Thoughts on “Have We Even Arrived Before Coming Back Home Again?”

N.B. This was originally posted in my Facebook page as a reflection on a project I'm currently involved with. The theme of such a project centers on the immigrant narrative where one leaves a place of origin, settles in a new one, adjusts accordingly, and finally undertakes the arduous process of trying to come back home and relive the sense of belonging and community that was once left behind.

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The teleological (horizontal time) element of citizenship can be found intriguing, baffling, or even both. Does one start life as a “stateless” entity upon one’s conception in the womb, only granted political affinity based on jus soli or jus sanguinis upon birth? If citizenship and political belonging can be obtained either by birth or by naturalization, how does one pinpoint a definitive end to such a process? Does naturalization rightfully justify such an end in that it dictates the immigrant’s arrival at the peak of evolution towards nurturing political belonging? For a migrant, is citizenship ambiguous the same way identities are fluid?

As naturalization facilitates the granting of new sets of values, beliefs and sense of selves, it opens up a bottomless pit in the guise of liminal spaces that trap the individual without any assurance of escape. One may embrace a new set of values, beliefs and perspectives akin to one embracing the widening horizons that reveal a bigger picture of the world. However, the struggle in positioning oneself within an arduous process is a slow, painful death. No one asks about what happens to the old self, nor can anyone pinpoint a measurement of self-growth in relation to time-space. The simulation of “home” within one’s occupied space is actually a long string of inquiries about which space is really “home.” In some cases, the journey even stretches out ad infinitum like a sailing ship trying to reach the horizon line, rendering the passage of time into a complete standstill. The assumed “permanence” of acquiring citizenship doesn’t ensure a direct influence towards one’s permanence of affinity towards both old and new communities. With a nation-state’s potential complicity in social injustices (racism, classism, sexism, etc.) through the perpetuation of “second-class citizens,” an imposed horizontal time flow towards political belonging tangles up into a loop, not even assuring the existence of an endpoint. The ritual never finishes itself even when everyone goes back to their respective houses at the end of the day. When will we really belong?

Is "statelessness" then an option to liberate oneself from national time, an attempt to bring oneself back into nature, into the mother's womb and back into maternal time? But how can one escape the impossibility of a bare "statelessness" amidst war and displacement that empowers external sovereign powers in enforcing the absence of affinity (ironically rendering it as a "state" in itself? Do individual rights such as freedom only exist because of a higher entity granting such rights, scratching the notion of the "individual" off the written paper? Can one resolve all dissonances only through imposing "silence?" Is "complete silence" even considered silent?

References used:

Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. Seagull Books, 2017.

Ní Mhurchú, Aoileann. Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.