Until recently, there was a relative paucity of work on immigration in the psychoanalytic literature. What might have been seen as uncanny ironyâgiven the remarkable diasporic movements of psychoanalysis itselfâhas increasingly been recognized as the effect of the cultural repression or dissociation of our psychoanalytic history (Jacoby, 1983; Kuriloff, 2010, 2012; Makari, 2008; Yi, 2014a; Yi, 2014b). Indeed, writings on the subject have recently burgeoned (Ainslie et al., 2013; Boulanger, 2004; Harlem, 2010; Tummala-Narra, 2009), as evidenced also in the production of this volume of essays. The predominant tendency in this developing literature has been to see immigration largely as a psychologically damaging process, a traumatic event that poses unprecedented difficulties and usually leaves irremediable scars in its subjects. Such analysis has been necessary, to not only ameliorate suffering but also initiate a process of remediation for the dehumanizing tendencies of xenophobia, whose principle mechanism is the erasure of the histories of (subaltern) Others.1 Little in evidence is an accounting of what immigration produces, how it generates and creates. The displacement necessarily occasioned by immigrationâespecially when forced by economic deprivation or political oppressionâis unquestionably a tremendous challenge to subjectivity, but it is also the fertile ground of creativity, the strange place where something new can come into being.
Consider this poem by Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, called simply Psalm:
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robinâstill, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that werenât enough, it wonât stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, Iâll single out only the ant
between the border guardâs left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions âWhere from?â and âWhere to?â
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isnât that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fogâs reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadnât been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
This song is full of inexorable movementâbirds, clouds, insects, fog, dust, octopus, and pebblesâall scrambling over, ignoring, and disrupting the territorial lines established by the imperious humans. And while Szymborska issues a deeply humanist call to what binds us together, the poem is couched in the ironies of one who has lived through what tears us apart: upheaval, war, and totalitarianism. You can hear the lament in it. What a funny thing, Szymborska seems to be saying, these useless and impossible boundaries that attempt to separate and divide, but are nothing if not full of mole holes and the diffusion of clouds.
At one level this message is simple enough: There is no natural division of the land, no essentialist state or border, between Palestine and Israel, between Turkey and Iraq, between the United States and Mexico. The land itself knows nothing of its partitioning, and it is weâhumans in bootsâwho do the dividing. But she also alerts us to something more complicated and painful: the layering inherent in the world, the way a single place contains the simultaneous flow of separate registers. The ant making its way past the guard on the ground occupies the same place as the robin bobbing up on the roadblock and as the squeaking mutter of human voices high overhead, adrift on the airwaves obliged to carry them. There is a childlike delight in the cartoon of pebbles provocatively hopping onto foreign soil, oblivious of their transgression, but by the end, this animistic world is reduced to âmixed vegetation, subversive moles, and windâ and what we are left with is the echo of something deeper down, saturated with histories, closer to our very subjectivities: âonly what is human can be foreign.â
Man-made statesâwhether these be political or psychicâcan only be bounded leakily, only contingently demarcated. There is always something blowing across the border from the other side, something smuggled in whether by privets or the human coyotes paid exorbitant sums to ferry Mexican families across the Arizona border. And more mysteriously still, we are repatriated daily in the nocturnal ships that transport us from that foreign country of our dreams. Our aching humanness, the inheritance of separation and division and loss, is soaked with foreignness. As Rilke (1923/2009) reminds us in his first Duino Elegy, âwe are not really at home in our interpreted world.â None of us.
But these displacements, as well as being the wellsprings of grief, are also the engines of poetry. Crossing the border undoubtedly makes enormous demands of any who undertake the journey; this demand is, above all, a call for creative transformation. Residence in the new requires innovation.
It is from this place that I begin to think about immigration: not with a sense of the otherness of the immigrant, but by way of the very foreignness constitutive of each of us as human beings and the call such foreignness makes of us for improvisation. We are all immigrants in this sense, all âstrangers to ourselvesâ as Julia Kristeva (1991) concludes in her meditation on the foreigner.
Most psychoanalytic papers on immigration tend to conceptualize the terrainâperhaps inevitablyâin dichotomies: there-and-then vs. here-and-now, the old country vs. the new, mourning vs. melancholia, assimilation vs. isolation. It is well established that faced with literal transplantation, the immigrant must steer between the Scylla of adaptation to new cultural ground that promises survival by assimilation but threatens a deracinated soullessness, and the Charybdis of an encapsulating nostalgia for a never-attainable paradise lost that ends in the withering victimhood of melancholia. What this subject can hope to achieve is biculturality.
Perhaps we have become nostalgic for a time in which the old country could be clearly demarcated from the new, one without the temporal displacements and simultaneities of our multicultural postmodernism. What counts as the old country is no longer so clear. An American ex-pat living in Europe misses good Mexican food; while an undocumented Mexican repatriated to a border town opens a Chinese restaurant (NPR, 2014).
The days of simple biculturality are gone. For one, we now take seriously the fragmenting inflections of other fault lines: the ways that class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, for example, rupture the supposed homogeneity of given national cultures and bridge subcultural groups. Take the case of numerous gay immigrants from Latin America with whom I have worked: Many feel more at home with their sexuality in the United States than they ever did in their country of origin, and not just in terms of White American âgayness.â Immigration has in many cases facilitated the discovery of a queer identity in Spanish through participation in a multinational Latino gay community that was not available to them back home. But neither is this to be romanticized as an uncomplicated story of emancipation. Socioeconomic status, education, race, and the poisoned legacies of colonialism and civil war split and multiply cultural identities along complex lines. Nationalized identity is refracted through the improvised, multinational subcultures of Latino gayness: a formation more complicated than simple biculturality. Indeed, by postulating an other culture, usually premised on nationalistic identity (including national language), biculturality can obscure the fractures extant in any native culture, furthering the fiction of a uniform national character.
This is brought home in any theorizing about immigration, since it must contend with the extraordinary variability of immigrant experience under the specificity of manifold conditions, as a number of writers have noted (Akthar, 1995; Antokoletz, 1993; Brody, 1973; Grinberg and Grinberg, 1989; Lijtmaer, 2001). The variables are manifold: the freedom or constraint regarding timing of departure or choice of a destination; the reasons for leaving; whether there are language differences, and if so, how divergent; the available resources (or lack thereof) to cushion the transition; the traumas that might aggrieve it; how beneficent, facilitating, persecutory, indifferent, or harsh the States involved might be; whether one is classed as a refugee, a dissident, a criminal, an ex-patriot, or a national treasure. Add to this dizzying array the complexity of socio-demographic status: whether the migration is made alone or in a group of strangers or a family or with the remnants of one, and the determinations of age, gender, sexuality, class, educational level, race, and ethnicity. All of these factors, to name some of the more obvious, make for radically different, indeed practically incomparable, immigration experiences. The war-torn Sudanese refugee who emigrates to Israel and the wealthy ex-pat American who chooses to live in London can be fitted under a shared rubric of âthe immigrantâ only with considerable force.
If there is an irreducible specificity for the immigrant, so is there a dense layering of place in the contemporary metropolis. The relatively ensconced Chinatowns and Little Italies of old have become a patch-quilt of Little Koreo-Pakistans, of Afro-Cuban, Dominico-Chicanotowns, perhaps bordered by a Hmong or Quechua community. We see saris while shopping for good harissa at the Syrian market to put on our chorizo and eggs. You can no longer assume that a conventional family is comprised of one race or one culture. Red-blooded, blonde-haired, American couples adopt babies from Africa and Ecuador.
Increasingly we live in a mosaic, a land of hybrids. As Guillermo Gomez-Peña (1992), the internationally recognized performance artist of the borderland, writes:
The bankrupt notion of the melting pot has been replaced by a model that is more germane to the times, that of the menudo chowder. According to this model, most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to float. Vergigratia! (as quoted in Bhabha, 1994, p. 313)
Homi Bhabha (1994) goes on to elaborate the hybridity of contemporary identifications for the cultural subject of the new world. Plural and in flux, these identifications (which we can contrast to the fixity and singularity of the term identity) are grounded neither in the monolithic past of the old country nor in an assimilationist accommodation to the new, but rather in some intermediate zone that elaborates the âincommensurablesâ of cultural difference, what will not blend into the melting pot, what refuses translation:
Such assignations of social differencesâwhere difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-betweenâfind their agency in a form of the âfutureâ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present. (p. 313)
This kind of thinking resonates with my own experience, a result in part of how young I was when my family immigrated. My parents, strongly sympathetic to the Cuban revolution of 1959, became embittered when Castro established a communist state and left Havana for Mexico City with their two young children in 1962 before immigrating to the United States almost a year later. I was almost four, just old enough to color my newfound ability to speak with the lilting rhythms of the Mexican capitol. Once landed in the US, I witnessed at close range the tribulations and triumphs my parents experienced in reestablishing themselves: hard work and perseverance triumphing over the occasional humiliations of xenophobic misrecognition. We took up Americanisms. My mother dutifully learned how to make turkey and packaged stuffing when I came home from school crying because everyone but me had shared in the incomparable feast called Thanksgiving. My grandparents came over a few years later to live with us and kept close to the old ways, getting by with a little phrase-book English and cafecitos, and over the years there were waves of cousins, some entering easily with visas, by plane, others more harrowingly on small make-shift rafts, via the refugee camp in Guan...
