KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, an Ethiopian by birth, writes of the deep sense of displacement among many immigrants from Africa and Asia:

Wherever Third World foreigners congregate in large enough numbers, there is a sense of emptiness. There is no attempt to develop their neighbourhoods, with flowers and gardens, trees on the sidewalks, etc. An Indian restaurant next to an Ethiopian coffee house does not add diversity and interest, but rather a hodgepodge of unrelated elements with no aesthetic cohesiveness.

A Third World foreigner, although he comes to stay, is always referring to his native country. His activities, his choices, his lifestyle, deeply reflect this native country. He may have come to find better shores but his heart and his imagination are with the homeland he left behind. He has no desire to reconstruct and to rebuild a new home, and instead lives in perpetual upheaval with his suitcase, metaphorically, left unpacked even after decades and generations of habitation.

This temporality continues down the generations. Immigrants’ children and grandchildren have a nostalgia for the country their families left. This manifests itself with their persistent references and adhesions to this far-away land: through their cultural choices, their earnest attempts to meld their cultural and personal lives with the country left behind, and eventually with their loyalties in politics and other social ties given to those which best represent this homeland.

They have never really left home.

And they have a latent anger, unfocused and diffused, at this difficult life of divided loyalties they are forced to live. And when made to chose a culprit for target, instead of directing their wrath at their families, which pulled them across nations to this land of apparent opportunity, they glare at the country itself, calling it “racist” and “discriminatory” and “hateful.”

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