In the US, Canada and Australia, the literature also reflects the history of immigration- I think of Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Michael Ondaatje, Christos Tsiolkus, my mother’s favourite book, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and more recently the wave of Chinese-American novels, of which probably Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) is the most famous. There is a new emigration museum in Dublin that opened in 2016 and emigration museums are opening across Europe (e.g., the Gdynia museum in Poland) because the history of Europe is a history of emigration, and this is reflected in our literature. Henry David Thoreau, who found himself on the Cape just after the tragedy was deeply moved and his story, ‘The Shipwreck’ is based on that event: to have escaped the famine and to die just off the beaches of the promised land touched him profoundly. A sentence that has been defaced once read ‘An imperishable memorial of Ireland’s affliction and England’s generosity in the year 1846-47.’ That such ‘generosity’ was highly questionable is the reason why the stone has been defaced.Īnd across the Atlantic there is another memorial, this one on Cape Cod to commemorate the 99 Irish men, women and children who died in 1849 when the little boat, the St John, carrying them from Galway to Boston went down so close to the shore that would-be rescuers had to stand by and watch them drown. At Carncough there is the (in)famous famine stone, with an inscription commemorating this. The reception was in a lovely hotel by the sea on the Antrim coast- on what came to be known as the Hunger Road, since it was a project devised by Anne Vane, Marchioness of Londonderry to provide work to men with starving families during the potato famine. In the summer of 2019 my daughter was married in Northern Ireland. In the little museum in Karlskrona, near where I used to spend holidays with my family we saw an exhibition about nineteenth century Swedish stone cutters: the streets of Europe’s capital cities were paved with stone hewn by hand from Swedish and Norwegian rocks by men working on the brink of starvation. Today, in the twenty-twenty-first century, we need reminding that these two wealthy Northern European countries with their highly developed social service networks were two of the poorest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both these novelists wrote about the appalling, grinding poverty that drove these Nordic peoples to emigrate in hopes of a better future. The Swedish writer, Wilhelm Moberg’s sequence of four novels, The Emigrants (1949-59) tells the story of people struggling to escape from the poverty at home by heading out across the Atlantic, while the Norwegian Johan Bojer also wrote a novel entitled The Emigrants (1925), following on from The Great Hunger (1916). In southern Sweden there is the Utvandrarnas Hus, the Emigration Museum at Vaxjo which tells the story of the millions of Swedes who emigrated to avoid starvation between 18. Emigrants were people who set off in search of a better life, people who became immigrants when they landed in another country and began to forge that new life for themselves. I don’t recall hearing about ‘economic emigrants/immigrants’, since the economic dimension was always a given and not perceived as anything negative. We need only think of the shift when the adjective ‘economic’ is added to the word ‘migrant’ to recognise that this is not an innocent term. Such changes in terminology are never innocent, they are never purely linguistic, for there is always an ideological dimension that lies beneath the language. The meaning of the word ‘migrant’ has also shifted, becoming more highly charged with emotion, used both as a term to elicit sympathy, (eg often used as a synonym for refugee) or as a term of abuse. In the last few years we have witnessed a terminological shift: where once we talked about ‘emigration’, meaning the act of leaving one’s country and ‘immigration’, meaning the act of arriving in a new country, now ‘migration’ is the term in general use. What do we understand by the word ‘migration’? Reflections on Migration and DisplacementĪ short talk given at the University of Glasgow Migration seminar, May 2019 by Professor Susan Bassnett.
0 kommentar(er)
