Melancholia across generations
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In Sara Ahmed's text on Melancholic Migrants, she argues for a clear distinction between the desires of the first and second generation of immigrants when it comes to finding happiness. This is made evident through movies like Bend It Like Beckham, where the destination country intervenes to "protect" the second generation from the past attachments and suffering of the first (Ahmed 148). Jess' happiness "requires that her father let go of his own suffering, which gets in the way of his happiness as well as hers" (Ahmed 151). This seems to posit happiness as something that cannot be shared across generations in an immigrant family unless the older generation lets go of their suffering, and consequently, is free from this melancholia. Ahmed suggests that the younger generations can also be melancholic, since "it is the very desire to assimilate, to let the past go, which returns to haunt the nation" (158). Since the second and third generations of immigrants are often the ones who feel this desire to integrate into the destination country, they are most influenced by this form of melancholia.
I also think that the melancholia experienced by children of immigrants can be borne from the disconnect that often exists between parent and child, as a result of conflicting identities. I think this is best expressed in Nitin Sawhney's "Nostalgia," especially with the lyrics "I can’t reach across a thousand years / [...] I can almost feel the hopes you left behind." The sense that there is an entire world of history, culture, and language experienced by the parents that the children cannot understand results in this unique sort of melancholia - this longing for something that is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
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I totally agree with you.
I would like to talk a bit more on the fact that people immigrated so that their next generations wouldn’t be in the situation they were before and wouldn’t struggle with those challenges and difficulties.
At least in case of Iranian migrants, and based on my lived experience, I know a lot of these immigrations happened with the phrases like “for the future of our children” or “I don’t want my child to live my childhood” etc. I remember when I was in the first year of my high school, at the same time my two best friends with whom I did grow up, immigrated to Canada. Their mothers were my mother’s best friends and I remember we went there to say goodbye and I vividly remember the words “oh dear, do you think I love leaving everything behind and go to Canada? No! I’m doing this only for my children. For their future.” Then I thought to myself “how inconsiderate my mother is! She is seeing her friends immigrating but doesn’t take any action!” Now, I look back and I see as a teenager how difficult it was for me to see my closest people leaving and in how much I was thinking of the BAD future that was going to wait for me as I didn’t immigrate then! (I think for the people who witness all the leavings a certain sense of melancholia starts its life at this very stage, the stage of being the witness of all the leavings and all the relations loosening!)
Now, I am here and I am seeing how my friends are living the lives differently and now we are all in that coming future.
We have immigrated with different paths and we all have one thing in common: the melancholia which was born in us with our moving away from the home to which we belonged. We are taking it to the new “home” and we try to make a meaning out of it. -
@arismita_ghosh’s point about the melancholia experienced by different generations is important. In class, we should think about how 1st- and 2nd-generation melancholia differ.