Hav­ing (very) recently emi­grated from the UK (to the Nether­lands), this arti­cle on what it means to be ‘for­eign’ was not only timely, but quite emo­tive, too.

The [com­plain­ing for­eigner] answers [the ques­tion of why he doesn’t go home] by think­ing of him­self as an exile—if not in a judi­cial sense then in a spir­i­tual sense. Some­thing within him­self has dri­ven him away from his home­land. He becomes even a touch jeal­ous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adven­ture. How much greater might the adven­ture be, how much more intense the sense of for­eign­ness, if there were no pos­si­bil­ity of return? […]

The funny thing is, with the pas­sage of time, some­thing does hap­pen to long-term for­eign­ers which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The home­land which they left behind changes. The cul­ture, the pol­i­tics and their old friends all change, die, for­get them. They come to feel that they are for­eign­ers even when vis­it­ing “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent liv­ing in Amer­ica, catches some­thing of this in her novel, The Name­sake. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, com­pares the expe­ri­ence of for­eign­ness to that of “a paren­the­sis in what had once been an ordi­nary life, only to dis­cover that the pre­vi­ous life has van­ished, replaced by some­thing more com­pli­cated and demanding”.

Beware, then: how­ever well you carry it off, how­ever much you enjoy it, there is a dan­ger­ous under­tow to being a for­eigner, even a gen­teel for­eigner. Some­where at the back of it all lurks home­sick­ness, which metas­ta­sises over time into its incur­able vari­ant, nos­tal­gia. And nos­tal­gia has much in com­mon with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a con­tin­u­ing, debil­i­tat­ing sense of loss, some­where within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the pos­si­bil­ity of return­ing home which feeds nos­tal­gia, but the impos­si­bil­ity of it.

Choos­ing just one or two pas­sages to quote in this arti­cle was very difficult.

via Link Banana