My Homeland Was a Feeling
“My homeland,” says the guest, “no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all...
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Voting from Abroad Revisited
The June 2nd print issue of The Economist contained the article “Returning officers,” that provided an update for my exploration of voting abroad. More and more European countries are allowing and...
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Immigration and Identity: Factors Affecting the Immigration Experience
Salman Akhtar’s “Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation” has shed a lot of light for me on the psychological experience of immigration. The book takes a psychoanalytical look...
View ArticleSome Emigrants
Some emigrants are homesick. Others are sick of home. —The Economist The post Some Emigrants appeared first on American Robotnik.
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Immigration and Identity: Identity Transformation Following Immigration, Part 1
According to Salman Akhtar, writing in “Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation,” anxiety resulting from the culture shock and mourning over the losses inherent in immigration...
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The Someday Fantasy
I am two. One looks back, the other turns to the sea. The nape of my neck seethes with good-byes and my breast with yearning. —Gabriela Mistral in Salman Akhtar, “Immigration and Identity: Turmoil,...
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Immigration and Identity: Identity Transformation Following Immigration, Part 2
This post completes the overview of Salman Akthtar’s “Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation.” Part 1 tackled factors affecting the immigration experience; Part 2 dealt with...
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Two Centers
Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east, and west of some central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one’s childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his...
View ArticleSecular Homelessness
Recall Lukács’s phrase ‘transcendental homelessness’. What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological...
View ArticleTo Dismantle the Center of the World
Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but also, undoing the very meaning of the world and–at its most extreme–abandoning oneself to the unreal which...
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