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Axe d’étude 3 : Migration et exil

🎲 Quiz GRATUIT

📝 Mini-cours GRATUIT

Migration and exile

Michael D. Higgins, the president of the Republic of Ireland, declared in 2015 that "Emigration has been a defining characteristic of the Irish people." After the Famine in the $\rm 19^{th}$ century, many Irish people left their island and went mostly to Britain and the US. This went on during the $\rm 20^{th}$ century and by the mid-1950s, when as many as 60 000 people a year left their native island. Very few went back. 

In his short story Home Sickness (1903), the Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) tells the story of James who, after spending 13 years in America, moves back to his native Irish village. However, he realises that he no longer truly belongs there and goes back to New York. At the end of his life though, "the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake…" which he had left behind in his native country.

The American singer Bob Dylan evokes the plight of immigrants in the song he wrote in 1967 "I Pity the Poor Immigrant". In a few lines, the singer sums up the dilemma of many immigrants who feel torn between two places and two cultures, unable to really belong anywhere : "I pity the poor immigrant Who wishes he would've stayed home…"

In Bilingual Blues (1981-1994) the poet, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who was born in Cuba in 1949 and then emigrated to the U.S., stresses how hard it is for a writer to go back and forth between two languages and two cultures. In an interview, he complained that "I have the feeling I am not fluent in either one" (NPR, 17 October 2011). Emigrating does not just involve leaving a place and moving to another one. It also means adopting a new language.

As J.F. Kennedy (1917-1963) pointed out, America is a country of immigration : " “Since 1607, when the first English settlers reached the New World, over 42 million people have migrated to the United States.” (A Nation of Immigrants, J. F. Kennedy, 1958). In those days, people referred to the U.S.A. as a "melting pot", a place where different cultures mixed and became American. In the late $\rm 20^{th}$ century, this metaphor no longer applied and America was described as "a tossed salad", in other words a place where different groups retain their specificities while living together. Most Americans pride themselves on their hyphenated background and will introduce themselves as "Italian-American" or "Chinese-American" for example.

However Kennedy when describing America as a nation of immigrants did not forget to mention "the exception of one group" : Native Americans whose territories were taken away from them and who, as a consequence, were displaced in their own native land. In the Prologue to his novel There There  (2018) Tommy Orange , who is a member of the  Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes,  writes that "All the way from the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image". This book is "A sorrowful, beautiful debut novel [which] follows a group of young “Urban Indians” struggling to make sense of their identity" (The Guardian, 18 July 2018). 

Quotations

"As is often stated, emigration has been a defining characteristic of the Irish people. While some often focus on the large numbers who left Ireland during and following the dark days of the Famine, and it is true that it represented a mass exodus of our people from these shores, over the generations it has been our propensity to be a migratory people.
Whether by choice or through necessity generations of Irish people have left this island to start new lives in distant lands. Figures vary with many estimating up to approximately 70 million people throughout the world claiming some Irish heritage. The history of the different waves of migration from this island is one that is incredibly varied and rich. "(Michael D Higgins in The Irish Times, 24 June 2015)

“The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.” (A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy)

"Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final necessary stop in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign." (There, There, Tommy Orange)

My subject: 
how to explain to you that I 
don’t belong to English 
though I belong nowhere else.
(Dedication, Bilingual Blues,1981-1994, Gustavo Pérez Firmat)

I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured 
By my brother in my land…
(We Refugees, 2011, Benjamin Zephaniah)

Vocabulary

  • to belong: appartenir (se sentir chez soi)

  • hillside: les collines

  • bog lake: lac marécageux

  • plight: dure situation

  • to point out: faire remarquer

  • a settler: colon

  • to reach: atteindre

  • a melting pot: creuset

  • a tossed salad: salade composée

  • pride oneself: être fier de

  • hyphenated: double (a hyphen : un trait d'union)

  • a tribe: une tribu

  • bottom: le fond

  • to remove: enlever, déplacer

  • feathered: emplumé

  • sorrowful: triste

  • to struggle: lutter

  • to make sense: comprendre

  • to state: dire, déclarer

  • a shore: une rive

  • propensity: propension

  • whether: que ce soit

  • a figure: un chiffre

  • a flavor: une saveur

  • unmistakable: incomparable

  • erasure: effacement

  • completion: phase finale

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