For me, this practice includes befriending failure, acknowledging the presence of frequent bouts of loneliness and embracing the fact that making a home in a foreign land is a long-term process
These days, giving myself time involves learning to relish my personhood and revel in my eccentricities. It translates to shifting the locus of my orientation away from how I might be perceived by others. Representation Pic
Every now and then, I keep returning to something a Nigerian refugee named Festus told me in the first year of my arrival in Tramin. ‘You have to give yourself time’. I haven’t seen Festus in months. He used to occasionally come to Tramin to peddle the street magazine Zebra outside the local supermarket. I often wonder how he is. I remember he was so surprised that Italy could make it difficult for me to be here despite being married to an Italian citizen. He picked up Italian on the streets and spoke fairly fluently, but he empathised with my predicament of having to master two very different languages. This was one of the many contexts that perhaps led him to reiterate to me, ‘You have to give yourself time.’
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What a surreptitiously wise thing to say. It sounds so innocuous, even mundane and obvious. But each time I return to this pearl of advice, I unearth hidden nuances. He didn’t say, ‘You need time’ or ‘It’ll happen in time’ or ‘Take your time’. He emphasised that I needed to give myself time. Within his formulation was the insinuation of a certain permissiveness that only I could bequeath to myself.
Giving myself time involves befriending failure, acknowledging the presence of frequent bouts of loneliness and embracing the fact that making a home in a foreign land is a long-term process, like learning. It happens over a lifetime, sometimes only inter-generationally. It implies that I be patient with myself and the world around me. That I do not function out of a sense of entitlement or feel bitter about feeling excluded from things. I suppose, without consciously knowing it, I have had to rebuild my entire social world in a new country.
One of the biggest differences, I have learned, between back home and here is simply in the nature of what constitutes friendships. I had always felt proud of my circle of close friends—many of whom are single women who dare to live life differently and make choices unaligned with the mainstream while also reparenting themselves. But even beyond that circle, it was never difficult to make friends. Given the nature of my work as a freelancer, I constantly met interesting people from diverse backgrounds who were open-minded, radical in their politics, emotionally resilient and practised genuine kindness. My therapist once commented about the over-abundance of friends and acquaintances in my life. It was so easy to strike up a conversation with someone and once the other person warmed up to you, you learned their backstory, their family history and before you knew it, you were planning your next meeting. As a feminist, this was so precious, this ease in terms of finding community, this access to like-minded people.
I ache for that here. I am beginning to see how immigrant motherhood is a very lonely enterprise. Despite being able to speak German with relative fluency, my inability to speak the local dialect alienates me from the other mothers I encounter daily. It’s difficult to swallow how uninterested people are in you when there is a language barrier. They see you as other and are satisfied with that categorisation. There is never a yearning to know more. A lot of what they glean about me is filtered by their ignorance about where I come from. Many express great disappointment that I do not speak to our child in ‘Indian’. Do I tell them there is no such language? Is it worth the effort?
At the same time, I filter my experience of immigrant motherhood against the loneliness and isolation experienced by so many mothers living in India. It doesn’t make me feel better. It simply offers perspective. Reading some of the social media updates of other highly educated mothers managing childcare against the reality of collapsed support systems compels me to acknowledge the systemic nature of our loneliness and occasional despair.
What does giving myself time look like? These days it involves learning to relish my personhood and revel in my eccentricities. It translates to shifting the locus of my orientation away from how I might be perceived by others. It means continuing to befriend myself as a way of mitigating the loneliness and wading through the discomfort of alienation, finding ways of creatively rendering my subjectivity. I want to believe my social life can look very different when I become more fluent in Italian and make the switch towards Dialect. I am too much of an extrovert to give up. Until then, I take comfort in art and literature. How are you giving yourself time?
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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