches
Dad was amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England, though. He�d never seen the English in poverty, as roadsweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He�d never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him the English didn�t wash regularly because the water was so cold�if they had water at all.
In colonial experience, in the days of the Raj, Englishmen or women in India were mini-lords, directing servants and shunning manual work which was relegated to the locals. The concept of a working Englishman was foreign to the average Indian, a concept shattered by first-hand experience when Indians themselves started to settle in England.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, students studying overseas were proverbially afflicted with this, hopefully self-limiting condition:
� we were in the room in which there was certainly nothing to be seen but the familiar poverty and disorder of that precarious group of people of whatever age, race, country, calling, or intention which Paris recognizes as les �tudiants and sometimes, more ironically and precisely, as les nonconformistes.
The vulnerability of students as a group is counterbalanced only by the hope that their poverty is short-lived. Their aim is to get what they can, within the shortest time possible, and leave. This doesn�t always work out, however. Witness for instance the spectacle where tens of thousands of Chinese students were stranded in Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
When one finally becomes established in a new country, surrounded by all mod-cons, it is tempting for the elderly to remind their young ones how lucky they are by comparison:
Papa said, �We did not have electricity when we were children. If we wanted to study, we were sent out to sit under the streetlight with our books. During the examinations, there would be a circle of students sitting and reciting their lessons aloud.�
Family Customs
In contrast to modern-day living, the old order was based on the extended family unit which would act as a cohesive force, and would, particularly in times of need, be responsible for the welfare of its members, defined according to strict rules. Mrs Tulsi, the head of the family in Naipaul�s Mr Biswas, felt obliged to provide for all destitute, unmarried girls, and even to provide lodging for whole families who did not have a place to stay! �Mrs Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. This was considered to be a right by dispossessed members of the family.� Her son-in-law did not like it when she threw him out of her house: � �The old bitch can�t throw me out like that,� Mr Biswas said. �I still have some rights. She has got to provide me with alternative accommodation.� �
In poorer communities, the older children often have major responsibilities looking after the younger ones. There is an old Maltese saying: Look after the youngest family member and the rest will look after themselves! In Trinidad too,
The older [child] would look after the younger. Somehow, as Mrs Tulsi had said in the hall of Hanuman House when Savi [Mr Biswas�s daughter] was born, they would survive: they couldn�t be killed.
The threat, hinted at here, is that in another place, disposing of a daughter would have been an accepted alternative (See chapter on Women and Marriage).
Many cultures, particularly Eastern ones put emphasis on children as a source of future wealth. �Now he saw that in this communal organization children were regarded as assets, a source of future wealth and influence.� The economic value of male children is lauded widely.
May our wives bear male children. May we increase in numbers at the next counting of the villages so that we shall sacrifice a cow and not a chicken as we did after the last New Yam feast.
Males were even essential to ensure one�s smooth passage to the next world. Iruve, a character in Ven Begamundr��s The Evil Eye, exclaims, �who will bring me a daughter-in-law from the city? � My soul shall not go to heaven if my pyre is lit by a son-in-law� One might well comment that lighting a funeral pyre is a rather remote possibility in any of the newly established migrant colonies in the west. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, while it is relatively easy to give up a long-held custom when new conditions demand it, it is more difficult to change a mental set up. The migrants� sense of propriety, and their judgement of what is right or wrong, would not have changed at the same rate as environmental changes. The inability to follow ancient customs is often a source of worry and unease among traditional migrants.
Marriage
Migrants often look for a spouse with the same ethnic background. However, when the proportion of males in a population was unnaturally high, as was quite common during the early days of migration to the West and to Australia, problems arose when it came to finding a suitable mate. Arranged marriages, the rule in places like India, became popular among �migr�s. Photo-marriages were not uncommon. The alternative was for the male returning home after a few years overseas to bring back with him a wife and start a family � an expense they could ill afford. Sometimes this selection process becomes formalised into a ritual aimed at bringing together widely-separated compatriots. For instance, when Mr Chen (in Timothy Mo�s SourSweet) returned to Hong Kong, a dance �had taken place in his home village of Tung San. It had been thrown for emigrant bachelors like himself in search of wives to take back to Europe.�
In every country where migration has been a significant phenomenon, women have felt the vacuum left by male emigration. In colonial times, men left their country to go to the colonies and left many unmarried women at home who often had to follow them as best they could.
English girls come to the colonies only when they are desperate for a mate, having failed to find one at home; �The Indian marriage-market�, they call it. Meat market it ought to be. Shiploads of� �em coming out every year like carcasses of frozen mutton, to be pawed over by nasty bachelors like you.
In some societies, marriage is too important a family affair to l be left to the whims of the individual.
The search among the eligible families had failed to provide someone beautiful and educated and rich enough to satisfy Mrs Tulsi or her daughters � For a short while afterwards a search was made for an educated, beautiful and rich girl from a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided she had no Muslim taint.
A wife for the son and heir of the Tulsi family had to be rich, beautiful and also well-educated. This is in marked contrast to the disdain with which they look down on education for the daughter who is good only as a servant, where, having any education at all, might be a disability which could encourage insubordination!
Arranged marriage, such an abhorrence in the west, is not necessarily objected to by those most involved in the transaction:
My wife�s name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife [In India]. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man.
In fact, Samuel Johnson is supposed to have remarked that an arranged marriage, where the partners had never set eyes on each other, was just as likely to result in a stable relationship as that which follows the normal pre-marriage rituals in the West: �if marriage partners were chosen at random from the public registrar � the overall level of weal and woe would not be greatly altered.�
An arranged marriage, it was hoped, would last for ever. This is in contrast with a modern marriage where relations can be very short lived. For instance, a couple described in Paul Theroux�s Dr Slaughter, �had met in China and married in Washington and had separated in London.�
Mixed marriages
Mixed marriages have been perceived as the cause of perennial problems. On one hand they are inevitable in a society when so many different ethnic groups intermix. On the other, there is undoubtedly an extra strain put on the couple when their background, their language or their cultures are disparate. Particularly in the older communities, a marriage involved not merely a union of two people, but also their families, including the proverbial mothers-in�law.
To marry or not to marry a person of a different background raises serious issues as is well illustrated in the following extract, where a Polish-born woman is trying to decide whether to marry her American boyfriend.
Should you marry him? the question comes in English.
Yes.
Should you marry him? the question echoes in Polish.
No �
Should you become a pianist? the question comes in English.
No you mustn�t. You can�t.
Should you become a pianist? the question echoes in Polish.
Yes, you must. At all cost.
The answer to the same question is often determined by the background of the person concerned. What is reasonable in one culture is unheard of in the other. The psychological process involved in selecting a partner, like choosing a career, is very much influenced, if not determined by acculturation and ethnicity. The European culture leans towards the conservative/artistic/cultural, whereas the New World culture emphasises the pragmatic, encouraging taking the risk of marriage to an ethnically different husband, and choosing a �useful� career where it is easier to make a living. (In fact, the woman in question eventually chose literature rather than music, a compromise which appeared the less risqu� of the two.)
Mixed marriages also come under considerable pressure from family members. They are worried that the lone migrant in a foreign land will marry the first woman he meets. Warning the Black young man against this eventuality, Mrs Deschampsneufs (in Naipaul�s The Mimic Men) warns:
�I imagine you�ll be coming back with a whitey-pokey bride.� � This was a term used by Negroes of the street to describe white people � �Let me tell you, boy. Take a tip from somebody who has seen the world, eh. Don�t.�
Almost invariably, (one might say understandably) parents are against mixed marriages, partly because of their awareness of the real additional difficulties superimposed on such a marriage. In addition, there is an ingrained suspicion born of cultural, (including religious) indoctrination, particularly marked in the older communities, which is carried over with them to their new place of abode � The protagonist in Hoffman� Lost in Translation admits that, �Much later, I found out that his parents weren�t exactly happy about his involvement with a foreigner, and a Jewess to boot.�
Naipaul�s father writes to his son in England warning him about the dangers of marrying a white woman:
Well this is one thing I am begging you not to do don�t marry a white girl please don�t. Mamie told me that the girls are just crazy over the boys that go to England to study, they feel that they are very rich, and when you marry them your life is done with.
And he continues:
Your Mamee has been telling your Ma about �how the English girls are having the West Indian boys dancing on their [the girls�] fingers.� And your Ma is worrying a lot. She thinks you may go and get yourself married to a white girl � If an investigation were made, it would show that by far the majority of inter-marriages end in failure � It appears that Mamee has drawn a picture of unsullied Trinidad youth being lured to a fate worse than death by white sirens � Of course the picture is false.
In the end, father has to concede that his son has to choose for himself, and nothing that he says can change that.
And marry who-ever you choose to marry. Who you should marry is entirely a matter for you; though for my part I should be more happy to see you marry an Indian, in the end it must be as you yourself choose.
Naipaul�s father admits that maybe the danger of mixed marriages lies more in the reaction of friends and relatives than from an intrinsic problem with the couple themselves:
Almost without variation, these marriages have never been successful�not because of the temperaments of the two people concerned, but because of the attitude that is shown them by friends on both sides; you will not be accepted by her people; she will not be accepted by anyone except those in our own home here.
What a terrible judgement to make on the future of a daughter-in-law! And yet it is the advice of a loving father who has only the best interests of his son at heart. It is not too much of a generalisation to say that the possibility of mixed marriages often instils this fear in the minds of parents.
Further relaxation of the strict laws involved in finding a mate occurs when the marriage is taking place away from one�s own country where it is no longer possible to enforce strict codes relating to choice of marriage partner. The character in Aidoo�s About a Wedding Feast has decided that her daughter should be allowed to marry a foreigner.
[S]ince the child was in a foreign land anyway, and the young man she was marrying does not come from anywhere around here, everybody should accept that there was no question of anybody getting the chance to go and check his background to make sure everything about him and his family was satisfactory, and so if I found him acceptable, that should be fine with you all?
The obligation of parents to ensure that their children make the right choice becomes less pressing at a distance. They begin to shed the responsibility of vetting their child�s mate now that their own culture no longer holds sway.
There is a considerable degree of variability in what is acceptable as a partner within ethnic groups. Acceptability seems to vary inversely with geographic distance between the places of origin of the prospective partners. A European will prefer another European, and within Europe, a person with a Mediterranean background will prefer someone from the same locality. This impression is confirmed through analysis of census data on intermarriages, as well as in studies which specifically look at the various stated choices made by people with different ethnic backgrounds. Race and religion, both of which are often inter-linked geographically, are perceived as important selective criteria of a marriage partner.
In Beverley Farmer�s Milk, the elderly, bed-bound Greek woman long-settled in Australia tries her best to prevent the marriage of her son �Jimmy� [still Dimitri to her] to a non-Greek. When he brings his Australian girlfriend to visit his mother, the old woman pleads with her, asks her to live with him but not marry him, even offers her money, (gold coins which she digs out from inside her mattress), eventually resorting to insults, calling her a whore, in an effort to drive her out of the house: �Gold pounds! Where they are? Take them. Hev the baby. Leave Dimitri alone.� There is a total rejection by the ageing migrant who does not wish to see a mixing of blood, a marrying out within the broader Australian community, a fear of losing one�s grip on the next generation. This is a widespread reaction. Many first generation parents would do their utmost to ensure that there is as little deviation as possible from what they consider as the norm. In their olden days, even marrying into the next village was considered a step down. Interesting also in the story above are the different moral standards that should hold for her boy as opposed to the �foreign� woman. He has to marry a �virgin� even though he himself with a child of his own, is no na�ve spring chicken. �For Dimitri next time should be only parthena, Veergin� his mother insists.
Intermarriage and colour
The laws that determine who should marry whom may become a very fixed part of a rigid social system, like the caste system in India, which prevents intermixing. In other countries it is a question of colour. The degree of intermarriage between Blacks and Whites in America is minimal�no more than one per cent of marriages involve a Black and White couple. Several surveys have emphasised the salience of colour as a barrier to marriage. Some people, like Tommy the South African, in Doris Lessing�s A Ripple from the Storm, have very strong views about marriage involving people of different colour. �I must say straight, comrade, that I don�t think it�s right for black and white to marry, but I know it�s because I�ve been brought up here ��
There is the perennial question, the gold standard as it were, as Baldwin puts it bluntly: �Would you let your sister marry one? [ie. a Black person] Some white parents are very protective and will do anything to prevent their children marrying anyone belonging to a different race:
�You can�t see my daughter again,� said Hairy Back. �She doesn�t go out with boys. Or with wogs � If you put one of your black �ands near my daughter I�ll smash it with a �ammer! With a �ammer!�.
The possibility of complications resulting from mixed marriage is never far from the parental mind. When the Jew Nat Lime, in Malamud�s Black is my Favorite Color, asked his Black girlfriend to marry him, he was rebuffed: �What about children? Were you looking forward to half-Jewish polka dots?�
Post raj India has also seen many children of mixed blood being added to the population. These apparently were also a cause for concern, as �The genes could play cruel tricks� [with these �white� Eurasians, who may give birth to brown-skinned children]. There is the fear of a throwback, black coming back with a vengeance. Though superficially they might pass off as white there is always the �threat� that their children will breed true and expose the past.
Even shades of colour can mean a lot for a woman looking for a husband in certain communities. In his autobiography N. Chaudhuri counts his blessings that he had no daughters with a dark colour to make his life a misery. Speaking about the difficulty of marrying off a daughter that was darker than acceptable, he says:
Providence has rewarded me by giving me only sons, all three of whom have, for boys, the passably brown complexion of teak and not the impossible brown of mahogany. Thus have I been released from worry over the colour bar to marriages � Varna or colour was the central principle round which Hindu society organized itself, and the orthodox Hindu scriptures know of no greater crime than miscegenation, or, as they call it, Varna-sankara, the mixing of colours.
Colour remains as the most important identifier of individual difference. It plays a very significant part in the process of selection of a marriage partner. As is the case for other perceived drawbacks and blemishes, it seems to affect a woman�s prospects to a greater extent than a man�s.
Sex and attraction
At times it is the exotic nature of the relationship that provides the attraction�a case of opposite poles attracting each other. Jasmine, in Mukherjee�s novel of the same name, says about her husband, �Bud courts me because I am an alien. I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability. The East plugs me into instant vitality and wisdom. I rejuvenate him simply by being who I am.�
Even an English and Italian couple may provide a degree of exhilaration not seen in a non-mixed marriage.
If you knew how adventurous we thought our marriage was, I remember laughing to Paola, to my daughter. That sudden meeting of two nations. Two cultures. Hounslow lower-middle and Roman aristocracy (so-called).
It is superficially possible to believe that the exotic may attract, at least initially and ephemerally. But it is hard to believe that it could be a basis for a lasting association.
On a more casual level, there is a tendency to believe that sex with a foreigner is acceptable in situations where it would not acceptable with a person of the same background. Encounters which one may forget easily are the norm while on holidays, for instance. The same degree of freedom might be expected in liaisons with people of a different background where the �danger� of a permanent relationship is somehow diminished. This is the experience that Jamaican girls have of their male compatriots in England:
They too fast, some o� these English girls
An� that just how the West Indian boys like them. What you think make it that none of us particularly can have a good time here.
The things they will do, no decent girl from home would ever dream of.
The impression given is that, for a West Indian in London, sex with an English girl is close to prostitution, while the real thing is reserved for girls of the same colour.
The same line of thinking goes on in the head of Gopi, the Indian boy in Delhi, in Jhabvala�s Travellers, who was fascinated with Lee, a Western girl visiting India, looking for spiritual fulfilment. Not understanding the sexual mores of the culture, she naively believed she could befriend Gopi, have dinner with him publicly, follow him to a hotel room upstairs, and then sit and admire the view from the window. A dejected and rejected Gopi reflects:
What to make of her? A girl who had been brought to a hotel room�had been led upstairs in full public view�and now she said she had been thinking of something else. And this was not an inexperienced, unknowing Indian girl like his sisters, but a Western girl who was travelling all round the world by herself. Everyone knew that Western girls were brought up on sex, lived on sex. She must have slept with many, many men, over and over again.
As if to confirm the stereotype, she was moved to pity him, took her clothes off and went through with it, convincing herself that
she was glad to be doing this for him and, at the final moment thought to herself that perhaps this was part of the merging she had so ardently desired while looking out of the window.
Marriages of convenience
Arranged marriages tend to have deprecatory connotations. In an ideal world marriages are made for love and any other end has sordid overtones. Marriages of convenience occur when the main aim is not to start a family and have children, but only to obtain a certificate which confers certain rights, most often the rights of citizenship.
One example that is not particularly encouraged by immigration authorities is where visitors on a short-term visa endeavour to make their stay permanent through a marriage of convenience. In Immigration Blues, Bienvenido Santos gives us a moving story of a Filipino woman in US who having overstayed her permit in US, was desperate to marry a citizen to avoid deportation. Alipio, an ageing immigrant himself and long-settled in San Francisco, finds himself getting old and alone:
Many times I wonder where are the others. Where are you? Speak to me. And I think they�re wondering the same, asking the same, so I say, I�m here, your friend Alipio Palma, my leg is broken, the wife she�s dead, but I�m okay. Are you okay also? The dead they can hear even if they don�t answer. The alive don�t answer. But I know. I feel. Some okay, some not. They old now, all of us, who were very young. All over the United States of America. All over the world �
His wife Seniang, now dead, had been �hiding from immigration� when he married her. Reminiscing, he remembers, �She went to my apartment and said, without any hesitation, marry me and I�ll take are of you�
And now, two ladies were knocking on his door, and what he thought was merely a friendly visit from the wife of an old friend, was indeed another plea to save a migrant from being sent home. Zafra, the elder of the two had to admit that they had an ulterior motive.
I wanted to say � �here is my sister, a teacher in the Philippines, never married, worried to death because she�s being deported unless something turned up like she could marry a U.S. citizen, like I did, like your late wife Seniang, like many others have done, are doing in this exact moment, who can say? Now look at her, she�s good, religious, any arrangement you wish, she�d accept it.�
The terror and desperation associated with deportation, which threatens the Filipino teacher, are counter-balanced by the grief and the isolation of the ageing man who keeps calling for his dead friends to no effect. What appears to be, at least superficially, a degrading business-like arrangement, is in reality a marriage of shared cultural values and expectations.
Separation
The heart-aches associated with separation and divorce are further exacerbated when there is the additional complication of distance, the risk of a child being removed to another country, maybe for ever. As often happens, it is the child in such a situation that bears the brunt of the pain. This is highlighted in Beverly Farmer�s short story, Milk, about an Australian girl married to a Greek man, who decided to take his child to visit his grand-parents in Greece. The perplexed young boy tries to convince his mother to come with them, as of old.
�Daddy wants us to go and live in Greece now,� she remembers him saying a while ago. �But you can come too � I�m Greek.�
�Half-Greek.� [His mother corrected]
�No I�m Greek�.
�Well, I�m not�.
But the boy couldn�t understand why his mother did not like Greece anymore, even though she used to like it there.
Likewise, the little Lebanese boy living in Ireland, in Edna O�Brien�s Country Girls, wondered why his mother kept threatening to leave his father and go home:
his skin the red brown of polished apples and his eyes identical to his mother�s eyes, big, sad, brown eyes with the yearn of Damascus in them. His mother � threatening to leave and bring him with her. That was when he got his fits because he wanted his mother and father to stay together, for ever.
For any child, the splitting apart of parents must be a shattering experience, a world falling apart. For the child of parents from mixed migrant background the threat is compounded by the fact that separation can involve hundreds or thousands of miles, rendering the prospects of regular re-union almost impossible.
Migrants have tended to move from a more conservative, close knit societies to more modern western countries which perhaps do not put the same amount of emphasis on the need for continuation, homogeneity, the value of the extended family, and the fundamental place of the family in society. Family break-up, it is believed, is more likely to occur, the greater the disparity between the partners � Migration was seen as leading to a weakening of these ties and the beginning of a dissolution. Hence the need for pre-migration courses, including marriage courses which used to be the norm in many countries from where migrants used to originate. Divorce, so common in the West was largely unknown in many of the Mediterranean countries or in Ireland, for example.
Second class citizenship
Citizenship is a desirable goal, but on whose terms? For generations, this concept was no more than a meaningless dream. Slaves, indentured labourers, guest-workers in their hundreds of thousands would have grasped an opportunity to become citizens, a status which was denied them. Subsequent generations bearing the mark of disruption and transplantation feel that citizenship, grudgingly given, has not proven to be the solution. Griffiths comments on the difficulties that migrants have integrating within the new society
� the indentured labourers, Indian or Chinese, brought in to supplement slave-labour in the nineteenth century were also dispossessed, though they struggled to maintain the social patterns of their original cultures. Unfortunately, these remnants of an inherited culture often only served to prevent the development of even a rudimentary sense of identification with their new homelands.
Second-class citizenship may be imposed on a whole population, as was the case in the heyday of colonialism. Writers like George Lamming described the situation in the West Indies prior to Independence:
Alienated by the psychological demands of their education from the masses below them, exiled from the regional peaks of the economy, while other men, in no way superior to them in fact or potential, give the ultimate directives about petroleum and bauxite and sugar. Here is a humiliation that goes deep �
To achieve recognition in such an unstable and intolerable situation some opted to play second fiddle to the ruling classes:
the select few � have more successfully adapted to the demands of the colonial structure. These men are the most obsequious and sycophantic, acutely aware of their precarious position, balanced in the no-man�s land between their �own people� whom they despise and distrust, and the white owners and government officials to whose coat-tails they cling, and whom they seek, desperately, to imitate.
These restrictions do not hold any longer in the post colonial era. However, we still find divisive elements within a migrant cohort, where the better-off migrants may try to extract themselves from what they see as a cloying ethnic background which pulls them down, and begin to ape the successful �white� men. Often this means distancing themselves from their own kind in an effort to �change�, improve their chances and become more acceptable.
Bereft of real power, and in an effort to become good citizens, some may adapt to the ways of the new land, especially after long years of settlement. In Canada, for instance, they congregate around dinner-dances, barbeques, and tea parties.
Although this small group is practicing an earnest attempt at assimilation, they have hardly entered into the web of Canadian life. They would all say that they love their adopted country; they�ve made good here, after all, they have more wealth and peace than they could have dreamed of in Poland. But their love is oddly isolationist: they are not interested in Canadian politics, or the local culture, or even their neighbors, with whom, they�d be the first to say they have nothing in common.
They understand each other much more than they understand the non-migrant Canadians. There remains a web of understanding which binds migrants from one country together, even when they claim to be fully integrated within their new society.
Such gatherings often include mixed couples who, as propriety demands, should speak a common (and therefore foreign) language. The sense of superficiality and unreality is thus enhanced in such gatherings. It is enough to compare the atmosphere in places where everybody can understand the mother language, with those where there are mixtures which necessitate the use of English as the lingua franca.
Through language, one also looks for terms to describe relationships, words which describe the degree of involvement and acceptability. These words define normative concepts which are supposed to involve both sides of the social divide, and not just the minority group.
A language reveals the attitudes of the people who use and shape it. And a whole declension of patronizing terminology can be found in the language in which inter-racial relations have been described inside Britain. At first, we were told, the goal was �integration.� Now this word rapidly came to mean �assimilation�: a black man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After integration came �racial harmony� � The call for �racial harmony� was simply an invitation to shut up and smile while nothing was done about our grievances. And now there�s another catchword: �multiculturalism�. In our schools, this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth.
Many migrants strive to achieve full citizenship, but they only manage to obtain �formal� citizenship, mistaking card-carrying for true belonging. How often do they really manage to challenge the established authority of the country they adopt or that adopts them? It is with some justification that Paul Theroux defines migration as �a flight to second-class citizenship�:
This dependent frenzy nowadays finds its expression in flight. Flight to England, Canada, anywhere that lets Indians in: more than a flight to money: a flight to the security of second-class citizenship, with all its opportunities for complaint, which implies protection, the other man�s responsibility, the other man�s ideas.
In the final analysis, one has to accept the situation, realising that full equality depends on factors well beyond anybody�s individual powers to achieve. It is possible that, at least for the first generation, there is no alternative to a dependent sort of living, where achieving equal rights in law, at work, pay and so on will remain a dream. Like Hoffmann, one wakes up one day with the realisation that one will always be a different sort of citizen within the new country.
Maybe, behind my back and while I wasn�t looking, I�ve acquired a second unconscious, an American one, made up of diverse cultural matter. Despite my resistance, or perhaps through its very act, I�ve become a partial American, a sort of resident alien.
Acceptance
From being a �guest in the house� the migrant eventually reaches the hoped-for status of being accepted as full member of the community. The process can pass through several stages, before final acceptance is reached. Eva Hoffman feels that she has reached a degree of understanding within the enclave she moves in:
I have now gained the status of an exotic stranger, and this brings high color to my cheeks and sharpens my opinion. I�m excited by my own otherness, which surrounds me like a bright, somewhat inflated bubble.
Tables are beginning to turn, and the clever intruder is now capitalising on her �otherness� as something positive, something desirable, a valuable characteristic and experience. Whether this is accepted or rejected, however, very much depends on the type of �others� one is dealing with. In the academic environment described by Hoffman in the above extract, within the English Department of a university, this �Europeanness� may be considered a plus, a bonus, which may not be the case in other environments, such as Melbourne�s wharfside, for instance. Moreover, the person in question probably has more than her fair share of intelligence and other exceptional intellectual gifts, which also help to endear her to her colleagues. She continues:
I do not experience the pain of earlier immigrants who were kept out of exclusive clubs or decent neighborhoods. Within the limits of my abilities and ambitions, I can go anywhere at all, and be accepted there. The only joke is that there�s no there there.
She feels cynical about the value of being accepted in a void which she is still struggling to comprehend. She is no longer the passive observer, but has to channel her energies to become a participant in the drama of life as lived by the majority.
Now that I am no longer a visitor, I can no longer ignore the terms of reality prevailing here, or sit on the margins observing the curious habits of the natives. I have to learn how to live with them, find common ground. It is my fear that I have to yield too much of my own ground that fills me with such a passionate energy of rage.
�Migrant rage�. Having to give ground, to give up what one has a right to, seems to be an essential condition, a sine qua non encoded within the concept of assimilation. To be assimilated is to give too much of oneself. There is no bargaining in this contract: you are accepted only if you are prepared to burn out every trace of a previous existence.
In very Darwinian terms, Ian Wallace reminds us of the alternatives: �In other words, man permits only what is made in his own image, and � there are only two possible ways of emancipating oneself from the pattern: mutation or death.� Ability to change (�mutation�) and adapt to the local conditions is essential for survival in a new country with different values and therefore different ways of distributing gifts and prizes. Unless one changes mentality and adapts to what is expected, one becomes very quickly marginalised. To be accepted is to be one of the group. Ironically, when the public seeks difference and originality it will only accept something which is slightly different from normal. If it sticks too far out, it will fail to have any impact whatsoever, and moreover will be seen as exotic, irrelevant, �other�, foreign, less valuable.
The search for evidence that one�s humanity is being respected continues, and when found, is treasured. In New York, the Indian girl, recently tragically widowed, looking for a job as baby-sitter/nanny was touched by the little kindnesses that her employee showed her.
I fell in love with what he represented to me, a professor who served biscuits to a servant, smiled at her, and admitted her to the broad democracy of his joking, even when she didn�t understand it. It seemed entirely American.
A reconciliation with the environment and the new place becomes possible after all. It will never be a first home, but it will do as a second one. The psychological chasm seems to fill a little. Building new bridges becomes possible. Hoffmann has to admit that:
Vancouver will never be the place I most love, for it was here that I fell out of the net of meaning into the weightlessness of chaos. But now I have eyes to see its flower-filled gardens, and hear small kindnesses under the flat Canadian accents.
She may still have reservations about �this goddamn place� which has become her home, but she can now appreciate the many good points there are in its favour:
� sometimes I�m taken aback by how comfortable I feel in its tart, overheated, insecure, well-meaning, expansive atmosphere. I know all the issues and all the codes here. I�m as alert as a bat to all the subliminal signals sent by word, look, gesture � A slight trace of an accent gives me away as somebody not born here, but my friends soon stop noticing it. They think of me as one of them.
The past with its colourful background is slowly being forgotten and she is now settling down. She is being accepted. She can read all the unspoken messages and can respond to them in the appropriate manner.
There is satisfaction in the contemplation of past problems resolved, past issues that have been surmounted. After thirty years in America, the proud father in Lahiri�s Interpreter recounts to his son the saga of his travels across three continents (Asia, Europe and America).
I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer � I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
The pleasure of seeing children growing into citizens together makes all the effort and sacrifice worthwhile. After all, many a migrant takes satisfaction in altruistic feelings, dismissing his very existence in a foreign land as being all �for their sake�.
Every day, when I pick up my son from his school, my heart fills with warmth at the sight of the multi-coloured crowd of kids, his schoolmates. They have a different colour of skin and different shape of eyes. They are kids from Egypt and the Philippines, from Poland and China, from Vietnam and Malta among them. They feel at ease with each other. They play and smile.
The stage at which one is at peace with the new world and with oneself is, luckily, reached by so many wanderers, migrants and exiles.
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is our second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will at first look like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise � Now you will become at last the one you intended to be. So I admit openly to myself what I have long known in my heart. I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my self.
This same feeling is expressed by Naipaul living in England
In that unlikely setting, in the ancient heart of England, a place where I was truly an alien, I found I was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else.
How long will the sensation of peace with the world last? Better not ask because no guarantees can ever be given.
Acceptance of the status quo is also reflected in the migrant�s relations with his family back home. There is a psychological adjustment, a re-arrangement of relationships. The Grinbergs tell us:
Gradually, as he commits himself more to his new way of life and the people around him, he begins to distance himself when recalling relatives and old friends. The lengthy and frequent letters some immigrants write and receive from the old world in the early stages of their arrival in the new world eventually slow to a trickle, becoming a sign of mutual distancing.
We find a good illustration of this slacking off in Naipaul�s letters to his father. There is a litany of complaints by both correspondents on either side of the Atlantic about the irregularity of response and the increasing time elapsing between one letter and the next. It is an unfortunate fact that as ties with the new country strengthen, those with the older one have to loosen.
Acceptance of those with a higher status
One particular class of settlement involves those who move from a �higher� to a �lower� status society. The colonialists going overseas to rule over their dominions had far fewer problems than those travelling in the opposite direction. More recently we also find a new brand of settlers, those who retire from good positions and seek to while away their last years, often decades, in a warm and hospitable climate. These �expatriates� also appear to have far less difficulty settling, perhaps because they can afford a life of relative luxury, present no challenge to the local population, and do not compete for the same jobs.
John Bovey in his stories collected in a book Desirable Aliens describes such an elderly American couple settled in rural France, in the little village of Barjaux. They are well respected and missed when the time comes for them to leave. This is not an uncommon experience for these expatriates. In a personal communication, Ann Monsarrat makes the same point about the ease of settlement when she and her husband decided to settle in the small village of St Lawrence (Gozo, Malta) within a semi-rural community in close proximity to the sea.
There is a degree of artificiality in such relationships, where respect depends almost entirely on the wide social distance between the newcomer and the native population, with the tacit understanding that the latter will respect the superior qualities of the intruder. There is in fact very little effort on the part of the latter to integrate within the new society in any meaningful way. After Independence, the British in India were instructed to make every effort to woo the Indian to the Western way of life�prior to Independence the question was irrelevant. Efforts were made to �mix� with the locals, at least at the higher levels of the civil service, but this proved to be impossible.
This is well illustrated in the story of Kitty, a civil servant with the British High Commission in India after Independence. In spite of the efforts of the British to ensure smooth relations, there was never any real prospect of the two parties ever accepting each other on an equal level. At social occasions organised specifically for the purpose of mixing, they preferred to talk among themselves rather than to each other.
All of us at the High Commission were very conscientious about mixing with Indians: mostly higher-ranking civil servants and people in culture and the arts. But these social efforts tended to break down, and our parties often ended up with the Indian guests on one side talking shop with one another and foreigners doing the same on the other � for most people, on either side, it became more and more just part of one�s official duties, and finally there were only a few of us left who genuinely enjoyed the company of Indians.
�Acceptance� in these circles acquires a new meaning, partly because the newcomers are not so desperately dependent on it, and partly because there is hardly the same long-lasting, often life-time commitment to the new country that ordinary migrants usually bring with them. Ordinary migrants cannot just up and go back to a secure position in the old country when things do not quite work out as planned.
Higher than average performance
Many migrants and their children feel they have to do better than average. There seems to be a need to overcompensate for their initial deficiencies. Naipaul, studying in Oxford says: �I want to come top of my group. I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.�
There is the feeling that to succeed within the new environment you have to be better qualified than the native applicant competing for the same job. There is an ever-increasing lust to achieve more and more. Eva Hoffman says:
I too suffer from the classic immigrant misconception, and I can�t distinguish between the normal and the strenuous road in life, between moderate and high achievement.
She explains, �I get into Harvard itself on the last blaze of immigrant bravura.�
Parents have high expectations for their children. They all like to see their children well on the way �from Brooklyn to Manhattan�, which is �one of the longest journeys in the world.� In fact, all around the major cities of the world where migrants have settled, we have seen the movement of children of migrants leaving the poorer suburbs which their parents inhabited, to move to the more lush suburbs, as they slowly rose for the bottom to join the middle classes. Even the two-year old child (in Timothy Mo�s SourSweet) whose head was too big for his body and who had difficulty expressing himself, was expected by his Chinese parents living in London to become an accountant at least. Viviano comments:
The high expectations of immigrant parents, their willingness to sacrifice for the children�s education, the family�s tight hierarchical structure of obligations and responsibilities, and the children�s obedience and dedication to the goal of family upward mobility are all extolled as values that white Americans (not to mention other minorities of color) would do well to emulate.
The outstanding academic achievements of Jewish and Asian students at universities in America, Australia and Canada are well known. So much so, that they have even resulted in some universities introducing discriminatory criteria to reduce the proportion of these students (e.g. Jews in America). Wong explains achievement in Chinese-Americans on the basis of �a combination of Confucian respect for education, concern for �face� and family reputation, habituation to hierarchical structures, and belief in filial piety.�
All this becomes incorporated into what has become known in the mass media as the �model minority�, minorities that do well, better than the average native-born. However, this does not come without a price. Many are concerned that this pressure could be prejudicial to the long-term health of these children.
Searching for compatriots/ fellow migrants
Throughout migrant existence one sees what Saul Bellow has called �colonies of the spirit�. The Grinbergs explain this searching on the basis that �the immigrant needs to find in the outer world persons who represent these good internal objects, along the line of �godparents� or substitute parents.�
Filling this gap can best be achieved by searching for people with a similar background. Even the Polish Frederic Chopin, well-integrated within the best echelons in Parisian society, would comment:
You may think it insignificant, but one's greatest solace in a foreign land is to have someone who carries one's thoughts back to the homeland every time one looks at him, talks to him or listens to his words.
This sentiment is shared by many other less distinguished migrants. Frankie the Maltese migrant waiting in a line at the Seamen�s Mission in Cardiff kept looking for a familiar face, hoping to recognise somebody: �He cast around for anyone else he might know, listened hard for the sound of his own language. It was a mostly silent queue.�
One expects instant companionship from a compatriot. There is instant warmth generated. As the character in Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain puts it on meeting a fellow countryman, � In the rough-and-ready way of men meeting in a foreign land, I conceived an instant liking for him.
The chumminess of being together, bringing it all out freely, can also be appreciated in Lamming�s Women at the Hairdresser, where a group of West Indian women convert a chance meeting at a London hairdressing salon into a social occasion. Very significant is the way they instantly stop talking, communicating, the moment a non-West-Indian joins them.
Many feel that they have to stick together to survive. In Toronto, Annie reminds her friend, newly arrived from Jamaica that:
Us West Indians have to stick together, Sheila. Is the onliest way � But lemme tel you one thing, and listen to me good. You must stick with your own, don�t think that any honky ever going to accept you as one of them. If you want friends, they going to have to be West Indian � I doesn�t even try to talk to white people now. I ain�t have the time or use for racialists.�
The Irishman Frank McCourt, having managed to escape the poverty of Limerick and settle in America, is advised to stick to his own kind, the Irish Catholic working class. It is within their own group that they feel secure, sharing the warmth of each other�s companionship. Richard Power speaks of the animation �that infused the lives of the expatriate Irish who lived in London, working, drinking, eating, condemned to relentless proximity to one another.�
Likewise, the academic from India living in America keeps looking for people of the same ilk:
In search of compatriots, they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world.
And however well established, you look forward to meeting anyone who could bring fresh and direct news from home, an ambassador to a lost soul. Jhabvala comments:
[W]ith what enthusiasm I welcome visitors from abroad. Their physical presence alone is a pleasure to me. I love to see their fresh complexions, their red cheeks that speak of wind and rain; and I like to see their clothes and their shoes, to admire the texture of these solid European materials and the industrial skills that have gone into making them.
Formation of sub-groups within the settled community is common and legendary�e.g. London�s Earl�s Court for colonials (especially Australians), Sunshine (Melbourne) for Maltese, Carlton (Melbourne) for Italians, Bronx (New York) for Jewish Americans, etc, etc. Chain migration ensures a continuous stream of migrants gravitating towards a nucleus. Taken to extremes it could result in the formation of ghettos, enclaves where cultures become fossilised and often irrelevant. For instance, �The Indians of the countryside [in Trinidad] were cut off by language, religion and culture from the rest of the colonial population.�
Finding a compatriot in a foreign country raises hopes of identity, friendships, a soul-mate, a chance of interaction, a breaking of long silences, a communication of souls
But one night, in one of the caf�s of Saint Germain des Pr�s, I was discovered by this New Yorker and only because we found ourselves in Paris we immediately established the illusion that we had been fast friends back in the good old U.S.A.
Migrants seek out other migrants because only in this way can they be sure that their views will be accepted as valid. After many years in Australia, Seri the Syrian migrant in Australia, in E.O. Schlunke�s Assimilation, realised that his wife had two personalities, one which was apparent at home and with Australian visitors: withdrawn, silent, non-communicative. The other personality bubbled through when she was with her Syrian friends. Her husband
saw her on the only occasion he had taken her to a social at the bowling club, pathetically alone most of the time, and distressed when anyone took pity on her and tried to talk to her. Then like a new reel coming on, he saw her animated, chatting volubly, eyes flashing and attractive when she was with their Syrian relations and friends.
The contrast could not be more obvious. The same woman assumes two totally different personalities in response to the foreign and familiar environment respectively. Although much of the isolation of women in a new country is related to the language barrier, other factors come into play, including the big cultural gulf which can make it difficult to know what is acceptable behaviour in a new situation.
Precisely the same predicament is faced by the Chinese lady establishing roots in London.
Her voice, so expressive and alive in her native Cantonese, became shrill, peremptory, and strangely lifeless in its level pitching when she spoke English. She would have sounded hostile and nervous; a cross between a petulant child and a nagging old shrew, neither of which descriptions adequately fitted the mature and outward-going young woman who was Lily Chen.
Trust flows towards a countryman. Sometimes this is unrequited. One is often let down. The protagonist in Malamud�s Man in a Drawer was sitting in a trolley car with matzos (Jewish cakes) lying between his feet. When the stranger next to him whispered in low Yiddish tones, a sort of bond was immediately established. A little while later, the stranger was gone, and so were the matzos. �The widower in his misery asked himself, Would a Jew have robbed another of his precious matzos? It didn�t seem possible, but it was.�
A few words in a familiar language on a tram from a complete stranger were enough to establish a link, a bond, a trust not readily made with a person speaking a foreign tongue. Hence the exacerbated disappointment with the realisation of being let down by someone of one�s own background. This he couldn�t believe.
Another example where thrust in a compatriot can be disastrous is seen in the story of Fidelman , an American-Jew, who travels to Italy to write a critical study of Giotto. He is immediately singled out as a compatriot by a tramp at Rome�s railway station, and the story develops about the interaction between these two, an interesting allegory on the inter-relationships developing among migrants in a foreign land Firstly, there is the immediate recognition of one compatriot by another, �I knew you were Jewish,� Shimon Suskind, the tramp said, �the minute my eyes saw you.� Secondly, there is the expectation that a fellow countryman could not possibly refuse a call for assistance. Shimon expected handouts: he particularly hankered after a suit to cover his rags. He also wanted to �borrow�� money to start his peddling business. Thirdly, we find the new arrival, a poor student himself, wishing to help, giving him a few dollars, but unable to shake him off completely. �Jesus, I�ll be saddled with him all day if I don�t watch out.� Finally comes the total revenge of the tramp, who breaks into the student�s rooms and steals the precious first chapter of the book the American was writing, which he then proceeds to burn. Too often migrants are taken for a ride by their compatriots, who rely on them for their needs, be it building a house, or buying the various paraphernalia that are required to furnish it. They prefer to do business with their compatriots, on the assumption that national ties would be stronger than financial incentive. This has often proved to be a disastrous mistake.
It is only among one�s own folk that one expects to be accepted. They are more likely to accept you warts and all. Sufyan, a character in Rushdie�s The Satanic Verses, failed to convince his disfigured friend, Saladin Chamcha, that only among his compatriots can he expect to recover his wholeness:
Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements, and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?
On the other hand, there is the obverse situation where avoiding compatriots becomes a more urgent goal. The better educated among migrants for instance may feel they have nothing in common with the others. Their main concern is to integrate into the new society and be accepted as equals. Sticking to their own kind might be seen as a brake on their upward mobility. For instance, Shekar, a young Indian academic in America preferred to be surrounded by his American colleagues and �dreaded being surrounded by his kind, ending up like them building little Indias in the obscure corners of New York.�
Maintaining economic links
For many migrants who left their family behind, a very common occurrence in the earlier years of migration, the main aim was to send much needed money home. This became a regular and eagerly waited-for support.
Perhaps one of the most poignant descriptions of the plight of a family waiting for the regular cheque from overseas is to be found in Frank McCourt�s book Angela�s Ashes. Having gone to England to get a job, Frank cannot resist the temptation to spend it all on drink, forgetting his wife and four kids starving at home in Limerick. The pathetic waiting for the postman for that all important letter with its contribution has been a universal metaphor about the dependency of one country on another.
John Cornell describes the dependence of Samoa on income derived from migrants settled in New Zealand:
Migration decisions are shaped within a family context, with migrants usually leaving to meet extended household (�aiga) expectations, such as the supply of remittances �
and he continues:
Social obligations within Samoa are rarely far from migrants� minds, and remittances are sustained for very long periods, especially when, as is usually the case, migrants intend to or believe they will return. Remittances are primarily directed into immediate consumption needs, including house construction and social obligations, whilst, through education and fares, they sustain the migratory system for subsequent generations.
There is often an element of enforcement in this, with relatives insisting on this continued source of income, sometimes even �involving specific trips to New Zealand to encourage, sponsor and collect remittances.�
For the average Asian, the one criterion of a good son is the guarantee of support in old age. Timothy Mo gives a good picture of these obligations in his book, SourSweet. In this story, Mr Chen, one of the main characters, is well aware of his obligations to send his regular remittances home:
He was remembered there [at home in Hong Kong] in the shape of the money order he remitted to his father every month, and would truly have been remembered only if that order had failed to arrive � like other families in the village, Mother and Father Chen were now heavily dependent on their son�s money from overseas.
The amount sent home constituted a substantial proportion of the total income of the individual. For Mr Chen, it represented thirty per cent of his weekly earnings.
Her husband gave Lily �10 a week for housekeeping �Of the remaining �20, �2 went on clothing and gas, Chen kept �2 for his own amusements, paid �6 rent and remitted �10 to his parents [in Hong Kong].
Kingston suggests that in fact the only value of family portraits to Chinese emigrants is to remind them of their duty to send remittances home:
My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands� �Send money��and posterity forever� �Put food in front of this picture.�
In many countries of emigration, the total amount of remittances received from sources overseas often constitutes significant proportions of the national budget. In one study, for instance, remittances from overseas every year were equal to the total annual government recurrent expenditure.
Remittances sent home by migrants have often had a very significant effect on the local economy. The feudal system in the small villages in Italy was all but overturned as a result of money sent home by migrant members of the family:
Besides this, most of the remaining villagers had, with money sent to them by sons or relatives who had found success in America, bought little portions of land for themselves from their former employers, so that they had become independent of the Signori, who in turn, as a result of all these upheavals, had become, some of them, as poor as the poorest inhabitant.
And if it wasn�t money, it could be other things: clothes, items of food even, anything that was plentiful in the new land but scarce or non-existent in the old. The couple of Asians living together in a marriage of convenience in Santos� Immigration Blues were not untypical in this respect:
They lived well and simply, a country life. True, they were childless, but both of them were helping relatives in the Philippines, sending them money and goods marked Made in U.S.A.
The benefits that the migrant countries receive through remittances have not been adequately documented. The millions of dollars that have been siphoned into these often poorer nations through their migrants and their families must have had a tremendous impact on the country�s economy. This was a source of income without which conditions there would surely have been far worse.
Conclusions
The concept of a melting pot, which implied that people of all nationalities would shed their individual differences and meld into a common nation, was a dream that governed migration philosophies for the first half of the twentieth century.
A more realistic compromise was reached when concepts of multiculturalism became more in vogue, and with them the realisation that migrants are more likely to form a kaleidoscope consisting of many cultures. In the words of the character in Chandra�s Red Earth and Pouring Rain:
the newcomers and the old ones collided and metamorphosed into a thing wholly new and unutterably old, fell into new orbits around new centres of gravity.
That migration is not a necessity merely for the traveller but perhaps even more so for the host nation is demonstrated by the successful settlement of millions in the new territories of the New World which have emerged as polyglot nations made up of hundreds of different nationalities.
Settlement is always associated with difficulties and problems. Establishing oneself in a new land is beset with myriad little issues that have to be resolved. Most people manage to do this successfully and establish a long-term relationship with the new environment. Some are in the happy position of George Lamming who declared that
The pleasure and paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am � there is always an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head.
Index to Chapter 4:
Achebe, Chinua
Arrow, 16
Aidoo, 18
Astro R & Benson, 4
Astro, R., & Benson J., 1
Azzopardi, Trezza, 46
Baldwin, 19
Baldwin, James, 7, 8, 15, 47
Begamundr�, Ven, 16
Bell, Daniel, 13
Bisondath, Neil, 46
Bloom, Alexander, 6, 13, 41
Booker,M.K., 16
Bovey, John, 44
Cauchi, M.N., 50
Cavalli Sforza, L.
Genes, 2
Chandra, G.S.S., 48
Chandra, Vikram, 46, 50
Chaudhuri, 20
Chaudhuri, Nirad, 7
Cornell, John, 49
Coulson, Anthony, 3
Crush, Jonathan, 11
Desai, Anita, 10, 15
Dowse, S., 11
Farmer, 22
Farmer, B., 19
Fromm, Erich, 12
Gorra, Michael, 5
Griffiths, G., 8
Griffiths. G, 39
Grinberg & Grinbert, 1989, 12
Grinberg, L & Grinberg R 1989, 43
Grinberg, L. & Grinberg R 1989, 2
Grinberg,L & Grinberg R 1999, 45
Grotjahn, Martin, 3
Hoffman, 17, 18
Hoffman, Eva, 1, 2, 7, 8, 40, 41, 44
Hoffmann, Eva, 40, 42
Jhabvala
Myself, 1
Jhabvala, Ruth, Prawer
Myself, 13, 46
Poet, 9
Jhabvala, Ruth, Prower
East, 44
Jhabvala�s, 21
Johnson, Samuel, 17
Kingston, Maxine, Hong, 10, 12, 49
Kingston,Maxine, Hong, 5
Kureishi, Hanif, 1, 15
Lahiri, 17
Lahiri, Jhumpa, 5, 10, 42, 46
Lamming, 21
Lamming, George
Pleasures, 51
Women, 12, 46
Lessing, 19
Malamud, 20
Malamud, Bernard
A New Life, 1
Assistant, 3
Short Stories, 14
Malouf, David, 43
Mann, Klaus, 4
Mo, 16
Mo, Timothy, 8, 13, 47, 49
Mukherjee, 20
Mukherjee, Bharati
Jasmine, 42
Mukherjee,Bharati
Wife, 13
Naipaul, 17, 18
Naipaul, V.S.
Barracoon, 1, 10, 47
Biswas, 6, 11, 15
Enigma, 3, 9, 10, 43
Letters, 44
Narayan, R.K., 6
O�Brien, 22
Parks, 20
Parks, Tim
Destiny, 9
Power, Richard, 46
Rasche, Herman, 4
Rubin, David, 5
Rushdie, Homelands, 7
Rushdie, Salman
Homelands, 4, 8, 40
Midnight, 14
Satanic, 1, 48
Santos, 21
Santos, Bienvenido, 50
Schlunke, E.O., 47
Scott, 20
Sebald, W.G., 11
Selvon, Samuel, 1
Londoners, 14
Lonely, 14
Working, 11
Shute, Neville, 13
Tabori, Paul, 3, 4
Theroux, 17
Theroux, Paul
Naipaul, 40
Thieme, J, 1
Vitaliev, Vitali, 6, 43
Wallace, Ian, 9, 41
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 45
Wong, Sau-lling,Cynthia, 14
Zamoyski, A, 45
Notes to Chapter 4
Name Index to Chapter 4a_Marriage
Aidoo, 3
Baldwin, 4
Booker,M.K., 1
Chaudhuri, 4
Farmer, 7
Farmer, B., 4
Hoffman, 2
Jhabvala�s, 5
Johnson, Samuel, 1
Lahiri, 1
Lamming, 5
Lessing, 4
Malamud, 4
Mo, 1
Mukherjee, 5
Naipaul, 1, 2
O�Brien, 7
Parks, 5, 6
Santos, 6
Scott, 4
Theroux, 2
.