An immigrant’s tale
In life every generation seeks it’s own path, to redefine itself, to break free from their parents generation. With people of Zimbabwean heritage scattered in the four corners of the globe I’ve found reading the tales of émigrés and their children fascinating. In the last year or so I’ve read a couple of accounts primarily from India. These stories have made me wonder how the generation of ‘Zimbabweans’ born and raised away from the mother country will define itself. What will be it’s motivating urge and how will it relate to their parents country of origin.
This search often leads the children of émigrés in interesting directions (I’ve also thought about the white émigrés who settled in the then Rhodesia from places such as the UK and the irony that a generation or two later it’s black Zimbabweans who are moving in the opposite direction). Recently I read an article, chock-a-block with all the cultural nauces that come with such tales, entitled “India Calling” which explores this theme. Here’s an extract the article:
“My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of Washington’s best schools…….
My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.
India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: It liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.” Read More
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The spectrum of experiences, perceptions, et al, should be intriguing. I have been observing with fascination how our Diaspora brothers and sisters latch on to the latest slang and gossip from home (and some know the best maprofita and n’anga you have probably never heard of).
And all this has awakened in me a hunger to learn more more about the psyche of our brethren- what survives, and does not, what is born and what dies, who and what they create etc- this would be a goldmine worth exploring in both fiction and non- fiction across all artistic genres.
It’s good to see more and more writing coming from some of them- and for those too busy wheeling and dealing there, or simply worn out by the toll of eking a living to support themselves and the folk back home, to write- those of us who can should telling these stories.