2017

Immigrants know about living on the edge, the liminal space we all occupy all the time, and when we return to our countries of origin, we often find ourselves there too (Tummala-Nara, 2009). As time goes on, if we are fortunate we take the doubleness for granted, rather than being sabotaged by it, effortlessly privileging one self-state over the other. But there is always an echo, a life not being lived— even if it is not a life we want to be living.

“Belonging was more than possession of land and statehood; it was the condition of being understood itself” (p. 292).

Forever foreigners, we are— and at the same time are not— equipped to read and communicate social cues. The differences between ourselves and others create ambiguity, which in turn promotes vigilance in our interactions. We inhabit a place of actual and psychic tension between un-belonging and belonging, as well as recognition, invisibility, and stigma (Goffman, 1963).

In the same way that I moved to the US on a student visa, my mother came to Germany to study at the university and to develop as a person in a cultural environment that offered women a much greater degree of freedom than she could have ever known in the Greek mountain village she grew up in. This parallel process between my mother’s choice to come to Germany and my choice to immigrate to the US is both meaningful and not uncommon amongst children of immigrants. Immigrant families often carry intergenerational patterns of migration. My mother gave me a sense of the power and potential of moving to another country.
Immigration in Psychoanalysis : Locating Ourselves, edited by Julia Beltsiou, Taylor and Francis, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, .
Created from slwa on 2017-08-21 03:56:41.

Immigration and Otherness The late Iranian immigrant, novelist, and psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi (1992) had the following thoughts about otherness and immigration: On the plane from Iran to the US, a strange idea kept occurring to me. I thought that most immigrants, regardless of the familial, social, or political circumstances causing their exile, have been cultural refugees all their lives. They leave because they feel like outsiders. Perhaps it is their personal language that can build a bridge between what is familiar and what is strange. They may then find it possible to generate new and revealing paradoxes. I feel it is no coincidence that this thought occurred to Modarressi while on an airplane, between places, leaving the past, moving into an unknown future. Up in the air we— the immigrants— inhabit a limbo that holds the truth that no place will ever feel like home again, at least not in an unquestioned way. We move through liminal spaces like airports and airplanes, hotels and waiting rooms. It is here where the boundary resides between you and me, where we stand in the spaces of me and not-me, where home and not being at home intersect. The crossing of borders is both exciting and frightening, as we transgress by separating from the familiar and entering into new relations. We cross internal boundaries, into a netherland/twilight zone, toward an unknown place.
Immigration in Psychoanalysis : Locating Ourselves, edited by Julia Beltsiou, Taylor and Francis, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, .
Created from slwa on 2017-08-21 04:00:07.