Re-skilling to empower self

For the refugee or the immigrant, feeling deskilled in a new land is a challenge, requiring vast emotional resources to turn around

In the midst of recent research, I came upon an essay on South Asian motherhood and its manifestation within diasporic contexts. It was a well-articulated piece that spoke about the challenges that South Asian mothers confront, especially when they are alienated from the contexts of their personal origins.

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A term stood out for me, “deskilling”, a reference to what happens to someone when they are dislocated by the process of immigration. Take a refugee as an example. Someone who may have been a practising physician in their local context, armed with the requisite degrees, is compelled to make home in another country where their degree is simply not recognised. This means they cannot practice the skills they acquired or honed over their careers and have to re-acquire a degree within the new context or learn a new skill or find whatever job is available that can help them secure some financial autonomy.

For women from the third-world, the level of deskilling that happens is quite acute. The absence of equitable societies compounds matters. Even if one is eager to learn the language of the adopted country, one has to have the resources to be able to join a class. Many of the South Asian men I meet here tell me how they never had the privilege of learning Italian, because they moved here and had to instantly find work. They pick up the language on the go, while conducting business and achieve an impressive fluency. But many of their wives, who they have brought along with them, remain home-bound, at best they take up jobs as cleaning ladies. They don’t quite have the opportunity to learn, or in certain cases are not necessarily literate, so learning a language involves, for them, learning to write and read. For women like them, motherhood in a foreign context can be alienating, because your child eventually gets settled and acculturated while you remain somewhat disconnected from their world as well as from your place of origin.

I think this is exactly the kind of situation I have been struggling to avoid. When I moved to South Tyrol last year, I realised soon enough that my fluency in English translated to very little here. There were no jobs I could easily access without a functioning knowledge of either German or Italian. Except, I couldn’t afford to learn either of these languages full-time as I was also determined to be financially independent. In the beginning, this aspiration involved accepting work in whatever form it came, be it apple harvesting, babysitting, or library cataloguing. While I was not at all reluctant to embrace whatever mode of work from which I could profit, I felt the sting of not being able to access opportunities in which I knew I would have thrived. I missed being an intellectual and using my mind and being in scholarly contexts and situations. At some point I decided to reach out to whoever I knew in Europe within the art world who may have had some connections and asked them to think of me if they needed intellectual labour. It was the equivalent of holding a sign on the street saying: “Will work for money”, and I am immensely lucky and grateful that it paid off. It was also the work I had done over the last decade that validated my position, offering me a foundation upon which I could further build.

But I wonder, every now and then, about an elusive point in the future when I might, possibly, finally feel a bit “settled”, with some form of reliable steady income that doesn’t necessitate the kind of hustle that has become, invariably, a part of my everyday life.

Sometimes, the simultaneous pace at which I have to perform all my various vocations alarms me. When I simply enumerate to another person what I have to accomplish within the lifespan of one week, I feel both alarmed and overwhelmed by my schedule. That I do not feel stressed out or succumb to panic or anxiety attacks is simply because I am in an equitable relationship, with a partner who lovingly shares more than his fair share of the load, allowing me the flexibility to continue writing this weekly column, while also writing a monthly one for another publication while doing a residency in Innsbruck, learning two languages, working as a proofreader and simultaneously writing two books. And because this schlep has become a part of my life, I am able to move fluidly between my various tasks and assignments, and, shockingly, I am able to draw immense value from each of them. My life feels incredibly metabolic, each dimension feeding the other, enriching the other.

A friend asked me the other day how I would feel if suddenly I was given all the resources I needed to just inhabit one identity, just perform that role. I told him while I would enjoy the luxury of having time, I would probably also lose out on everything I am able to access because of the compulsive nature of me having to be simultaneous.

I have been trying to convert the stigma of feeling deskilled into a regenerative feeling of re-skilling. It is the only way I know to self-empower. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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