As a beginning to Part 2, I want to quote from one of the most eloquent and articulate writings on immigration – from a chapter from “The Brain That Changes Itself” (Norman Doidge), and the sub-chapter is called ‘The Culturally Modified Brain’ and is headed ‘When the brain is caught between two cultures’
“Immigration is hard on the plastic brain. The process of learning a culture -acculturation – is an ‘additive’ experience, of learning new things and making new neuronal connections as we ‘acquire’ culture. But plasticity is also ‘subtractive’ and can involve ‘taking things away’. Each time the plastic brain acquires cultures and uses it repeatedly, there is an opportunity cost: the brain loses some neural structure in the process because plasticity is competitive.
Immigration is usually an unending, brutal workout for the adult brain, requiring a massive rewiring of vast amounts of our cortical real estate. It is a far more difficult matter and simply learning new things because the new culture is in plastic competition with neural networks that had their critical period of development in the native land. Successful assimilation, with few exceptions, requires at least a generation. Only immigrant children who pass through the critical periods in the new culture can hope to find immigration list disorientating and traumatising. For most, culture shock is brain shock”.
How does one bring up children in a society where nobody queues, where pushing in is the norm – where these norms clash so viscerally with the norms of one’s country or society of birth. Paradoxically, the only thing which makes initial sense is to tenaciously cling to the deeply held values of one’s prior societal norms? I remember visiting a water-park with my children. We paid what we considered a huge amount of money as an entrance fee – $80 for the family, versus 20c per person charge in South African public pools – and delighted, my children then queued up, waiting for their turn to slide down the big chute. They never got a chance. We couldn’t understand what was happening – the queue never moved! As was the norm then, all the Israeli kids jumped the queue, or climbed over the queue fences, or simply pushed in, while I naively insisted to my children that ‘we will do things properly – we do not jump queues’. My ethically driven exhortations to my children were probably less about ethics and more about a determined and dogged clinging to something known. Either way, they marked us as ‘freiers’, a term as yet unknown to me. A ‘freier’ in Israel is a ‘sucker’. The translation is simple, but the implications are enormous, not only in consequence, but in vast areas of life. For what we could not then realise is that to be a ‘freier’ carries a stigma even worse than the stigma of paedophiles today. Be a cop-killer, a rapist, a murderer – anything – just don’t be a ‘freier’.
Dear reader, if I could invite you to stop at this moment and reflect on your internal process which might range from disbelief, to ‘he must be exaggerating’. Reflect, too, upon how you yourself might be processing what you read in order for it to make sense to your world of sense. Know that just as an immigrant cannot know what he doesn’t know, you, dear reader, cannot know what an immigrant knows, regarding alienation and discombobulation.
If the above swimming pool story is quaint to you, dear reader (and existentially not very significant either,), I would ask the more existentially essential question: ‘How would you teach your own children to behave in areas more important than mere sliding down a water slide’? Think of what norms hold sway in a society like Israel which has had an influx of immigrants from Europe, from the Arab Countries, from North America, from South America. These immigrants arrived in such a short space of time and in such huge numbers relative to the existing population that there was never really enough time for any ‘one’ set of norms to take hold.
Imagine a Jew from Yemen or Morocco mixing with a Jew from Canada, or a Jew from Ethiopia mixing with a Jew from Argentina, or France, or America. What norms apply? Does one push and shove? Does one queue? What norms hold sway in a society where survival is all that counts. What norms does one inculcate into one’s children now living in a society made up of so many immigrants where perhaps school or university places are limited? What is the general attitude to ‘cheating’? Is there a general attitude in this regard? Is there perhaps a subliminal expectation that cheating does occur – that cheating is normal? Is there an unstated acceptance that only ‘freiers’ follow rules and regulations? This notion seems so outrageous here in Australia where I now live, that when I have mentioned this in discussions, people tend to understand it as an gross exaggeration, or, worse – a personal indictment of my own moral values or moral lacunas. In terms of my white middle class South African values as I knew them, and in terms of Australian values as I have come to understand them, the notion of cheating is abhorrent, and it is so distasteful that people here cannot accommodate it into any possibility of their own world view and therefore cannot imagine it to exist as a societal norm anywhere. How could they begin to imagine a society in which survival is the overriding factor to everything – you survive, achieve, succeed, accomplish, by whatever means it takes, including – whatever.
Forget the garbage I have just written above. Imagine your sons are to be drafted into the army. They have to choose a unit. Some are prestigious and difficult to be accepted into, but acceptance leads to societal respect and the best jobs years later. What would you do, to have your child accepted? How far would you go, particularly if societally, ‘anything goes’ especially, contacts?
Forget the above paragraph too.
How about positions in the army which involve extreme danger – cannon fodder positions. Imagine your son about to be allocated to such a unit. How far would you go to ensure his acceptance into a less dangerous induction? What would you do to get your son into a kitchen unit, not on the front lines?
Would your decision be any different if the society you were in lived with these terrible conundrums, all worked on ducking and diving and manipulating and pushing for best odds? Can you even contemplate such notions from a comfortable, safe, western country’s perspectives?
Completing this cameo of the theatre of the absurd, imagine if you will, the notion that as an immigrant to the opposite hemisphere of the earth, even the sun’s precession in the sky during the day lacked the familiar relational position – it seemed to traverse the wrong way. Even the certainty and constancy of the sun is suddenly lost to an immigrant as he begins to reinvent his identity of being-ness in the world.
This true impact of this concept, of being so displaced, so uncertain, is extremely difficult to convey to anyone who has not lived it. Words convey literal meaning, but the meta-meaning, the deep implications, remain a vicarious shadow to the voyeur reader/observer, unless he/she has ‘been there’.
Israel truly made me feel I was in the theatre of the absurd.
In part 3 of this blog, I will talk about my experiences of re-migration – to Australia.
Michael Cohn – December 2014
