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.