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You know I am just reading the Cecil foster article and I am scared, I want to cry for him and for myself too cause I am beginning to experience what he is talking about. I am an immigrant here, just from the isle of Grenada. I have met so many of my fellow country men and women here, all with a story to tell, a story as long and as cold as only a true Canadian winter can be. Yet they are vehemently opposed to the thought of returning home. And I have often wondered, why don’t they return home? But I have come to realize, they can’t or rather won’t, pride prevents them from doing so. They are ashamed, they feel they are failures and that the society they will return to will condemn them for being the supposed ‘privileged ones’ to have escaped to the Promise land but who have failed to take advantage of the opportunities that it offers aka the proverbal ‘Land where milk and honey flows‘.
They will be outcasts, ostracized by the same community that lovingly encouraged them to leave and supported them in prayers and memory while they were away. Is it any wonder that they turn to drink and it has to be an ‘island rum’ at that? It is the only thing from ‘home’ that won’t judge them no matter how many times they return to it. They are ashamed twice over, one for squandering the opportunity they were ‘privileged’ to get and second they are disturbing the myth, the myth that north America is the land where milk and honey flows. The natives are furious at being forced to acknowledge that all may not be as it seems.
So what does this mean? For some, it means that you go on, hoping to reap the milk and honey that you were promised, always in the hope that you will make enough money and have enough power to return to the home that you refuse to acknowledge has grown faint in your mind, your memory. Knowing deep down that you have simply fulfilled the myth. And so in the mean time you wake up each day and take a ‘shot’ to brace you for the disappointments that you are sure to face this and every other day. The drudgery and cold that will surely slap you in the face as you step out the door today and every other day. Essentially, an alien, in-between two spheres with nowhere to call home.
Sometimes, I wish that I had not taken this course and that I was still in my blissful ignorance. It was a safe place to be, a comfortable place. Now my mind has been stimulated, I look at the world with new eyes and challenge things I previously took for granted. All well and good you would say, I guess, but it has repercussions. I feel even more distanced now than ever before from my friends so I enter an even more lonely space as I am now rebelling/opposing and most of my friends who look like me are uncomfortable with occupying that space with me.
They seem to think that I have crossed the line; that education has not made me a better person but has in fact corrupted.
>Hi hun, very pertinent topic. Why do we not return home is a malaise that strikes me often. Yes, and some are often driven to drink, to become social misfits etc, just to preserve the facade that they are "away" and doing well- look at all the posing on facebook. It is intergenerational and hopefully people will start taking an honest look at themselves and define what is really achievement, begin to set goals for themselves and at some point to think about going home as a positive encounter.
>The thing is as well Kima that we the ones who are here in North America 'away' as we call it, perpetuate the mirage…we make the people at home feel like we are in the land of milk and honey. We do not tell them the cold hard reality. We do not tell them that to send the barrel we have to get up at 5am in the blistering cold to go out there and hold down two jobs, barely getting 4 hours of sleep per night; if we're lucky. We do not tell them that to make anywhere close to a decent living we have to give up precious time with our kids. That we have to endure racism, the likes of which they would never be able to comprehend just to survive.
>Nice drop Mz. Spice…thanks for sharing the view from the other side…Don't think this perspective has ever entered my thoughts prior to now. I think I am still one of those who cling on to the myth that once you are "overseas" things are better for you…There is no way you can be longing to return home in the prime of your life. I think me being back in Grenada "in the prime of my life" I am even more convinced that nobody could willingly want to return to Grenada…the antithesis of progress…the negation of opportunity…