“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” Joan Didion
What if the stories that we have told ourselves are wrong? What if the real tales makes us something else, something that perhaps is too late to become?
One of the tales that formed me up was more or less of a lie. My grandmother, born in Buenos Aires, was the youngest of an Italian family, most of her older brothers actually born in Italy. I did not ask too much, but bought straight away the whole known tale: Big boats, crowded decks, lost of poverty in the old land. Argentina as a land of opportunities for the dispossessed. And my family as one of the many, crossing the sea once, forgetting their connections, their stories, their family, and starting anew in America. A neat tale, coherent with the broader American mythology. Not quite true, though.
One of the last times I saw my grandmother, we were complaining about the distance between The Netherlands, where I live, and Argentina, were she did. We could not see each other as much as we wanted. Yet I told her that my travel was nothing compared to the one her parents did. At least I could imagine to come back to Argentina few times more, but for them? for them to go back to Italy was impossible, wasn’t it?
My grandmother almost laughed in my face.
It turned out that her family possessed quite some properties in the old country. And for quite some years they travelled back and forth, negotiating them. Eventually they sold all what they could sell, and started a jewellery in Buenos Aires. And indeed, I heard many times the stories of my great uncles being ripped off by other jewellers, and going broke. I just didn’t put it together with the tale of the dispossessed migrant. When I formed my own image of my grandma, she was just another hard working woman, married to a factory worker. And that did fit with the Argentinian broad narrative, the poor hard working Italians making Argentina with their hard work.
Reality, of course, was more complex. Or totally different, depending.
For quite some years I thought that previous waves of migration were a onetime travel thing. I hypothesise that the identities of the migrants then, and the identities of the migrants now, should be a two totally different constructs. Did you have any other option than to assimilate, if you knew that you would never go back to your original country? Or, nowadays, how could you totally assimilate, given the maintained contact with your origins, made easy by cheap planes and phones and internet and whatever else.
But no. The arching narrative of migration as a turn of the page, as a blank slate to build a new life, has never been quite true. Our migrants are not that different than the migrants of generations pasts. And all the doubts and the troubles and the questioning for our modern identity, well… we have been here before.
We just have to remember. We are not that special, after all.