Every immigrant undergoes two separate lifecycles
By Daud Xiddig
Submitted: Daud Xiddig
In truth, this is a thought I have been grappling with for a very long time. I can remember, from a very young age, sitting on the floor and listening to hooyo tell me about her life back home in Somalia. I can remember listening to her stories, closing my eyes and imagining a new world, and a new hooyo, a younger hooyo.
However, this world was not new, far from it. Every piece of this world was a shrapnel lodged into my mother’s memory. Using my mother’s stories as inspiration, I think of her past life. Growing up in Somalia, with a whole community to call family. I picture her leaving the house to go school, her uniform pressed but not ironed. My mum used to tell me that she didn’t have an iron at home so she would pile her clothes under her pillow and wake up to flattened clothes.
I imagine my mum sitting on a dusty bus seat, the engine choking and spluttering. I can vividly see the beetle bus snake the sandy streets, into the city centre. If I close my eyes, I can almost hear the laughter in the back of the bus, the back of the shop, the back of the classroom.
Then, I think about how one day, the same city that raised my mum, stood up. Put its arms on its hips, and spat her out. Carara.
Submitted: Daud Xiddig
I imagine her conflicted journey here, full of terror and excitement. She was finally going to see what this ‘UK’, that everyone loved to talk about all the time, was all about. I describe this journey as two separate lifecycles because I think my mother had to sever from her past life in order to gain access to this new life, here in the UK. She experienced childhood, adulthood and social death in a short lifespan and when she arrived in the UK, she experienced a rebirth. In this new country, she toppled over at the asylum centre, learnt how to crawl at the home office, and walked down the stairs of the Town Hall to receive her passport.
Assimilation: the gradual process by which a person or group belonging to one culture adopts the practices of another, thereby becoming a member of that culture.
My mother had to assimilate, and the perfect place to document this assimilation was at the school playground. I vividly recall my mother standing at the school playground alone, when I was in Year 3, waiting for me to walk down the tunnel and through the doors. Then, as the years went by, my mother started to become friends with the other mums at the playground. Her friendships began to blossom and I saw her English slowly improve.
Submitted: Daud Xiddig
Her tongue became accustomed to a foreign taste, a foreign language. English was an acquired taste; it still doesn’t sit right in her mouth. Her English always arrives with a Somali echo. The thing I love the most is that she never gave up her diraac. Hooyo always put her somalinimo first, she never lost her roots. Albeit, they were now covered in 10 inches of British soil.
W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term ‘double consciousness’, published in the autoethnographic work, The Souls of Black Folk. He described it as: ‘This sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.’ As he says, ‘One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.’ The theory of double consciousness differs from my exploration of the two life cycles of an immigrant as Du Bois states that two identities must coexist at one time, in one space. However, I am proposing that an immigrant (through forced movement and journey) had to give up their old life and create a new one. Two lives, lived at two different times, in two different spaces.
The dichotomy that exists within the consciousness of immigrants is a stark and severe one. Furthermore, the contrast between my mum's life in Somalia and her life here in the UK is so vast that I cannot even imagine piecing them together as one. The only possible way I can grasp this intense transition is by theorizing the existence of two life cycles that overlap. As her child, I am a product of that overlap. I reside somewhere in the middle.
Drawn: Daud Xiddig
About Author: Daud Xiddig is a Third Year, English Literature student at Nottingham Trent University. He has always had an innate connection to his motherland but his trip in 2019 transformed him. He discovered Somali poetry and found his new favourite poet, Hadraawi (Somalia's Shakespeare.) Alongside this, he witnessed the immense power of education and the disparity between urban and rural education- it is now a subject he is extremely engaged in. He also loves the typical things a young adult who grew up in the UK would love. He spends too long on twitter and has a slight obsession with Game of Thrones and talks about the weather more than he should. You can read more of his work here.
