Unwillingly torn from your homeland

It is the custom to distinguish between economic migrants and refugees.  I, and many of my friends, fall between these rigid categories.  Money was not a motive for my leaving Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia, as it was then) but nor was my life in constant danger when I left, and I was not deported.  I love to travel but I was not seeking a new way of life; I did not sense that I was actually an Australian under the skin with the sort of conviction that affects, say, a transgender person.  Though I had read the Billabong books of Mary Grant Bruce....  However, I believed that when Zimbabwe emerged from its bitter war I would no longer be welcome there and so I started looking for suitable opportunities to depart.  Commonplace enough.

Anyway, I am naturally interested in the reasons why people take the hard road of quitting their country of birth and settling elsewhere, perhaps without having much choice in their destination, and in how they adapt.  I know many migrants from Southern Africa: some have been required to leave home; many have suffered hardships; most pine for their old country; a few have allowed their lives to be destroyed by regrets; all have tales to tell.  It is their tales that I plunder when I write about migration and assimilation. 

Actually, at certain points in any life, there are decisions to make.  In Rhodesia, where they were made against the backdrop of the guerrilla war, they gained urgency, especially at points of crisis.  These pressures could easily precipitate or worsen existing personal problems.  Over and above everything, in a way not known in stable countries, the question of emigration would hang.  Talk and speculation gave way to an imperative and the moment of departure would be chosen.  And this was a forced departure, not a lifestyle choice.  Leaving the place you love for a strange life in whatever country will accept you....  But I cannot complain.  Any true refugee knows what I mean, but with a vengeance.

I always knew the war in Rhodesia would result in an extremist, racist black government, probably a dictatorship.  Old and recent history told me that.  If I said so, outside a coterie of “liberal” friends (that is, rationalists), someone would be sure to start raging and denying the obvious.  I wonder what they really thought?  But of course it is natural enough to deceive oneself; in my own way, hoping against hope, I sometimes wondered, looking round at my relatively prosperous homeland and its ingenious, well-educated inhabitants, with its relatively good race relations and plentiful resources, if there was a future for me and mine.

The immigrant experience

The immigrant experience is intrinsically interesting.  I am an immigrant and if you include “internal migration”, from one part of the country to another, most of my neighbours are, too.  And as this is the case around the globe as, we are told, the centuries-long movement from the land to the cities intensifies.  Anyway, it is not surprising that I end up writing about immigration.   

Europeans in the country of my birth, Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, were all immigrants and many of the Africans were – certainly a majority of those I knew had been torn from their ancestral lands to come and live in a city.  Then I became an Australian and Australia, like the US, is a country of immigrants, apart, of course, from the downtrodden aborigines and I saw hardly any aborigines, and those I did see (never met) struck me as decidedly gloomy – perhaps only as a contrast to the smiling black faces I suddenly found I missed so much.  Come to think of it, all Australians seemed rather grim; the besieged white Rhodesians were surely more cheerful; or was that just because I worked in an institution of tertiary education? 

Immigration has been a raging issue as long as we have been in Britain, and especially now.  I have said the immigrant experience is nearly universal.  It is the experience of not quite belonging anywhere.  But to balance it is the widespread and sometimes burning desire to assimilate, to become, in my case, a fair dinkum Australian.  I despised the “when-wes”, the “Rhodies” who collected together to gripe about their condition and rail against a world that could not see how wonderful we Rhodesians had been.  But most of them were, in fact, making a better fistful of becoming Australians, braaivleis (sorry “barby”) and sunshine Australians, at any rate.  I, of course, became intellectually Australian, an anorak on subjects such as Australian impressionist painters or or 19th century Australian literature of internecine Labor Party politics.  Which is probably to say not Australian at all. 

Of course, wanting to fit in is not the inevitable concomitant of homesickness.  If the host country hates me perhaps you want to destroy it or at least try to impose your own values upon it.  Fortunately, Australia did not hate me, it merely did no notice me.

The title of my novel, Assimilation, says it all.  Mind you, it is ironical.  The protagonist is also unusual in the depiction of migrants, a white African rather than a black, a Rhodesian but not the Rhodesian of stereotype (a farmer traumatised by terror attacks or a bitter racist) – indeed, someone who by language and religion and colour has everything you might think would fit him to assimilate – but still he experiences the fate of the exile, and as his mind assimilates his very soul resists assimilation.

And, of course, events, dear boy, events (as the politician said) intervened.  You should not take on more than a couple of life’s great challenges at once and when you change house and job and nationality and lifestyle all at once the worry and anxiety trigger all sorts of new challenges and the loaded gun goes off.

In my novel Richard, my protagonist, seeks to embrace Australia and to shut out Rhodesia but, initially, he is unsuccessful.  His loaded gun discharges.