Losing Place

Abstract

The migrant story, lived and told thousands upon thousands of times in this past century of massive worldwide migration, is a story that holds the peculiar tensions of loss and hope as its central premise. At the least, it is a story of physical displacement, one through which a citizen or subject abandons, under compulsion or voluntarily, a place of habitation and the cultural practices of community that constitute it. More profoundly, it is a story of affect, a severing that disrupts and reconstitutes one’s sense of self and community, triggering a plethora of emotional and psychic struggles. Recognizing the number and extent of these losses and the impossibility of speaking of loss without also speaking of mourning, Eng and Han claim that “the experience of immigration itself is based on a structure of mourning” (2000, p. 352). In this chapter, I explore some of the dimensions of this relationship of migration and loss, from both a personal and a cultural perspective. In locating my own story of leaving (and returning) within the framework of a culture of migration, my purpose is to raise questions not just about migration but, perhaps more so, about the cultural impact of collective loss and the challenges and opportunities it offers for change and renewal through mourning.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

J. Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous

Storytelling provides a resource for the constitution of identities and an explanatory framework for particular experiences.… [It] both enables and embeds the performative construction of collective and individuated identities; it provides a structuring dialectic mediating the imaginary and the material.

A. Kear and D. L. Steinberg¹