Viva America!

Picture from fiftiesweb.com

Versão em português
Version en français

A feeling of isolation is almost inevitable when we settle in another country, despite the welcoming, and even if we are protected by the law and a support system. It is worse if we don’t have children, these magic beings who build strong bonds between parents and the surrounding world.

Although having been welcomed and having been integrated fairly well where I live, I will never be a “pure laine”, like people here in Quebec are proud to be. I will never be perfectly amalgamated with people from my country of adoption, because it is impossible to share our experiences and our identity as a people; we can tell our stories to each other, but it will never be like having the past in the same circumstances. On the other hand, I miss my roots, my family, and the place where I was born and raised. I feel it's not the same thing any more, everything’s changed... perhaps I changed myself. Here and there, there is a hiatus, a gap that can’t be filled.

Time doesn’t go back so that we can experience what we missed in our absence. Immigrants live in the limbo, kind of nowhere. They don’t integrate completely in the country of adoption and lose the link with their country of origin. In nowhere they will live the rest of their lives.

The positive aspect of this experience is about broadening the way we see things, we stop having a vision limited by the frontiers of our first country. As we strive for integration in the country that welcomed us, submitting ourselves to a metamorphosis to reach a native state, the best we can, we practice a healthy exercise for the neurons, which makes us detach from certain conditionings. Other connections are activated, and we are not restricted to them. It is a bit like learning another language, which allows us to navigate in different ways of thinking, using an invisible "switch".

There are gains on one side, but, of course, there are significant losses in this process too. However, if we do not try to integrate, we just stay with losses, no gains.

In a couple where each one comes from such different countries with different histories, like in our case, there are small oasis of shared memories in the solitude of each one, in our common occidental limbo, which provide moments of pure joy.

Today, my husband called our cat using the name "Rin-tin-tin", in a solitary moment of fun; he couldn't imagine that I would understand. I reacted, saying: "Yooh Rinty!" And we began laughing and remembering the characters of the famous American series and many others we watched on TV in our childhood. It was a magical moment.

To my surprise, I found myself exclaiming: "Viva America!"