Motherlands
The following essay is a draft of an excerpt from my working manuscript.
The Turkish-born novelist Elif Shafak wrote this in October 2020: “Motherlands are castles made of glass…”
Via Jeanne Menjoulet
“…In order to leave them, you have to break something—a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an émigré, therefore means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets. It is easy to forget they are there, light and minuscule as they are, and go on with your life, your little ambitions and important plans, but at the slightest contact the shards will remind you of their presence. They will cut you deep…[The motherlands] are shadows that tag along with us to the four corners of the earth, sometimes they walk ahead of us, sometimes they fall behind, but they are never too far.”
***
In March 2022, the Twittersphere proclaimed that the sculptor Bruno Catalano had dedicated his ‘Les Voyageurs’ (“The Travelers”) sculptures to the Ukranian population.
‘Les Voyageurs’ play a trick on the eye, causing viewers to wonder if the six-feet-tall bronze sculptures might topple. The art feels tentatively stable — one wrong turn, one mishap and everything is ruined. “How does this stay together?” admirers wonder. Or, put another way: “Something’s missing.”
Incomplete, but somehow still standing.
Let’s take a look at Catalano’s work: In 2013, Catalano revealed a series of 10 life-size sculptures at the Port of Marseilles on the occasion of the city being named the European Capital of Culture. The best way to describe them is to picture a realistic sculpture of a human — but with a large swath of the midsection missing, as if the artist took the paintbrush tool in Photoshop and erased an entire section of the body. In artistic terms, the sculptures are surrealist.
The sculptures depict “everyday” people, all with a suitcase or bag in tow. One article has described this body of work this way: “[The subject is] Incomplete, he leaves behind what he cannot carry, to walk towards the hope of a better future.”
How’d he decide to create these pieces of art? Not surprisingly, they represent something that the artist feels deeply. Born in Morocco to a Franco-Sicilian family, Catalano at age 10 is exiled from Morocco with his family to France. According to the translated bio on his website, “Bruno experiences this uprooting with no anxiety; he’s impatient to discover the metropolis. He adjusts fairly quickly to his new environment, even if, at school, he’s sometimes reminded that he’s not a native.”
Excitement! But a sense of not belonging. New experiences! Yet dislocation. Leaving home can be a jarring hybrid experience, although one thing is certain: The travelers will always leave something behind. Even when they can fill their satchels with remnants of home, parts of them may illuminate their see-through obstructions, laying bare the fragility of the churn of migration.
So, do these travelers eagerly anticipate their next steps despite expected hardship? Or are they trudging forward as if through molasses, the only thing keeping their gaze forward being a fear of what’s behind them?
And that’s what seemed to resonate with Twitter about a month after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Kyiv Post posted a picture of one of Catalano’s “travelers” on March 22, 2022 with the caption “Sculptor Bruno Catalano. The sculpture is dedicated to emigrants leaving their #homeland … with emptiness inside and going nowhere.” Although it’s hard to know if Catalano has said anything about specifically dedicating his work to the victims of the current crisis, the underlying theme portrays the emotions his sculptures successfully depict.
A recent newscast from the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina shared about a Ukranian family who has lived in the area for about 10 years. Tatiana Cihovska and her husband arrived in the hope of “opportunity” and “promise” and “betterment” — all those buzzwords that we are meant to embrace as a way to somehow obscure the fact that people are doing something quite painful: leaving their home.
Fast forward to March 2022, and Tatiana was able to help her sister leave Ukraine and then join her and her family in North Carolina via Poland. “She feels homesick anyway because it’s not her home and it’s all strange,” she said. “It is really hard and when we walk on the street and there were Polish young people singing some Ukrainian supporting songs and they were raising money for the Ukraine. There were many Ukrainians crying, just crying.”
***
In his book Together: The Healing Power of Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy writes about London-based charity The Forum, which works with migrants and refugees. A 2014 survey reveals that almost 60 percent of respondents “viewed loneliness and isolation as the biggest challenges they face in living away from their home countries.”
Other challenges included:
Loss of family and friends;
Lack of social networks;
Language barriers;
Loss of status;
Loss of identity;
Loss of job or career;
Cultural differences;
Discrimination and stigma connected to being a foreigner;
Isolating impact of government policies.
This is a lot; it’s so, so much. Like Shafak’s description of the “shadows that tag along,” these potential contributors to a lingering sense that one is in a place where feeling “whole” is unlikely, make shadows feel more elongated or misshapen. Shadows feel ominous — but we can’t escape them.
***
When my family moved to Ireland, we had to essentially figure everything out on our own.
Meaning, we didn’t receive cushy travel stipends or moving bonuses or help with finding housing. We weren’t on some sort of “rotation” with a multinational corporation. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, but I never really considered us “expats.” I know that to say we were “immigrants” is likely a little too try-hard. Yet there we were — year after year —at the GNIB (Garda National Immigration Bureau) on Burgh Quay right on the River Liffey, waiting for our number to be called so that we could renew our visas. Matt had a Green Card, which is a “Highly Skilled Visa” or a Stamp Number 1. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even get a work permit as I wasn’t sponsored by anyone — and regardless, there was a means test and my professional background likely wouldn’t earn me the wages needed to get that particular stamp. So I was a Stamp Number 3 and was “not entitled to work or engage in any business or profession while in Ireland.” This was actually difficult for me to stomach, as the year prior, I had taken my first non-freelance job since having children and was enjoying the regularity and routine. Back to the drawing board.
Enjoying life in scenic Sandycove after being booted unceremoniously (and probably illegally, but when you’re unfamiliar with local laws and tight on funds, it’s sometimes easier to just go with the flow…?) from our rental in next-door Dalkey.
But we weren’t “broken” the way that Elif Shafak writes about or “incomplete” the way Bruno Catalano sculpturally depicts. Instead, we were excited about the opportunity for a new job — and, I will admit, a new adventure. Because at the back of our minds — in a tiny corner that I can almost picture as a glowing pebble, throbbing but minuscule — was the unspoken knowledge that a safety net existed. It’s easier to jump when the rebound will likely be “ok.” Let there be no doubt: An American passport is a highly desired document.
But still. Ten years ago, just as we were in the thick of all the logistics entailed to move our household back across the Atlantic — back to our own “motherland” — the Guardian published a snippet of a post by a blogger based in Africa entitled “Why are White People Expats When the Rest of Us are Immigrants?” “Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’.” This is an interesting conversation, and it’s not the first time it’s been raised in the Guardian, let alone in general conversation. In a “Mind Your Language” column back in 2011, Briton Peter Manatle, who has lived on three continents, reflected on how “when British people overseas, or press organisations such as the Guardian, use the term ‘expat’ with reference to Britons abroad, then use words such as ‘immigrant’ when describing people from other countries who are in the UK. Strangely, this sometimes extends to non-British foreigners overseas. So, a Briton resident in France might refer to himself as an expat, but call a Polish resident of France an immigrant, as if somehow there is a distinction to be made; although he may later refer to someone from the USA as an ‘American expat’, implying that there is a sort of hierarchy of foreignness.”
In this so-called “hierarchy of foreigneness,” I felt that we lived in this elastic space between the two. Because when my husband and I sat on the hard plastic chairs at the GNIB, toggling between chatting with each other and moments of isolation staring into our phones, I felt a sense of rapid assurance that our paperwork would go through — per usual — but also that the expanse between “a part of” and “apart from” Ireland could be a lonely one. And as a result, I felt somehow protective of these people or at least compelled to learn their stories. We were like them — to a degree. But our privilege — we spoke English fluently, we blended in, appearance-wise, in Ireland (indeed, I really do look Very Irish), my husband was able to take a day off of work to wait for our number without a decrease in his paycheck — separated us from their reality. And I suppose I also felt some obligation to them, to let them know that I understood all of these nuances. (Which I acknowledge is also some weird mental gymnastics that can only be born from the perch of privilege. But I haven’t made it to almost half a century without appreciating — not to mention benefitting from — this amorphous, yet nonetheless quite discrete, notion that someone blessing you with the equivalent of “I see you” can help one muddle along.)
***
Like a good mother: Watching my son navigate the rocks at Dun Laoghaire Pier.
An American who was visiting us in Ireland asked, “Who cleans your house?” In our case, the answer was “Um…us?” But of course she didn’t really want to know an actual name. What she was asking was what “populations” were the house cleaners in Ireland. We weren’t entirely sure, but we guessed Polish or Brazilian. We knew that taxi drivers, if not Irish, tended to be Nigerian. Her question shouldn’t be dismissed as an abrasive one because we know that there are industries everywhere that provide migrants an entrée into employment: stereotypically speaking, Vietnamese own, manage, and work in nail salons; Central Americans work in construction, as do Irish migrants to America. It’s just that my sense was that in the early 21st century — and certainly before that — one didn’t think of immigrants to their country as individuals, but instead as cut-outs of different groups. Is this why Catalano’s see-through sculptures affect me? Is it partly because the holes indicate the shedding of parts of one’s identity…but also partly because it illustrates how easy it is to simply look through a person?
In September 2022, the New York Times published a story about how 50,000 Ukranians had found solace, hospitality, and perhaps even a new life in rural Ireland. The perpetual diasporic emigrants were welcoming those who needed shelter. According to this article, 5,000 of these migrants were put up in hostels in Donegal, a county in the northwestern county of the Republic (which is technically surrounded by Northern Ireland). Despite the generosity of individual community members as well as organizations such as the Donegal Local Development Company, one displaced Ukranian mother described the phenomenon as “… like walking in the fog… You just take it step by step.” How many Irish throughout history have felt this same quicksand trudging when faced with creating a new life far from their rainy island home?
Migration is nothing new; it’s simply a fact of humanity. Who helps usher one into a new space? Maybe we’re all mothers.