I felt completely out my element. Like a fish out of. Like a sailor ashore. But mostly, with a puffed up chest, I felt Mauritian, and nothing English agreed with me. I yearned for Mauritius, and knew how happy I would be if only I were home amongst all the people and all the things I knew []
Exile and imagined journey
The facts are that for many years now there has been a sizeable amount of white immigration as well as black, that the annual number of emigrants leaving these shores is now larger than the number of immigrants coming in; and that, of the black communities, over forty per cent are not immigrants, but black Britons, born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain, and with no homeland but this one. And still the word ‘immigrant’ means ‘black immigrant’; the myth of ‘swamping’ lingers on; and even British-born blacks and Asians are thought of as people whosereal ‘home’ is elsewhere.
Unwanted immigrants
Also for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts mingling with the remnants of the plane [
Migrants plight
He loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human
Triple disruption that a migrant suffers
The migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century. Like many migrants, like many people who have lost a city, he has found it in his luggage, packed in an old tin box. Kundera’s Prague, Joyce’s Dublin, Grass’s Danzig: exiles, refugees, migrants have carried many cities in their bedrolls in this century of wandering
