HOW DOES IT FEEL? MIGRANTS AND AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION.

  Piaras Mac Éinrí

Irish Centre for Migration Studies

National University of Ireland

Cork

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be on your own
with no direction home
like a complete unknown
like a rolling stone [1]

 

The traditional concepts behind such words as "emigrant", "exile", "identity", "culture", "host community", and the various interrelationships and processes that connect these words, were based on the idea of fixed categories. There was a definable self, a definable other. The self was largely defined by origin: one came from a particular, defined place, fixed in space and marked by a whole series of unchanging cultural characteristics.  All of these categories were, to a greater or lesser extent, essentialist: they were considered to be fixed, non-changing properties, intrinsic to the individual and his/her culture, if not his/her genes.. Emigration meant leaving one's own place and going to another, equally clearly defined and different, a place with its own characteristics and identity.

  ne could, of course, relate to these othernesses in different ways. Thus, to employ the distinction used by Kerby Miller [2] , emigrants saw the experience of emigration as a more or less positive matter which was undertaken in a more or less voluntary way, while exiles saw themselves as the victims of a system which exploited them. For them, emigration was a matter of compulsion rather than choice, and such, indeed, it usually was.

 Under the traditional approach, we assumed that we knew what we were talking about when we used the terms cited above. The culture of the country from which the migrant departed and that of the country of destination were considered to be definably different. Moving from one to the other was a discrete process with a beginning and an end; furthermore it was a process which could not usually be reversed. The very dichotomy implied by the terms "emigrant" and "exile" suggests that the response to this process could only be in one of two forms: look forward, or look back.When the emigrant left, an "American wake" was a significant rite of passage. Nowadays, the same emigrant can catch a plane home for Christmas.  This has implications,  not simply for the migrant, but also for the home community from which s/he has departed. In a sense,  emigrants are now visible to the home community in a way they never were before. In the past we could conveniently close the door and hide our grief, not unmixed with guilt and relief, at the latest departures. Everyone knows how unwelcome the returned migrant sometimes was, like a corpse come back from the grave.

  If there was, above all other qualties, a defining aspect to the experience of emigration and of the place to which one went, it was precisely the matter of encountering otherness, exoticism. There was, literally, a Dream of  America. This dream is common to all European (and other) emigrant cultures and examples may be found in the literature of Ireland, Denmark and Italy, to name but a few.

  Generally, the place left behind acquired the petrified quality of a culture frozen in space and time, growing ever more distant and ever more precious, but as conveniently remote as it was unreal.

  2          Theoretical approaches to the study of emigration.

  While the processes touched on above have been examined from several different disciplinary perspectives I would like, for the purpose of the present article, simply to distinguish a few broad approaches. One  is the tendency to see migration as a rational choice made by the individual, motivated by a praiseworthy desire to better his or her life, mainly in the economic sense. The other is an essentially structuralist approach. Migration is the working out of a system which, according to one viewpoint, allows the market to function in a rational way by sourcing labour in the most efficient and cost-effective way. According to another, it represents a complex and ordered form of systematic exploitation of the disadvantaged and the concentration of power and the accumulation of capital at the centre, to the disadvantage of those groups who are geographically, politically, culturally, racially, or sexually marginalised within the social system.

  In reality, there can be no simple categorisation. Thus, we speak of "Irish (e)migration", but the term should really be used in the plural. Many Irish emigrants leave because they have little other choice. Ill-equipped to deal with an alien, multicultural society, they are often liable to be disadvantaged and exploited  in the host society. Others, whether one chooses the term "yuppie emigrants"  or a more neutral one, are voluntary emigrants and are often better placed to benefit from the greater interpenetration of economic and cultural life which characterises life today, although even they will rarely fit in as easily as their host society counterparts.

  There is a painful paradox here. The very rapid pace of change in society today is making life more difficult for the traditional, less well educated emigrant, as the advent of Thatcherite values in a society such as the neighbouring one (and now, in our own) drives such people ever further out towards the margins, and the gradual and wholesale destruction of the welfare state removes whatever props may traditionally have been provided. The accelerating rate of social and cultural change which we are now experiencing is also hastening the destruction of traditional societies and cultures all over the world. However, it is precisely in such an environment that the other type of emigrant has a chance to flourish: an environment in which traditional ways of categorising the individual are breaking down.

  3          The changing experience of emigration.

  We now live (and we now are conscious of this fact) in a world of shifting values and signs, were the future is constantly pressing up against the present. The migrant is at the leading edge of this process and is thus in a particularly ambivalent position, because in one way s/he encounters the other in a very particular way (which is, of course, mirrored in the experience of the member of the host community who experiences the otherness of the migrant); yet, s/he, in assimilating, to a greater or lesser extent, to the host society, is also the self who becomes the other. The extent to which this may happen in any particular case varies, of course, from total assimilation to an ongoing and profound sense of alienation.

  Look at the Irish in Britain. Today, BBC Radio 4's South Africa correspondent, Fergal Keane, is Irish (and has a typical Irish accent), something which would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. A perusal of radio programmes today, Saturday 5 February, 1994, shows BBC Radio 2 is having an hour-long Mary Black concert at 6.02 pm, Oxford academic Terry Eagleton's play on James Connolly will be heard on BBC Radio 3  on Sunday night, while later the same evening Maeve Binchy will be heard presenting the regular  series With Great Pleasure; one of the readers is her cousin, Kate Binchy.

  Does all of this mean that the Irish have "arrived" in Britain, that to be Irish is now a plus? Certainly one often hears such statements made (concerning the Irish in France, Germany and the USA as well). They are not entirely without truth. Furthermore there has been a certain validation of the positive value of otherness (provided it is not seen as too threatening) in most multicultural societies. It does not follow, however, that the old realities do not continue for a very considerable number of Irish emigrants.

  In examining the changes which are occurring in emigration today, our subject-matter has partly to do with imagining the self and the other and the encounter between them. We are thus no longer purely in the realm of the empirical research beloved of sociologists and human geographers. In terms of the approaches available, one is obliged to forsake the high, hard ground of the empiricists of migration and to turn instead to such areas as applied psychology and literary criticism, especially those strands of current literary criticism which attempt to  explore the centrality of difference in  areas such as gender. Part of the difficulty about migration studies, at least in an English-speaking context, has been that the obsession with empiricism - a peculiarly British vice? - has tended to ignore the theoretical advances which have been made in neighbouring disciplines.

  4          A Changing world

  The old assumption was that place, culture and identity were fixed and interrelated in a definable, consistent way. Above all, culture was connected with an ethnic consciousness which, in turn, was associated with a specific place or region. The highest and purest form of any particular culture was necessarily that which was found in the place where the guardians of that culture controlled their own destinies in a polity with defined physical and political boundaries.

  Around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communication...Euclidean and perspectivist space have disappeared as systems of reference, along with other former 'common places', such as town, history, paternity, the tonal system in music, traditional morality, and so forth. This was a truly crucial moment. [3]

  In the world in which we find ourselves today,  there is an increasing stress on interconnectivity, accompanied by an an emphasis on the notion of permeability of borders, whether of the self or of the community in which one lives. The geographer David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity [4] comments on an early work of British author Jonathan Raban, Soft City [5] , in which the latter replaces the concept of the city as a well defined, rationally organised space, with clear boundaries and a hierarchical structure and set of values to which all must assimilate, with the notion of the city as a theatre "a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles". The city is not a community, but a labyrinth, criss-crossed by an infinitive number of networks and associations, few of which are fixed in space or time. Fluidity and subjectivity are dominant characteristics; the city is above all a theatre of self-invention.

  For better or worse, [the city] invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offered when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in a city is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relation between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more  real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. [6]

  Post-modernism signals the death of such 'metanarratives' whose secretly terroristic function was to ground and legitimate the illusion of a 'universal' human history. We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back pluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself...Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.

... If there was something liberating about the possibility of playing many diverse roles, there was also something stressful and deeply unsettling about it... [7]

  Finally, French feminist literary critic and psychologist Julia Kristeva in her work Étrangers à Nous-Mêmes [8] points to two central aspects of the migrant condition, both concerning the matter of self and other. Kristeva points to a peculiar reaction on the part of the host to the migrant, a reaction which may vary from fear to outright hatred. She explains this, in part, in psychological terms. The migrant is a person who has made a "positive" choice: s/he has left his/her own society and culture and moved elsewhere. The effect of this is to give the migrant, even a street-sweeper, a specific kind of power, in the mind of the host; such a decision to displace oneself from the familiar to the unfamiliar is not easy and one might lack the courage to undertake it oneself. There can be no easy answer, for the person in the host society, to the question "what if I had to make such a choice?", but the migrant, by being there, signifies that s/he has already made it. A second, related point is that the migrant, again by his/her very presence, relativises the value system of the host culture. After all, if a given society shares the same set of monolithic values it is very easy to believe that such values are necessarily and even uniquely right. The mere presence of the migrant explodes such illusions.

  In sum, the culture of postmodernism, the revolution in telecommunications and the availability of cheap transport, as well as the globalisation of the world labour economy, have created a new, more plastic world.  Nothing, even emigration, is permanent.  No set of values is seen as necessarily superior to any other. No culture is isolated. Thus the migrant, in a sense, has already been in America before going there, while the constant coming and going of the modern traveller mean that no part of Ireland, for instance, can aspire any longer to the aloofness and isolation of De Valera's vision.

  The migrant is the exemplar of postmodernist humanity.  Living in a universe of shifting, plastic values, s/he must define an individual response, must largely construct his/her own identity.

Culture itself is being redefined; it is everywhere and omnipresent, through the dominance of the mass media, but it is also so banalised that at another level, each individual is in a constant process of re-inventing his/her own culture and identity, borrowing freely from a smorgasbord of eclectic possibilities. In short, there are no longer fixed categories, whether external realities or in the construction of the self.

  A last important point needs to be made, as it is one of which postmodernity seems to take little account. There is still a question of power in society, how is is defined and exercised, and who controls it. Many migrants in general, including Irish migrants, do not participate in the power system/structures (at home or abroad): but what they have to say about it, from their tangential perspective, is therefore sometimes acute.

  5          Some recent Irish perspectives

  Exile is not a simple matter. It seems to me that certain (or indeed uncertain) aspects of the personality do not travel well; they tend to warp and atrophy. The person in exile grows and develops in a different way. The vision of the native heath, which is surely for anyone a crucial matter, becomes narrow and distorted. This is only the most obvious manifestation, but there are others, more complex, and perhaps more serious.

  I don't know if anyone has investigated properly the pyschopathology of exile, but it would have to include the level at which reality itself, the daily world, is experienced, and it is possible that a long number of years in exile causes a profound change in a person, no matter how successful, or how well-balanced. [9]

  Q.            "Isn't emigration a defeat for the Irish people?

  A.            "I don't look on the type of emigration we have today as being of the same category as the terrible emigration in the last century. What we now have is a very literate emigrant who thinks nothing of coming to the United States and going back to Ireland again. The younger people in Ireland today are very much in that mode. And it's very refreshing to see it. If future legislation in the Congress will acknowledge the skills and the capacities of Irish emigrants and grant legal status to allow entry to qualified jobs, we will have a mobile labour market stretching from the US to Ireland to the European Community where we can participate and contribute fully..."

  Q.            "What can these emigrants offer Ireland?"

  A.            "They should do what they have to do. The world is now one world and they can always return to Ireland with the skills they have developed. We regard them as part of a global generation of Irish people. We shouldn't be defeated or pessimistic about it. We should be proud of it. After all, we can't all live on a small island". [10]

  And there it is, this IDA poster, illuminated at the end of the corridoor that leads from the airbridge gates to the arrivals terminal; the ghostly faces of those beautiful Young Europeans. It always seems poignant as any ancient Ulster saga to me, this pantheon of departed heroes, so hopeful and innocent, frozen in their brief moment of optimism.

  And you meet your friends the night you get home, the people who stayed behind... You pretend you know what your friends are talking about, because you still want to belong, And sometimes there are rows, as the night wears on, because you don't keep in touch as much as you should, and they resent you a bit for going anyway, and you resent them a bit for staying, although you can't put your finger on why. But the conversation flows, as much as it can, with a couple of awkward moments. When you use the words "home" or "at home", for instance, your friends don't really know what you mean. Sometimes you don't know yourself.

  ...  Then, about half an hour before closing time, you find yourself looking around the pub and becoming frantically uptight. You're feeling completely out of place, you don't know why. It's weird. You don't get it. But somehow, despite the ceol and the caint and the craic, something is wrong. You're home in Ireland, but you're not home really. London is still in your head, on New York, or Paris. But you're in Ireland. How did this happen? It's not that you're unhappy exactly. But it's just not right. .. You close your eyes and try to fight back the almost overwhelming urge to be somewhere - anywhere - else. And you realise in that moment that you really are an emigrant now. And that being an emigrant isn't just an address. You realise that it's actually a way of thinking about Ireland. [11]

  Living as they do at the margins of  powerful socio-economic regions, peripheral cultures such as Ireland's lag behind, in some respects, the latest changes in the neighbouring core regions. In other ways, however, they are more responsive, because more exposed, to every new current. This has major implications for the way in which migrants view themselves, their own identities, and the home and host cultures, respectively, which they have left and where they have settled. Perhaps the most important single change, as suggested already,  is the redefining of the relationship between place and culture; nowadays, you can take it with you, culture has become portable and personal,  and what migrants bring back also affects, in many subtle ways, the culture they left behind them. Viewed in this way, the migrant is not an outsider or an alien in any society,  but both the litmus test and the harbinger of  the vast cultural changes which are now sweeping the globe. Precisely because the migrant has made (using Kristeva's terms) the positive choice of leaving her/his own culture, s/he is in a better position than any to appreciate and even to define the fluid, shifting nature of modern definitions of culture and identity.

  Ethnicity, or nationality, is an important but not unique vector in the construction of the self. Nowadays, at least in the newer postindustrial societies,  people may regard other factors as equally or more important in their definition of themselves. Gender and sexuality constitute a notable example. Lesbian writer Emma Donoghue puts this well:

  "I felt more of an exile for 25 years in Ireland than I ever have in the twelve I've been out of it" (talking about being gay) "Is there an age of consent for being Irish?" [12]

  6          Post colonial identities: postmodern identities

In a sense, all previous Irish identities have been profoundly marked by the legacy of colonial rule. It is not a coincidence that some of the best writers, currently, are part of that deracinated urban population whose voices and values received little or no recognition in De Valera's Ireland. Roddy Doyle, Dermot Bolger and Joe O'Connor are all Dubliners, celebrating - if that is the appropriate word - a new, urbanised, unsentimental Ireland, with all its dirt and poverty and distress. It is not surprising that two of these, Bolger and O'Connor, should have be among the first to discern the nature of the changes in the modern Irish culture of emigration. In a curious way, the narrow nationalist culture of the early independent state, focused as it was on the need to build a unitary national culture at all costs, was incapable of accepting the complexity of the modern state, and chose to deal with the obvious failures of that state - especially emigration - largely by ignoring them. The ideology of De Valera's state was one focused on a glorious mythic past, Irish-speaking, rural and self-sufficient. Dublin school children of my generation diligently learned about the work of the blacksmith and the farmer, but nothing of the reality of life in the burgeoning suburbs. The discourse of nationalist, independent Ireland masked a peculiar paradox: behind the facade of anti-British values and culture, life continued pretty much as before. Ireland continued to provide the neighbouring island, as it had always done, with two staple products: cheap food and cheap labour. The machinery of the state, and its laws, faithfully followed the British model.  The prevailing culture in Ireland continued to reflect in some of its dominant characteristics the ideas of ourselves and our identity which we had inherited from our former colonial masters.

  Thus, the country was one where the dominant characteristic was an extraordinary narrow-mindedness and a culture of repression masking, as it always does, an ever-present inferiority complex. In turn, our lack of confidence in ourselves and in our identity led to a search, as it seemingly always does, for simplistic beliefs and slogans: triumphalist Roman Catholicism and jingoistic nationalism were the most notable. It is not a coincidence that Dermot Bolger has his character attack the old ways:

  I thought of my father's battered travel bag, of Molloy drilling us behind the 1798 pike, the wasters who came after him hammering Peig into us, the masked men blowing limbs off passers-by in my name. You know, all my life, it seems, somebody somewhere has always been trying to tell me which Ireland I belonged in... [13]

  Martin Meenan puts its another way:

  Your life, has a relevance only in that it refers to somwhere else, back home (talking about a poet declaiming) "probably some shite about the land" [14]  

All that has now changed. For the first time we have the opportunity to redefine ourselves, even to re-invent ourselves. Most important, we are acquiring the ability to discern the processes which have bedevilled us in the past. Of course, it might well be that we could swap the self-image defined for us by Britain with an equally pernicious one made in France or Germany: Ireland as a quaint, pure, frozen reminder of Europe's forgotten past, untouched by modern hand. To quote Michael O'Loughlin,

  " You're Irish", she asked, making it sound as if it was a status, like being a film star. "I love Ireland very much, you know".

"A promoter had chartered a jet for the weekend, flown to Dublin, and loaded it up with traditional musicians...A van pulled up and a dozen or so men spilled out, unmistakably Irish in their demeanour and colouring. 'Ah,' said, Baxter, ' the currachs have landed'.

"She explained they were Auslander. This year the Irish, next year, who knows?"

"As Caesar had marched north, we had marched with him, with his laws, his grammar, his plumbing, his Greeks. And while we were marching with him, wer were crouched down in our forests, in our earthen forts, with our idols, our severed heads, our bubbling language, waiting for him. We were both Caesar and Vercingetorix. Which is to say we were nothing, nowhere, Auslander.." [15]

   What has changed however,  is a matter of self-empowerment: we have the tools now, and the critical distance (and a bit less overweening self-congratulation), to define ourselves. We also have the maturity, lacking in the past, to recognise the crucial role of emigrants and the diasporic culture: it is indeed different and sometimes harshly critical but we should not attempt to deal with it, as we have tended to deal with everything else, through denial.

  7          Conclusions

  If the above is true, we are now entering a period where, for the first time, Irish people are exploring their differing identities in a context where British definitions of us and our own knee-jerk reactions are inreasingly less relevant. To the extent that this is true, it may be held that Ireland's membership of the European Community has had a least as significant an effect on the Irish imagination, if not more so, that the achievement of political independence for part of the country in 1922.

  Ireland itself has become a new, more pluralistic place. It has also become a place in which migrants are visible for the first time, sometimes awkwardly so. Their views and decisions will increasingly count, particularly as emigration as a phenomenon is unlikely to decrease significantly for some time to come.