It is common that when people migrate to a different place they struggle to integrate into the new society. People with refugee backgrounds face the extreme end of that struggle. I have seen people express their distress through social media, friends, with some I have directly talked to. As someone who recently resettled in New Zealand, I don’t share the same struggle, at least not to an unmanageable degree. I have been reflecting on why that is the case and share it with you.
Our default and plausible position should be facing difficulties in integrating into the new society. When you seek asylum in another country, you are forced to leave behind what you have as opposed to migrating to another country you often choose to leave behind what you have. For people with refugee backgrounds, their lack of choice in moving to a different place creates a stronger connection to their past, which makes it harder to break from. A break that is necessary to move forward.
In the new land, they see a different culture than their own. Meeting different faces than faces they are familiar with. Hearing different names than what they know. Walking different streets than where they grew up. Talking different language than what they used to communicate. Breathing different air than what made their childhood. All create a sense of alienation. People can get trapped inside that alienated state for years, unchanged.
A couple of months ago, I attended a Hazara community gathering for a nazir (a food service for goodwill). It was my first time seeing a big group of Hazara diaspora in Auckland. Though strangers all of them were in the sense that I had not met any of them back in Afghanistan, I was delighted to see people with whom I share the same culture, history, and language. From the people whom I talked with, I distinctly remember the face of a man and his story. He was in his forties, which looked younger than forty-year-old Hazara men I have seen before. He spoke in plain Hazaragi tongue with not a single mix of English word as if he arrived yesterday. I have more mixed words than many of them had. In fact, he had been living in the country for over twenty years.
He talked of a longing to go back to Afghanistan—a thought he had lived through a lot but might not thoroughly. I asked if it would be mere a visit. He said no. He wanted to stay there, which sounded an absolute madness to me. But I could see the justification of it in his eyes—a desperateness for connection to a home, a land, a culture he had not seen since he was ten. It also reflected a failure to find a replacement in the many years he lived here.
I have also been away from what he was longing for, for nearly ten years now, yet I don’t share the same desperateness. I can see many reasons for that. Of the many reasons what speaks out the most is the life I lived in Indonesia. For a decade I lived through rigorous detentions and was deprived of my basic rights to formal education, work, family…. Every moment of that decade, I wished for what I have now - a new beginning. I came with great hunger and openness to welcome whatever my life in New Zealand bestowed on me no matter how new and unfamiliar things were. People who directly move from their origin country to a new safe land they don’t have the knowledge of not having what they have in the new land.
It shouldn’t mean people have to go through a period of limbo to live their new life. What I experienced does not justify what it taught me. It was in Indonesia I went through a divorce from my past. I saw the longing for a home gradually diminished within me. What was a tangible feeling when I first moved to Indonesia slowly faded into nothingness and it hasn’t come back to me. I think my body has forgotten what it is like to have a home and I stopped longing for it.
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Hussain, thank you for sharing. We are lucky to have you here in New Zealand, and hope eventually it will feel familiar and become your home.
Kia ora, as you say, Hussain. There is truth and wisdom in your words identifying the role of choice and hardship in the refugee experience. I wonder if the longing to return of the Hazara man you spoke with is shared by the females in his family…