The Identity of Migrant Amin Maalouf
By Sonia Caballero Pradas
Collage exhibition in Lebanon’s NABU museum that portrays the development of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) through photos. The photos are placed on the Lebanese pound, and the numbers written on the paper become higher throughout the entire exhibition while mirroring the decreasing value of the pound throughout the years..
Defining identity is an ongoing and fundamental question that has occupied philosophers from Socrates’ time to modern-day. From the time we become aware of our individuality, we try to portray the particularities of our personality. Whether it be fashion style, music preference, gender identity, and sexual orientation, the sports that we enjoy practicing or watching, our values, and the causes we care about are all topics that shape our “thing”. In our efforts to confirm ourselves as special, different, and capable of standing out within a varied community, we discover, shape, and refine our own identity. While being different from the crowd may be a goal, accepting all that we have in common is equally as important as being unique. Indeed, belonging to a certain group is a survival instinct that comes all the way from our mammal ancestors.
To survive, a creature must belong to others, and feel united to fight external dangers. In the warm womb of our group, our ethnicity, our culture, our language, or our country, we settle our individual identity. However, can these cultural babies belong to two different wombs? Identity conflict is present everywhere and within everyone, including those who stay forever in their motherland, inside the “first womb”.
Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi: “The homeland is where love and freedom exist”. I took this photo in Beirut downtown, Lebanon. In the wall, the impact from the civil war’s bullets can be still felt.
People so often seek to know who they “truly are”. While this is a difficult quest for virtually everyone and can take a whole life to accomplish, migrants are faced with the double-edged effects of dual identity, an often suffocating feat to overcome. On the one hand, migrants are different from their host peers; and often are “othered” which can lead to a state of isolation and emotional exhaustion. Meanwhile, living and developing in the “second womb” can likely provoke loneliness in the separation from the traditions and lifestyle of their homeland.
The Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, who went into exile in France after the civil war erupted in his country in 1975, reflects on the migrant’s identity by observing his own case: “The more you steep yourself in the culture of the host country, the more you will be able to steep yourself in your own; but also, the more an immigrant feels that his own culture is respected, the more open he will be to the culture of the host country” (On Identity, 1998).
In this book, Maalouf analyzes the differences between communities and how they may cause wars in the name of identity in regards to ethnicity, religion, language, and political affiliation and more. Many of these factors continue to shape Lebanon today and can be observed by walking briefly among different neighborhoods of Beirut, where enormous Virgin Mary statues at the entrance of residential buildings are found, as well as the yellow flags of Shiite Muslim party Hezbollah standing in big squares and shops.
Mural by the Spanish artist Jofre Oliveras in Amman (Jordan) that portrays an Arabic Jordanian man holding a Roman capital as a symbol of the history of his country and as a part of his own identity.
Human beings often feel the need to prove their affiliations and interests by showing them off to the rest of their community. This is the identity revolution. Migrants need to flex and fluctuate from one identity to another all the time, because the world seems to see in strict black and white terms, while ignoring the essential and infinite shades of grey that shape human identities. Either you are Lebanese or French. Palestinian or American. Turkish or German. Sudanese or Canadian. How can you choose between your roots, the land of your ancestors and the new safe home where you are trying to develop yourself as a full independent individual? You may enjoy the songs of Lady Gaga and eating mlookhiyeh (ملوخية) at the same time. Is that possible? In fact, yes, it is. And both factors sculpt our personality, identity, and experience.
Being unique while belonging to a community is the highest ambition of human sociology. At times this seems arduous to achieve. However, as Amin Maalouf demonstrates, there are other individuals and communities who embrace ‘mosaic thinking’ and value the principles of diversity. People who can see beyond the unrealistic black and white, and that recreate themselves with every new piece of knowledge, every new step, every new cultural friend from a different womb who may have been forced to leave the homeland and who is now called migrant or refugee. As the Lebanese French author concludes in his book: “those who can accept their diversity fully will hand the torch between communities and cultures and will be a kind of mortar joining together and strengthening the societies in which they live”.
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