Emigrating Home

ONE OF THOSE KIDS

If you're wondering why I wrote this book, you've got to imagine you're an immigrant. You may even be an immigrant who applied for the nationality of your new country and they gave it to you. So, technically, you're not abroad. You're in a new home.  Isn't it possible, though, that one day you might have to return to your original country? Why? Who knows what may happen? And you're scared for your children because they don't know your mother tongue. Imagine, for an instant, you are one of those children and you are thinking about this problem. 

I was one of those children and I have lots of friends who worry about their children on that score.  

• Mustafa, a friend of mine, couldn't find a school where his kids could continue to learn Arabic.  

• Milo's wife couldn't speak Italian, so she couldn't teach their children Milo's language which he wanted them to know. 

• Lal's children were having a rough time at school. 

Those were some of the reasons my friends--and they came from different countries and spoke different languages-- gave me for feeling insecure in their new country. Whatever the case, the question that needs an answer is: what if, for some reason, we have to go home and the children don't know our country's language? What if they grow up here and then want to go back to our home country?  Even if they love it here, eventually, won't they lose out culturally, if they don't know our language? Couldn't it also be of practical use to them here?  Translators and interpreters are always needed.  

So what do you do?  It's easy to give up on the issue. But, maybe, in later life, your children may feel they've been neglected. Maybe you decide they would gain in confidence if they knew your language as well as the language of their new country?  So you look around for a school where your language is taught, or try to get them tuition after school. This can be difficult and often impossible.

Mustafa  couldn't find a suitable school where he lived and decided to go to his home country during the long school holidays and put his children into a summer school where they'd get 'complete immersion' in Arabic. It was a good idea from one perspective.  His children were both less than seven years old. It's more difficult for older kids.  But he found that all the schools at home were holding summer classes to teach a foreign language.

Mustafa has not found an answer short of going home, which is ridiculous. People should be free to go abroad for a better deal. But is it fair to globalize your children? Children, after all, are not chicken nuggets, or hamburgers, in a global business franchise. I don't know the answer. I can only tell you of my own experience as one of those children and why I decided to write 'Emigrating Home'.

Once upon a time, when the British Empire covered much of the globe, I suddenly found myself flung into a crisis. I was at school in England in January 1952 when some Egyptian policemen were killed in a clash with British troops in the Suez Canal Zone and a mob torched shops in central Cairo. My father, who was Egyptian, and my step-family were in Cairo.  At that fateful moment for Egypt, I received call-up papers to the British army. I had been born in Jamaica, then a British colony, so I was British.

A short time later, however, I discovered I was also wanted in the Egyptian army. My father's nationality made me also an Egyptian citizen.  Who am I? What is expected of me? Should I put a pistol to each ear, one for Britain and one for Egypt, and pull the triggers simultaneously? 

Those were some of the questions that throbbed in my teenage head.  

I had a waking nightmare for a long time:  I had to make a move that would somehow be in line with my conscience. It was, I felt, useless to base my decision on expedience. If I did that, I knew I would feel I had betrayed myself. It was tough. There was no question of my liking one country better than another. I had three countries. I loved the Britain and Jamaica I knew and the Egypt I'd heard and read about. I wasn't a pacifist. The greatest asset of any country is its people, not the landscape or the system of government.  Joining any army could mean having to kill people and this was not something I could take lightly. I could see myself defending those three countries, fighting off aggressors, or in a resistance movement to foreign occupation. I could not see myself in an invading army. 

Luckily for me, British law recognized dual nationality and I got leave from the army to go on from school to university. Then, four years later, the Suez Crisis of 1956 blew up. After that, I went to visit my Dad in Cairo. My father didn't want me to leave again and I stayed on. Eventually I found a job and started trying to pick up Arabic as I worked. I stayed for over 20 years, living as a stranger in my own country, a 'khawagga masri fi masr', which means something like, a 'foreign Egyptian in Egypt'. But it was by no means a negative experience. Some things were strange at first, but as time went by I fitted in more and more and had happy times. Egyptian good humour and belief in fate were a great help. Fate, after all, could also turn out people like me. 

My own experience as a child, my concern that children shouldn't have to go through the awful self-questioning I did, and my friends' worries about their children led me to write 'Emigrating Home'. In the meanwhile, I take a certain comfort from the conviction that the guardians of the Pearly Gates, if I ever get to them, won't ask me for a passport, inspect a visa, or seek proof of my army service. 

'Emigrating Home' is a POD (Print on Demand) book, so you won't be able to browse through it in a bookshop. You must order it to read it. But I shall do my best to make you happy. You can read a review of it here that was published on the amazon.co.uk website. It is on sale at all the Amazon websites. I'll supply you with  a chapter you can download.  Clicking on one of my links will take you to the website of my publishers, 1st Books Library, where you can see a preview of the book and if by then you're hooked on it, as I hope you will be, you can buy it there. You can also buy it at Barnes and Noble or at Amazon.  

I welcome your comments on my work and your ideas about the problem of teaching migrant children the language of their father's original country. So you can e-mail me and I promise your e-mail address will not be handed over to any third party for any reason. It'll remain with me, solely for correspondence on my book and the 'big problem'. Maybe we can solve it together.