The following words come from a dear friend: Elizabeth Zamora, who as many of us immigrants makes reflections about it. I am the translator from Spanish, so I assume responsibility for any mistakes in it.
Elizabeth Zamora Cardozo
Barcelona, December 13, 2022
The bubbles of my beer raised slowly. With a zombie look, my friend and I peeped it to get higher up to the point it transformed into foam. “I have something that I do not know what it is”, she said to me. Are you depressed? I answered her. No, it is not that, I know my depression, she convincingly replied. I believed you have immigration sickness, I assured to her. What are you saying? What is it about? She asked me. I did not know how to explain it nor to define it. I just got the feeling she was suffering from “immigration”.
That night I walked home asking myself: Can we get “immigration” sickness? Then, I started to look for an answer to that mood. Due to that I found Joseba Achotegui’s research about Immigration Grief, specifically Ulises’ syndrome. Although my friend was not in any extreme situation, it allowed me to open my road towards a new search and reflection.
Ulises’ syndrome is a group of symptoms which we immigrants suffer when we are confronted with a higher stress than our adaptation capacity. It is the migratory grief that carry to an extreme condition 1.
J. Achotegui took as an image the Ulises’ travesty trying to reach Ithaca. He pointed out seven processes which described the immigrant grief. Those are: Family and friends, language, culture, home landscape and environment, social status, contact with our original neighbors’ loss and physical security (fear of deportation and stronger when we have done a dangerous a journey in order to arrive in the new country).
Although, I think that in this process there are several elements, the above points are essential for understanding the different stages that an immigrant walks through.
Sadness, crying, guiltiness, death feelings, anxiety, stress, nervousness, excessive and frequent worries, irritability, insomnia and somatization through headache and fatigue are the most frequent symptoms.
J. Achotegui express that many times immigrants are diagnosed as depressed, even though we cannot consider a proactive and full of illusion people on that mood. One that is ready to fight, to overcome barriers who suffer decay due to external circumstances produced by a hostile environment is not depress.
The first and foremost truth is that we immigrants are reborn in another person. The way we can change outside of our hometown. For good or bad. Everything depends on the lived journey circumstances.
So far, I have anchored the issue from a sociological point of view. After I immigrated, I have the urgent need to dig deeper on the subject. My own living experiences push me to explain to others and myself. To search and search myself on this issue. From there I have reflected on what I called “immigrant soul”.
The circumstances and vicissitudes which a human group who spread fluently by the planet, what has been named: the mobile continent, is inviting us to build new forms of comprehension and analysis.
Those which allow us to go deeper on our soul cornerstone, when the scenery ask for inedita forms of transit and transit ourselves on the out and interior space.
The symptoms like uproot, nostalgia, yearning, fear, emptiness, among others feelings as result of migratory grief should be documented from approaches close to immigrant reality.
The way we reconstruct the personal view since our arrival, is as diverse as our own inner cosmovision, and as intense as our own particular situations around our take off. Everything depends on our “emotional muscles”, and especially the conditions around our migration. Immigrating means to read ourselves. To feel the imperative need to read to others different from us, with no knowledge of the alphabet that they have used and use to build their own history. It is a form of knowing our abilities, our shadow and light, as well as the one from others. We, immigrant, carries a transformation and change tattooed on our skin as our soul.
Notes
1 Achotegui. Joseba. “La crisis como factor agravante del Síndrome de Ulises”, Temas de Psicoanálisis, Número 3, Año 2012.
