Throughout many displacements and my work in the area of mental health with migrants, Ibegan to recognize a pattern in the groups of those who are foreigners or who are part of adiaspora group. When I was in college, I was a Cape Verdean student in Curitiba, and Iwondered about the group of friends I had formed, about what brought us together. I realizedthat there were affinities that I did not know how to name and that went beyond a sharedlanguage or origin. It was something the experience of “staying a foreigner” could bring about.I use these words as a way of acknowledging that this term cannot be understood solely as acategory of being, but rather as something that impacts existence. “Staying a foreigner”represents a contingency. In the group, there were representatives from other countries, otherstates, and from rural areas within their state. Most came from outside the city.
Academic works that address the issue of groups that organize themselves in diasporas oftendo so around the issue of identity maintenance, an element of culture that is shared andmaintained for this purpose. Working with forced migrants, I recognized that many of theprofessionals addressing the needs of this group had experienced the condition of “staying aforeigner” themselves. The condition of foreignness concerns those persons who experiencesome type of psychological suffering. However, foreignness is understood here as an implicitcondition of the human constitution that everybody experiences in specific moments. I amreferring here to experiences of displacement where a person lacks the cultural context tounderstand personal observations or the expectations of others.
During my doctoral research, I conducted interviews with twelve therapists addressing themental health of forced migrants based in major cities in Brazil such as Rio de Janeiro, SãoPaulo, and Curitiba and Minneapolis, and Atlanta in the United States. All participants wereworking in different institutions and NGOs and were part of what we can call a cross-borderclinic. The border clinic we speak of is the one relevant to forced migrants that is on the borderbetween knowledge, cultures, languages, and otherness. It’s a frontier territory that implies apsychic and symbolic displacement in a constant renegotiation between the familiar and theforeigner, between the self and the other.
Otherness or alterity is a term meaning the "other of two", used to express something outside of tradition or convention (LEVINAS, 1982).In this research, I sought to find out if the personal experiences of the therapists had anyimpact on the listening offered to the forced migrant population. Listening in the therapeuticprocess is a dynamic that refers to the possibility of offering a space in which the subject canrecover their own voice to tell their own story. It is worth noting that there are filters thatpermeate all listening, and therapeutic listening presupposes renouncing one's own culturalassumptions to ask the other about him or herself and offer ethical listening. When the accountof the facts of a story takes place according to a conjuncture without going through the sieve ofethics, we distance ourselves from certain neutrality. The ethics I refer to is that of listening topsychoanalysis, the ethics of the subject's desire. It does not respond to institutional demandsor to the morals of a society or system, but it is the very foundation of human existence. Forthis purpose, I asked these therapists about their reasons for choosing this field of work.
Eleven of the professionals stated that they themselves had experienced or were stillexperiencing the state of being a foreigner. They reported that this experience had a directimpact on their fields of practice. The experience seemed to have an effect on the decision towork with this population and the way in which they listened to their patients also seemed tobe affected by their choice.
We are born in and within our culture. The dynamics of groups are maintained by the feeling ofbelonging, the belief in the idea of being one, and in the possibility of unity. According toSTITOU (2007), the question of origin is necessary for the construction of a shared imaginary,which is also, in part, the reason for maintaining the social bond. This imaginary constructiontakes society as one and as a compact entity that responds to a single leader andconcentrates on a single identification and a common ancestor. This belief is not supported byhuman experience itself, which highlights the impossibility of sharing the same place or history.The perspective, marks, and memories of an experience, even when lived collectively, areindividual and unique.
This recognition offers the possibility of building a bond with others thatis not built on the idea of communion. The experience of “staying a foreigner” offers thepossibility of decentralization as well as abandoning the illusion of the universality of ourbeliefs. In this disenchantment process, it is discovered that the recognition of differencesdoes not threaten an individual's singularity. This is a necessary process in view of the beliefthat the survival of a culture requires protecting it from any unknown influence as a justificationfor protecting against acts of intolerance and xenophobia. In a way, it is saying that letting goof this illusion is a way to get along with the other and also recognize yourself.The experience of foreignness, even if it varies, brings up within the individual the possibility ofrecognizing a place. This experience always refers to the subject's life story, their color, theirgender, their social place in the country in which they find themselves, and their capacity forresilience. “Staying a foreigner”, brings knowledge of an experience that has been lived, that isunique to each individual and cannot be shared. It is a place where you do not know what theother person expects of you. This experience has the potential to awaken the person from theillusion that belonging makes us one. It means that people who have “stayed a foreigner”share with each other an existential experience. It is from the phenomenon of human mobilitythat brings together cultures that are initially distant that the concept of Pangea is constituted.
This term designating a single, but diverse, continent, is used as an analogy for the symbolicformations that operate in the cross-border therapeutic territory.Writing about a similar phenomenon in 1969 Victor Turner said: “I prefer the Latinterm "communitas” to “community”, to distinguish this modality of social relationship from an"area of common living”. (…) It is rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential andgeneric human bond, without which there could be no society” (TURNER, 1969, p.360).What is interesting about liminal phenomena for our present purpose is the blend of lowlinessand sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship that they offer.
We are presented, in suchrites, with a "moment in and out of time," and in and out of the secular social structure, whichreveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of ageneralized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmentedinto a multiplicity of structural ties. These are the ties organized in terms either of caste, class,or rank hierarchies or of segmentary oppositions in the beloved stateless societies of politicalanthropologists. It is as though there are here two major "models" for human interrelatedness,juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and oftenhierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating people in terms of "more" or "less". The second, which emerges recognizably in theliminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relativelyundifferentiated "communitas," or even communion of equal individuals who submit together tothe general authority of elders.
This approximation of mental health professionals and migrants may seem forced at first. It isfueled, however, by the commonality of shared experience. Each side brings knowledge aboutthemselves and, at the same time, realizes that it does not know the other or what is expectedof them. These conditions offer the possibility of asking and not inferring about the unknown.When the interviewees speak of interest, we understand that they are talking about somethingthat affected them in their own experience of strangeness. In the same way, in the diaspora,migrants’ attempts to maintain their culture, language, and identity, in short, the experience of‘foreignness’, suggests the possibility of delimiting a territory. It suggests that it concernssubjects who share the place of an existential experience.
If you think of diaspora as thedispersion of peoples, the existential Pangea represents this rapprochement, yet it is nowexemplified by a shared existential trait rather than boundaries drawn by man.I observed that those who have experienced “staying a foreigner” and subsequently returnedto their country of origin continue to be affected by this experience of choosing to work withthis population. As stated above, a certain type of knowledge about oneself allows you to listento others. When the therapists I interviewed reported that their proximity to their patientsderives from lived experience, I understand that they refer to the profound and transformingexperience of having been a foreigner themselves.However, this experience is not exclusive to those who have moved to foreign lands.
For oneof the interviewees, it was his relationship with language that linked him to this group. Thistherapist has a “speech defect” that impacts his hearing, just as someone who speaks aforeign language has an accent that reveals their nonbelonging. This professional recognizedhis experience with language as a vital element of his interest in working with the migrantpopulation. These professionals reported an experience that seems to reflect knowledge aboutwhat it is to inhabit a particular space and recognize a quality of unknowing that impactsradical individuality.It is a bond with the issue of migration that, for some, comes from lived experience whichenables an understanding of this place occupied by the refugee migrant, that of a foreigner. Itis an idea of otherness that does not match the national and cultural identity; one could say itis possibly created by the identity productions which are introduced via the notions ofexistential Pangea.
Throughout the interviews, the theoretical research process, and my own clinical practice, Iobserved that the professionals had “stayed foreigners”, which allowed them to take thefundamental pedagogical position of listening to the other. It is this idea – that the Lacanianclinic attributes to listening - on which the therapist draws to think about the experience of theother. There is a disposition for ethical listening, which recognizes the relativity of its referentialand which is willing to investigate further. It is an ethical code that responds to the subject'sdesire and not to the institutional demands or to the morals of a society or System.This willingness to go beyond the frontiers of the known opens up the possibility ofencountering the unknown without restricting oneself by outward impressions. It comes withthe recognition of the irrefutable responsibility of each subject towards the other, that ofrenouncing the theoretical framework itself. It also works to create a listening space in whichothers can show up as who they are to express themselves. In cross-border clinical practice,therapists are called upon to reinvent themselves in the face of the unknown and thisintervention needs to include the other to be achieved.