Home Sweet Home 

by Tiep Nguyen

A constant force in the lives of many refugees is a yearning for their homeland. 

Many people in our community have fled their countries of origin owing to the persecution they experienced there. They become homeless and stateless. The flight from home involves a number of losses. Most significant, yet least studied, is the loss of their country, which has a serious impact on their mental health and psychological wellbeing.

I happened to see a film on SBS one evening in June. The film, titled Dying to Go Home, was about Manuel, an Amsterdam-based Portuguese immigrant. After being killed in an accident, Manuel awakens as a ghost and realises that he will never find peace until his bones are buried in his native land.

This ghost story film struck me deeply. It reminded me of a wish that I had heard expressed by some Vietnamese refugees - that when they die, they would rather die in their native country. These people were exiles or refugees who have been forced to leave their own country due to oppression and persecution as a result of their race, religion, ethnicity, politics or social group.

Being forced to leave one’s country - the manner whereby a refugee is commonly differentiated from a migrant - implies a devastating loss, so devastating as to be akin to bereavement, to use June Huntington’s analogy.

There are numerous literary examples of how exiles mourn their loss of country. Some Vietnamese poems illustrate these feelings:

Every evening, standing at the back porch

Inside I have a manyfold poignant pain. (Folk poem)

The classical poetess Thanh-Quan wrote:

I grieve missing country

African Americans, generation after generation, still long for their African past in their spirituals:

Way down upon the Swanee River

If the homeland is experienced as lost, it follows that we miss it and seek to recover it, one way or another. Having been forced out of their home country, the exiles often wish to return. In this respect, too, refugees are differentiated from migrants. They are different, not only by the voluntary or involuntary way they leave their own country, but also by the strength of their desire to go back there. They yearn to go back and rebuild the country or to be reunited with their loved ones.

And the stronger the attachment, the sharper the loss. The loss of homeland, or a ‘place-culture mix’, to use June Huntington’s definition, and the subsequent longing to return to one’s homeland will give rise to psychological reactions quite similar to those induced by bereavement.

According to Ton That Niem, who has many years’ experience treating Vietnamese refugee psychiatric patients in America, the loss of country and culture, which has been ignored in past research, is for these refugees the most important loss. It is a special etiological factor of their sleep disturbances with nightmares. When their wishes to restore their homeland or at least to return to their homeland at will are unfulfilled, the dreams take them back there, and they prefer living in that ‘phantom milieu’. Their mental state suggests an analogy with the amputee who continues to feel the pain of the lost limb.

Maurice Eisenbruch has drawn parallels between reactions to the loss of country and culture and reactions to the death of a loved one. He has noticed that the excessive clinging to the past culture among uprooted and exiled people is similar to the mummification and overidealisation of the deceased spouse. It leads to their intense guilt, withdrawal, social isolation and depression. Particularly, it freezes their ability to form new attachments and relationships and may trigger frequent encounters with ghosts and spirits from the homeland.

People commonly assume that once refugees get settled down in their new lives their grief and guilt over leaving their homeland are healed. Clinical experience does not seem to support such an assumption. Charles Ray, director of a refugee counselling project in Florida and a leading authority on what has come to be known as ‘post-resettlement trauma’, observes that the extent and depth of the refugees’ loss tends to increase rather than decrease with the passage of time. Even when their traumatic memories are buried beneath daily preoccupations of surviving or succeeding in the new country, Maurice Eisenbruch remarks, refugees do not necessarily feel better. The material security that many of them have achieved in the country of resettlement hardly overcomes their wish to go back to their country of origin and their regret for having fled.

It is widely acknowledged that refugees are generally appreciative of the humanitarian assistance they receive, especially of a grant of permanent asylum in a certain country, safe and free from fear of persecution. The fact that they are nostalgic for family and original homeland does not indicate that they are not grateful to the host country. It only means that they are not yet able to establish emotional, social and historical links with the host country. They need more time and more help. Recommendations have been given as to how to help refugees cope with their massive losses and settle into their new homeland.

The national policy of multiculturalism must have its credit in facilitating the process of grieving for the lost homeland and accepting the newly found one. It makes possible a slowed rate of acculturation and a substantial cultural maintenance, which, as Maurice Eisenbruch proposed, may allow the refugees to work through the grief over loss of country and culture.

Eisenbruch’s study on unaccompanied refugee minors from Cambodia found that cultural bereavement among those placed in American and Cambodian foster care in the United States was significantly greater than those fostered in Cambodian group care in Australia. He attributed the significant difference to less pressure in Australia for the children to leave their old culture behind and more encouragement for them to participate in traditional ceremonies. He then argued for a moratorium during which resettled refugees are not pressured to acculturate.

Broad social policies like multiculturalism help refugees to bear the painful loss of culture and homeland with less poignancy and to acculturate at their own pace. The refugees themselves seek to cope with this loss by flocking together from scattered areas and building their identifiable ethnic support systems and communities of co-nationals. This phenomenon of secondary migration seems spontaneous and exists in any resettlement country, even in countries adopting the policy of refugee dispersal such as Sweden, Norway, the United States, Canada, Germany and Britain.

The resettlement policy of dispersal was a logistical failure and a serious mistake in terms of refugee’s mental health. Despite this policy, the scattered individuals or families gradually managed to come together and set up their miniature home country, the so-called ‘ethnic enclaves’. The newly established ethnic communities have slowly begun to serve as, in the words of Kim-Oanh Cook and Elizabeth Timberlake, a forum for cathartic collective mourning of losses and a buffer between the old familiar lifestyle and the new modern one.

Since many refugees, especially the newly arrived refugee, enjoy the supportive and protecting function of ‘ethnic enclaves’, cultural isolation and discrimination from the host population are a major source of stress. Feeling distressed over the loss of country, still fresh in their hearts, or with high spirits and energy invested in making a new life in the new country, refugees may suffer a serious blow to their emotional recovery when they become the target of racist attitudes and hate speech. They may find it very difficult to identify with their new country in such circumstances. After hearing the words "Asian go home" and similar slogans reflecting a strong rejection of them, one Vietnamese refugee said, "We may have to depart and make another ocean crossing"; another said, "Where shall we go when we have no home to go home to!"; those more resigned say, "Even the Holy Family had to take refuge in a strange land, we are no exception. If worse comes to worse, we cannot but accept it".

Refugees are those who have been pushed out of their home country by external forces over which they have no control. At the same time they are constantly pulled back to their original country by internal forces they always cherish and nourish - the love of family and homeland, the attachment to historical links and cultural values and the allegiance to the land and people.

It is known that many refugees have suffered torture and trauma in their home countries or in the process of migrating to Australia and may carry the effects of these experiences for many years. On the other hand, what happens to refugees after they enter a country of permanent settlement has a great effect on their mental health as well. While we cannot change their pre-migration traumatic experiences, perhaps we can help minimise post-migration contingencies and create more pleasant and satisfying experiences in their resettlement and new start. We can help make their newly-found land feel like a home, where they have a sense of belonging and sharing, a home that is sweet, sweet home.

References

Cook KO & Timberlake EM (1989) Cross-cultural counselling with Vietnamese refugees, in Koslow DR & Salett EP (eds), Crossing Cultures in Mental Health, Washington DC, Sietar International.

Eisenbruch M (1991) From PTSD to cultural bereavement: diagnosis of South-East Asian refugees, Soc. Sci. Med. Vol 33, No 6, pp 673-680.

Eisenbruch M (1990) The cultural bereavement interview: a new clinical research approach for refugees, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Vol 13, No 4, pp 715-735.

Huntington J (1980) Migration as part of life experience, paper at Cross-Cultural Issues in Counselling - a NSW Department of Health Cross-Regional Conference, NSW Institute of Psychiatry.

Liebkind K (1996) Acculturation and stress - Vietnamese refugees in Finland, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol 27, No 2, pp 161-180.

Ray CG (1985) The experience of loss, Refugees, February, pp 35-36.

Ton TN (1989) Treating Oriental patients with Western psychiatry: A 12-year experience with Vietnamese refugee psychiatric patients, Psychiatric Annals, Vol 19, No 12, pp 648-652.