If you are made to look at an intricately interwoven pattern of different colors, as if through prism, and you are to focus on one or two particular colors among many, the remaining colors simply happen not to escape your sight and you simply happen to effortlessly take notice of the other colors, however dimly and unwittingly. Likewise, the issue of immigration itself is so vast and complicated; hard enough to be raised, analyzed and draw conclusions in an article or two, let alone discuss the underlying subjects, such as how immigration affects an immigrant socially or culturally in general and our Djiboutian society in particular. Anyhow, I’d hereby try to take a look into the impact of immigration, like social estrangement and cultural disorientation, on any given immigrant, especially a Djiboutian, in the following essay.
The very desire of going abroad is intrinsically widely popular among Djiboutians of all walks of lives and affairs on varying scales and of course for various reasons. However, a small percentage of all Djiboutians abroad have managed to emigrate on valid grounds such as resettlement, family reunion, and political exiles and as genuine refugees, especially during the worst days that the civil war was still raging in the north of the country in the early 1990s. Therefore, the vast majority are, more or less, adventurers in search of better life abroad. Whether these wild dreams’’ of better life’’ are within reach of one or could be attainable once abroad in one way or another, is the subject under my scrutiny here.
First obstacle that a Djiboutian immigrant is liable to encounter is probably that of assuming an identity that fulfills the descriptions of international definitions of refugee and concocting equally a convincing case to meet the legal requirements of the country of asylum without considering all the ensuing ramifications of one’s newly found craft. That means that one is supposed to claim to be a person from a place of high risk to his life, say Mogadiscio; who belongs to a given minority and persecuted people who have suffered all sorts of extreme injustice and how those insurmountable circumstances have forced one to flee, and so on. Thus becomes one a legal immigrant who has the right to live in any given country of asylum!
Soon after that one is poised, willingly or unwilling, to adapt to a totally different environment, socialize with people one didn’t know before and learn and master a new language and live in harmony with a completely strange and sometimes hostile culture, as is the case for most Djiboutians abroad, except or to some minor extent, those who happened to be in French-speaking parts of the world, like Belgium (Wallonia), Canada (Québec) and France, for instance. This brings Djiboutians of remarkably different social and financial backgrounds into a common or level status in which former prestige disappear in a drastic way or new ego appears in a dramatic way, as well. For some, on the one hand, it could mean naturally the beginning of getting rid of a despicable past life full of hardships, and for some, on the other hand, it could possibly mean the beginning of painful yearning for previous life style full of opportunities and privileges. But they inevitably all share the haunting sense of being in a kind of identity crisis at the same time that by not any means will be easily solved. Having all those factors in mind, let’s put the social and cultural sides into perspectives then.
Socially, we were not accustomed to the experience of living in societies where one must stand alone to take mostly crucial decisions of one’s life and hence take full responsibility without the slightest possibility of having an idea where and to whom to rush to for instant help, like close family members and, if necessary, distant ones, notably with racial lineage of some kind. Societies where everything, even normal inter-human exchanges, is measured in time and material gains in contrast of that “hustle and bustle’’ business we were used to. That’s why, to my understanding, we see an staggering surge in the averages of depression, constant migration, addiction, imprisonment and many other misdemeanors among Djiboutians worldwide.
Culturally, we were not used to live in secular and “democratic “societies where one can do and say whatever one sees fit so long as one doesn’t commit a punishable offence in the eyes of the system that is run in one’s adoptive country. That’s why once again ,to my humble understanding ,we see the horrifying mount in the cases of divorce, multiple remarriages, immoral “polygamy”, delinquencies, dropouts and much more distressing phenomena’s in our Djiboutian community abroad.
In conclusion, true that we found ourselves in places much more advanced in any conceivable way to that we’ve left behind, but we can’t afford losing the mainstreams of our origins altogether in hunt of phony role models nationalities and citizenships! However hard we try to conceal or overlook its importance, we can’t help saving and sticking to some of our semi-nomadic heritages, unfortunately. So, why don’t we be proud of it instead!
With all due respects,
Sougueh Waberi Darar
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