Immigration Issues: 4. Can you ever go back?
That's the constant question for the immigrant. After fighting through the adaptation process of the new country the prospect of just returning home even if just for a visit seems more and more appealing. Finally, no comparing, just fitting in. Well. More times than I can count going back just left me more confused than before.
Unfortunately everything is more complicated and this simple question turns out to be incomplete. Going back to... where or when? To who? To what? The immigrant always returns to the past as well as the place. There is just no other way. Time has elapsed but your memory is stuck and you come back expecting your life to greet you but all you get is the visual track for your memory because everything else seems gone. Depending on how and why you left your country this will be a major or minor inconvenience (I'm sure some people are glad not to find the exact same misery they left.), but it will leave you desperate to find a connection because at the same time you know that what you left is such a big part of you.
So you turn to people, meet old friends, spend time with family. Everyone is happy to see you but then there is the silent awkwardness. They are not sure if you are still the same. And you aren't - it never bothered you, but now you wish you could just erase the new experience and just melt with your surrounding. You do the same things you used to do, everybody is trying to erase what happened in the meantime. You try to fast forward on your life in the home country, trying hard to convince everyone it's the same old you. But it's not. At some point it gets too much and you stop hiding. That's when the real friends show themselves and you have to let go. The truth is, people who stayed are not the same either but for some this is an impossible realization. They thrive on patterns and who are you to come here and try to make it all irrelevant? Not insisting on certain regional and national idiosyncracies equals suicide to them. Oh, you have an accent now! Oh, you wear different clothes! Oh, you don't share my exact daily reality! What a betrayal! It hurts. But when the emotion subsides you realize they do it for their own protection and slowly you need their affirmation less and less. Maybe their definition of the "real native" is something completely different to yours? You are left amazed by the fact you never noticed that before.
As an immigrant you have the advantage to actually "see" time go by. Certain periods of your life are limited to a certain setting and so visiting often means visiting your childhood or your adolescence. Since you also usually only visit for a short amount of time, the entire experience lends itself easily to lots of nostalgia and idealization. I usually end up in an inner frenzy of comparing... the then-and-now, the here-and-there. Is it what it seems? What is my conclusion, where do I stand on the perpetual identity-question? It's never conclusive, you just get a headache.
It's hard to go back. You see what you left and you have to let it go all over again. Then again it's nice. you see what you left and you find yourself in it. And so you hang there... spread like a bridge between two places, neither here nor there.
Can you ever go back? I don't know.
Posted at 04:41 PM on January 28, 2004
I love your way of expressing yourself, Dinka.
While I cannot claim to have been through the same situation, I can say that I have experienced that same sort of awkwardness with good friends after being separated by many miles and many experiences, and it's awful. I find myself becoming nostalgic for how things once were...and I *hate* nostalgia. Too depressing, yk?
I think you canīt go back because you develop (forward). And I think it`s good.Itīs the best! I know the temptation. But it is often an illusion and somehow the wish to rest somewhere in the past. Sometimes I also miss that homeland feeling. But when you moved once in your life ( also mentaly)you are just on the way. Love the past, also the present. I would love you to come nearer to us! Not back! Lincoln canīt come back to Austria anyway and heīs your life now!
:-)))) dora is right. so don't come back, just come ;-)because there is no back anyway
How very difficult to straddle two identities at the same time.
Really well-phrased, Dinka. Wow....