The Penguin Book of Migration Literature

by Dohra Ahmad

  At the other end of the continuum, it’s important to recognize that those who have the luxury of choosing not to emigrate are part of the story of migration as well. An example is the heroine of Salman Rushdie’s uncharacteristically straightforward parable “Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies,” who challenges the conventional wisdom that migration will represent a better life. We also need to consider the original inhabitants of destination countries: native people whose land, cultures, and economies bore the cost of these voluntary and forced arrivals. Within this collection, Joseph Bruchac’s poem “Ellis Island” stands in for the experience of Native Americans, Canadian First Nations people, Indigenous Australians, Maori, and other indigenous people for whom the migrations of settler colonialism wrought unfathomable and unwelcome change. Further, internal or “intranational” migration (i.e., migration within one country) can be just as transformative and traumatizing as international migration. We see this in the fiction of Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Bessie Head, and Rohinton Mistry; Langston Hughes’s poetry; and within this anthology in the excerpt from Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. As Hamid indicates, even with no change of citizenship status and no risk of deportation, internal migration—especially from rural to urban areas—can be a wrenching and isolating move.

  This anthology conveys deep commonalities as well as significant differences across its literary portraits of migration. In listing the common elements, it is not my intention to homogenize or flatten the differences; migrants have a very broad range of experiences depending on race, gender, sexuality, class, language, legal status, and many other factors. However, we will also see meaningful overlaps. First, each of these pieces rebuts existing discourses and stereotypes about migrants and migration; in other words, they each have a strong counterdiscursive function. Some of those discourses and stereotypes include the prevailing notions that all migrants are eager to leave their home countries; that migration is optional; that migration is permanent and unidirectional; that it automatically leads to a better life; and that the ultimate goal of migration is to assimilate to a new place.

  The beautiful, dynamic literary texts contained here present a more complex and multilayered picture on all these counts. Whereas sociologists and historians differentiate between “push factors” (namely, reasons that people emigrate, for example war or economic depression) and “pull factors” (namely, reasons that people immigrate to a specific country, for instance employment opportunities or changes in immigration policy), popular media in destination countries tends to focus almost exclusively on the latter. Not much has changed in that respect since Sam Selvon observed in his 1956 short story “Come Back to Grenada”: “Them English people think the boys lazy and goodfornothing and always on the dole, but George know is only because the white people don’t want to give them work.” Invariably, our writers need to concern themselves with what “them English people” (or Australian, Canadian, French, German, or US people) think. In reality, as the excellent documentary The Other Side of Immigration points out, migration would be better understood as effect rather than cause.

  Relatedly, many of these pieces contest the idea of immigration policy in destination countries as moral or absolute, as opposed to being determined entirely by shifting global power relations. In Mengestu’s “An Honest Exit,” the narrator’s father is cynically advised to “tell them you were fighting against the Communists and they will love you.” Often, “push factors” stem from violent interventions on the part of destination countries—France in Algeria and Vietnam; Portugal in Angola; or the United States in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—against the popular view of destination countries as saviors or innocent victims.

  Third, these pieces dispute the idea that migration is an individual or even a family-based phenomenon, eloquently asserting the collective nature of the endeavor. Witness this heartbreaking passage from Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”: “Since there are no mirrors, we look at each others faces to see just how frail and sick we are starting to look.” Amid the trauma of forced relocation, only migrants themselves—along with the writers who document their collective experience—can validate each other’s humanity. We see a similar process in Julie Otsuka’s “Come, Japanese!,” which tracks the creation of a new collectivity encapsulated in Otsuka’s innovative first-person plural “we” narrator.

  Finally, when taken as a group, the writings included here counter the primacy of the United States in the rhetorical landscape of global migration. Whereas many in the United States think of ourselves as holding a global monopoly on immigration, other countries host a far greater number of migrants relative to total population. For example, only a tiny proportion of Syrian refugees resettled in the United States—even before Donald Trump’s inhumane closed-door policy—compared with Turkey, Lebanon, and other countries. Part of my purpose with this anthology is to break the United States’ monopoly on the idea of being a “nation of immigrants.” Understanding migration within a global scope helps us observe fundamental differences—legal, political, and cultural—as well as shared elements around the world.

  Across the many migration routes depicted here, we can observe many recurring symbols. Foremost among these is the ocean, which looms large especially in the writings that recount African enslavement, South Asian indentureship, and their generational reverberations. Equiano writes of a terror of the sea that recurs in later writings on migration, especially in the African diaspora; M. NourbeSe Philip echoes him two centuries later with the loaded phrase “perils / of water.” Danticat’s narrator asserts horrendous continuities across time, asking, “Do you want to know how people go to the bathroom on the boat? Probably the same way they did on those slave ships years ago.” The original sin of slavery generated untold wealth for England, France, Portugal, and the United States; pillaged West Africa of its human capital; and contributed to the displacement of the original people of the Americas. These literary pieces remind us that we can’t understand contemporary migrations without understanding slavery and colonialism as their precursor and cause. The pieces also assert commonalities across descendants of enslaved and indentured people, as well as refugees. These voyages imperil both physical and psychic survival; they also unite those who suffer through them. As Danticat’s narrator observes, “There are no borderlines on the sea.”

  At the same time that these readings dramatize the many commonalities among migrants, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature helps us break apart, or dis-aggregate, the concept of migration. Intersecting categories like race, gender, sexuality, class, physical ability, language, age, and legal status profoundly structure one’s experience of migration. For people from Black-majority countries, endemic anti-Black racism can come as a shock. In her poem “Home” (a spoken version of “Conversations About Home,” included here), Warsan Shire records the violent and hostile epithets “go home blacks / refugees / dirty immigrants / asylum seekers / sucking our country dry,” and worse. In his memoir To Sir, With Love, E. R. Braithwaite records how, when seeking employment in London after serving in World War II, “I had just been brought face to face with something I had either forgotten or completely ignored for more than six exciting years—my black skin.” Within a xenophobic destination, visible markers of religious faith can be as perilous as dark skin. In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s short story “Montreal 1962,” the narrator’s husband finds that “I could have the job if I take off my turban and cut my hair short.” Migrants from particularly marginalized groups undergo a sense of hypervisibility and a pressure to positively represent their entire perceived demographic, as Baldwin, Braithwaite, Selvon, and others of our authors illustrate. At the same time, racism can become an assimilation ritual for non-Black immigrants: solidarity among new arrivals and local communities of color may exist but isn’t guaranteed.

  Gender, too, heavily influences the experience of migration. Across countries and over time, destinati
on countries have shaped their populations by legislating preferences for specific genders, historically gendered professions, and domestic configurations—for example, single men (as in the case of Chinese workers on nineteenth-century US railroads), single women (as in Filipina nurses around the world), or heteronormative nuclear family units (as in family-based immigration policies in Europe and the United States). Border rape and predatory smugglers may add trauma for all migrants but especially those who identify as female. Further, being a migrant of a gender or sexual minority can make one particularly vulnerable, especially since family-based immigration policies become implicitly heteronormative if a destination country fails to authorize gay marriage. Shani Mootoo’s unassuming but complex short story “Out on Main Street” portrays its narrator navigating swirling eddies of racial, national, sexual, and gender identities. Her story guides us past our possibly limited, proscriptive definitions of family and community.

  These readings also allow us to observe a further linked set of factors related to social class: namely, income, occupation, education, language, region of origin (country or city), and immigration status (authorized or undocumented, with much gray space in between). In Otsuka’s “Come, Japanese!,” class status fragments the narrator’s collective “we” into “some of us . . . and some of us.” As the narrator tells us, “the girls from first class had never once said hello from beneath their violet silk parasols in all the times they had walked past us up above on the deck.” Similarly, in “Children of the Sea,” one of Danticat’s narrators reports that his fellow refugees “get into arguments and they say to one another, ‘It is only my misfortune that would lump me together with an indigent like you.’” Tapping into the critical importance of immigration status and employment status, Deepak Unnikrishnan writes of the “Temporary. People. / Illegal. People. / Ephemeral. People. / Gone. People” whose lives differ radically from permanent migrants. The official discourses of migration employ deceptively discrete categories—economic migrant, refugee, asylum seeker, expatriate, student, stateless person, trafficking victim—that in reality overlap and blur. These literary texts bring to life both the significance and the instability of such categories.

  The intersectional categories multiply. As our literary texts demonstrate, much depends on when, how, and to where one emigrates. Policies of destination countries—for instance jus soli (citizenship by birth location) versus jus sanguinis (citizenship by parents’ ethnic origin)—significantly affect migrant lives, as do tolerance, or lack thereof, for minority religious practices. Many of the characters we will meet here have been shaped by multiple diasporas—e.g., the Afro-Caribbean Londoners in Selvon’s “Come Back to Grenada,” and the Indo-Caribbean Vancouverites in Mootoo’s “Out on Main Street.” As Mootoo’s narrator observes sardonically, “I used to think I was a Hindu par excellence until I come up here and see real flesh and blood Indian from India.” Timing matters as well. Selvon shows how an earlier migration can cushion the impact for later arrivals: “George can’t help thinking how things change a lot since he first come England, how now it have so many spades that you bouncing up with one every corner you turn.” Djamila Ibrahim narrates the seldom told story of migrant domestic workers threatened by civil war in an already hazardous destination. Depending on the author’s perspective and characters’ or poetic speakers’ experience, we may see isolation or community; dehumanization or empathy; trauma or triumph.

  Appropriately for the vast difference in the experiences portrayed, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature also encompasses a variety of literary styles and techniques. Here are love stories, coming-of-age stories, school stories, and travel narratives; tight rhymes, gliding free verse, and experimental lyrics; heartrending tales and wryly humorous observations. Just as there is no singular migrant experience, there are myriad ways of writing about migration.

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  I have divided our literary texts into four sections—departures, arrivals, generations, and returns—with the aim of imparting the full range of the migration experience, from the complex and often ambivalent decision to emigrate; to the act of relocating; to the process of adjusting to a new home; to the lives of migrants’ first-generation children; to the backflow of many migrations. While useful, this structure implies a unidirectionality that the readings themselves will helpfully disrupt. Similarly, I have arranged each section chronologically according to the time period during which each piece takes place; again, this organization felt generally useful, but may obscure the historical and aesthetic present of each writer. In other words, many of our writers (like Julie Otsuka, or NourbeSe Philip, to name only two) are deeply immersed in a bygone period yet also informed by the political concerns and narrative innovations of their own time. I hope that readers will keep in mind the many links among and across these chronologically ordered sections.

  DEPARTURES

  The stories and poems in our opening section present the reasons why people migrate—or don’t. As mentioned above, I felt it important to counter a simplistic, unidirectional immigration narrative by acknowledging migrants as people with deep histories—individual as well as collective—that predate their migration, rather than newly created humans whose lives begin on a boat, plane, or desert crossing. We will see homelands portrayed as idyllic (as in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation) or hellish (as in Shire’s “Conversations About Home”). In the category of voluntary and semivoluntary migrants, many are motivated by misleading myths generated in destination countries. Otsuka’s voyagers believe that “in America the women did not have to work in the fields and there was plenty of rice and firewood for all. And wherever you went the men held open the doors and tipped their hats and called out, ‘Ladies first’ and ‘After you.’” In his autobiographical story “Under the Wire,” Francisco Jiménez’s brother tells him that “people there sweep money off the streets.” Djamila Ibrahim, in her short story “Heading Somewhere,” writes of “young women who’d left Addis Ababa to work as maids in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere, light on luggage and high on anticipation for a better life.” The protagonist of Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields seeks out a scene “just like England is supposed to be.” Poet Dunya Mikhail goes further, to imagine “another planet / beyond this Earth,” free of war, weapons, and police. Here she shares the utopian strain seen in many of these readings, including those that depict escape from the most horrific conditions. These writers can always see a better world, even if it lies past the solar system or (as in Equiano and Danticat) at the bottom of the sea.

  This section also conveys the trauma of children left behind, rarely discussed but seen here in Edwidge Danticat’s exquisite foreword and Paulette Ramsay’s epistolary novella Aunt Jen, as well as elsewhere in Lisa Harewood’s short film Auntie, Harewood’s vital Barrel Stories oral history project, and the compassionate and illuminating documentary The Other Side of Immigration (all listed, along with many others, in the “Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing” at the end of this book). After all, those who stay home—whether by choice or otherwise—also belong in the complex story of migration.

  ARRIVALS

  In our next section, many migrants find that their destination falls far short of the alluring promises that those migrating voluntarily, at least, had been given. The women in Otsuka’s story learn that “the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts.” In Baldwin’s “Montreal 1962,” the narrator observes bitterly that “this was not how they described emigrating to Canada. . . . No one said then, ‘You must be reborn white-skinned—and clean-shaven to show it—to survive.’” Migrants find themselves reduced to the labor they can provide, as Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s narrator reveals in The Bridge of the Golden Horn: “While we were working we lived in a single picture: our fingers, the neon
light, the tweezers, the little radio valves and their spider legs.” They are beset by nostalgia, as Claude McKay’s poetic speaker conveys in “The Tropics in New York,” when, “hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” As well as the lost geographies of home, they may long for far-flung family members separated by cost or by law, and for missed milestones like births, weddings, and funerals.

  In an environment that is at best indifferent and at worst murderously hostile, there are also compensations. Like the journey, the arrival may be made bearable by other people. Selvon writes: “Long time George used to feel lonely little bit, but all that finish with since so much West Indian come London.” Migrants build communities that are not only national, ethnic, and racial, but also affiliative in other, undefinable ways—for example the connection between Punjabi taxi driver Parvez and English prostitute Bettina in Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic” (included as part of our “Generations” section but also relevant here). Throughout this section, as Edwidge Danticat explains in her foreword, the concept of “home” undergoes radical redefinition. Turning to Selvon once more: “When he think ’bout home it does look so far away that he feel as if he don’t belong there no more.” In all these selections, adaptation is gradual and nonlinear, as Unnikrishnan imparts in his staccato line “Acclimatizing. Homesick. / Lovelorn. Giddy.” In that process of adaptation, migrants reinvent the seemingly static national identities of both origin and destination countries.

  GENERATIONS

  The next section contains readings that depict the experience of children and adults with migrant parents. This is another fuzzy category within the discourse on migration, as most commentators use “first generation” while others use “second generation” to denote the offspring of migrants. Both terms are imperfect, in that both erase the previous generations in origin countries; both are also overly clean-cut, in that many migrants travel as children themselves, and thus could make up a “generation .5” or “generation 1.5” (depending on the numbering system). In any case, it seemed important to include the reality of these offspring, whom some writers describe as caught between worlds. In “The Time of the Peacock,” Mena Abdullah explores the sensation of control—or lack thereof—over one’s surroundings: for young Nimmi, growing up in an Indian family in rural Australia, “the hills were wrong.” For Zadie Smith’s teenaged Irie Jones in White Teeth, not the landscape but her own body is wrong. Mehdi Charef’s narrator characterizes protagonist Majid in terms that sum up many first-generation experiences around the world: “For a long time he’s been neither French nor Arab. He’s the son of immigrants—caught between two cultures, two histories, two languages, and two colours of skin.” For Marjane Satrapi, who moved from Iran to Austria as a young adult, “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.” To Shani Mootoo’s doubly diasporic Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian narrator, “we is watered-down Indians—we ain’t good grade A Indians.” Charef, Kureishi, and others dramatize the parent-child conflict that takes its particular shape from the condition of migrancy. In “Green,” Sefi Atta’s young narrator differentiates herself from the embarrassing “they” of her Nigerian immigrant parents: “‘What’s it like being African?’ my friend Celeste asked when we used to be friends. ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. I was protecting my parents. I didn’t want Celeste to know the secret about Africans. Bones in meat are very important to them. They suck the bones and it’s so frustrating I could cry.”