Refuge

 

I have often wondered what it takes to really feel that a place is yours and that you belong to it.  A large percentage of the world’s population ends up in a different place than the place they were born, some 244 million people, according to the Pew Research Center. Some are voluntary migrants, but a substantial number are refugees who have left their countries to flee violence, persecution or war.

In the United States we like to say that we all originally came from someplace else, meaning our ancestors did, not necessarily we ourselves.   Americans whose ancestors came here generations ago do not see themselves as refugees or immigrants.  They boast about the fact that their families have been here for generations, as though that is a personal achievement.  There are societies they can belong to if their ancestors came on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolutionary War and so on.  In Colorado where I live, people could get vanity car license plates that proclaimed them to be a “Pioneer.” One had to go to some lengths to prove that one had earned that title. To procure the license plate, one had to prove that at least one ancestor came to the state more than a hundred years ago and was among the first settlers here. Why that bestows some kind of prestige on the current generation is a mystery, but the plates were popular.  

People like to differentiate themselves from others. Historically that differentiation has been an effort to establish a hierarchy where one class could feel superior to another—those of British, German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Asian ancestry arrayed in the order of their arrival on U.S. shores, debasing the following arrivals. Judging by the unrest in countries with large immigrant populations, I suspect that immigrants are not welcomed warmly in very many places.  Even East and West Germans had a hard time integrating, and they are of the same stock.  North Koreans who have managed to escape into South Korea are generally looked down on for being backward.  It does not seem to take much personal effort to make some feel superior to others.

Why is it that we want to establish our superiority along such unremarkable parameters?  Why was a world war fought to proclaim a “superior” race, slaughtering millions in the process? 

The experience of living as the outsider is not new to me or presumably other members of my larger family—siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, all refugees, living in places we did not start out.  I was born in Iran but was never considered Iranian by those who considered themselves the real Iranians.  My parents and their forebears for generations lived in Iraq, but from the way they described their existence, they were still considered aliens because they were Jewish and not Moslem.

When I was in college in Seattle in the 1970s, I befriended a couple from Montana.  The wife was completely at home in her universe.  I found her remarkable for that; until then, I had never encountered anyone who was so at one with the world.  I did not know whether that was just midwestern optimism or her specific ease.  It was difficult to describe what it was that made her seem so comfortable.  I have puzzled over it and have never been able to identify what made her seem so totally un-estranged. It was not merely contentment, but a knowledge that she just was, that nobody would doubt her right to be in this place on earth, nor that anyone would doubt their own place. She seemed to take it for granted that everyone was at home in the world, much as I assumed that nobody was. I did not envy her that comfort. I may even have thought her a little dull for being so unquestioning, but I did marvel that anyone was so at ease. Maybe I had read too much existential literature, but I took it for granted that alienation was the human condition. It seemed that she did not “live in a place that’s not our own/ And much more not ourselves” as Wallace Stevens would have it, whereas for me, that we are in a place that’s not our own is completely accurate. 

My parents were living in Iran as Iraqi citizens in 1948, when, with the formation of Israel, they were suddenly no longer voluntary alien residents but stateless exiles.  Iraq rescinded their citizenship and confiscated their property because they were Jewish and considered a threat.  As a family we were then stateless until the mid-1950s when we acquired Iranian citizenship.  My parents remained in Iran until 1979 when they were again forced to leave, this time because of the Iranian revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power and made life for non-Moslems intolerable.  They moved to the United States. My father joked that he would refrain from becoming a U.S. citizen to protect his new home from another revolution. He had experienced three “nationalities” without ever moving from his place of birth, and he knew about upheavals.  He was born in Iraq when it was under Ottoman rule. It was then colonized by the British and eventually became an independent Iraq.  None of the iterations were amicably inclined towards him or his family.

My father’s case may have been extreme, but the experience of being uprooted is obviously common.  Hundreds of millions of people peregrinate during their lifetimes and have to accustom themselves to a new country with unfamiliar habits, languages, climates and systems for earning a living.  At the turn of the 20^th century, people seldom ventured more than 100 miles from their birthplace, but since World War II, the world has been awash in refugees, exiles and migrants

In 1958, my parents sent me to boarding school in England, and that was the first time I saw a Black person. There were girls at the school from some of the former African colonies, the West Indies, and Asia; the school was a microcosm of the globe (but with no males!).  At some point in my time there, the head mistress decided that non-British girls were to be called “girls from abroad,” rather than “foreign girls.”  Until then, I had not considered that there was a difference between the British girls and the others of us. The term “foreign girls,” in my mind, was merely a description of what was.  Not until the head mistress decided we needed a more palatable label, did it occur to me that there might be anything that differentiated us from each other. We were all homesick, more or less unhappy girls, biding our time until we could get out.   I wondered why foreign girls needed to be singled out and renamed. It was the headmistress who saw the “girls from abroad” as other and felt the need to correct a problem that did not exist among us girls. It seemed pointless to me to change the nomenclature but not the attitude towards foreigners.  This was an interesting first encounter with “political correctness” trying to reshape perception, but it seemed to me, even then, that changing language does not necessarily change attitudes. One can adopt the correct language and still maintain one’s prejudices.

On one of the school holidays, I was at the boarding house in London where some of us foreign students spent the month.  The place was run by the widow of a vicar, and our accommodations were similar to our dormitories at school, where several of us shared a room and bathrooms.  I remember one time when she had a full house, I was assigned a bed on the second-floor landing, curtained off for privacy. The proprietress maximized her earnings during school holidays and did not turn customers away.

There was an influx of people from the Caribbean and Africa into London in the 1950s, coming either for economic or cataclysmic reasons.  Mrs. Harris, the vicar’s widow, often did her grocery shopping in the East End of London where staples were less expensive.  One day she returned from one of these excursions, irate.  She could barely speak and kept repeating, “You can’t believe what I saw today.” 

“What did you see? Why are you so upset?” I asked her, alarmed.

“I saw a beige child! Soon we will all be beige.”

That was an unforgettable statement. I had never heard anyone referred to as “beige” and it made me realize that although Mrs. Harris had made a business of housing foreign students, she might have held us in contempt for not being as white or as English as she was.  Did she think of us as varying shades of “beige?” She was not an unkind person; she occasionally attempted to have us all join with her to celebrate events like Christmas, but for the most part, we were just her paying boarders.  Her banality hid her dislike for anything unlike herself. She was English, after all, and in the 1950s, the British Empire was just beginning its descent and was not inclined to humility.  (I have been very impressed in recent times, however, on visiting England, how graciously and unequivocally locals in London have embraced the huge numbers of foreigners that now live there.)

Sometimes I wonder if the world would become a more peaceful, less bigoted place if we did all become “beige”, but I suspect we would still find differences to justify our contempt for each other.    I am not advocating loving everyone—I know there are many people I wouldn’t care for, and I am not naïve enough to think we can do away with prejudice, but I think minding our own business would go a long way towards a less fractious coexistence.  So many prejudices stem from one group trying to impose its preferences on everyone.  Attitudes like “I am a Christian, Moslem, straight (fill in the blank) so everyone should to be.”  “I believe women are intellectually inferior, so let’s oppress them.” “I don’t believe abortions should be legal, so let’s ban them for everyone, even though I can opt not to have one (or I cannot become pregnant, being a man).”  What is wrong with just making these decisions for ourselves and not for everyone?   If you do not like Jews or Blacks or women or whatever group, you do not have to befriend them, but you also need not to harm them.  If you do not like the last wave of immigrants or refugees, you can decline to help them, but stay out of the way as they help themselves.  It really will not erode your power, your position, your job, or any of these narratives you have concocted to excuse what is merely a prejudice.

As I write this, Americans have just come through a very contentious election pitting Donald Trump against Joe Biden.  To me, America has been a grand idea, one that stood for justice, democracy, and equality. True, the execution has not lived up to the ideal, but I always felt that the desire to have the ideal and the reality inch closer to each other has been an aspiration.  Sadly, a dim and incoherent man managed to almost destroy this vision, and his main weapon has been to pitch one group against another, to create an “us” that should eradicate the “other”.  The “other” is not always the foreigner, the outsider; he has targeted various groups to mock and belittle, as anyone who has heard his speeches will recognize.  He has treated exiles in uniquely cruel ways, identifying them as the cause of America’s ills, while destroying their families. This is an easy target, since these people have no voice in politics, and bullies tend to go after the voiceless.  It is dismaying that more than 70 million citizens agree with him.  It is also heartening that there was such jubilation when the election was called in favor of Joe Biden.  When was there ever dancing in the streets after an election?  Alienation may be part of the human condition, but so is connection. Perhaps we can hope.