The writer Carlotta Pisano shares her personal experience as a migrant mother and an intercultural family
“Where trees have roots, men have legs”
-Francis George Steiner, A Kind of Survivor
By Carlotta Pisano
Being a migrant mother can be challenging even if we are protected within European borders. Over the last thirty years, the old continent has tried to manifest and impose a politically correct vision via the European Union. The Schengen agreement has changed the lives of many people, allowing them to travel easily from one country to another within the Union, without a visa. My generation grew up with the utopian dream, sold by the magnificent idea of a continent of free movers and those in constant mobility. Thoughtful ideas of mutual respect is the propaganda for a better Europe: Most of them had failed or had been forgotten, but that is another story for another time.
Before COVID-19, when normality had a different flavor, movement was the salient ingredient that came with the will to comprehend, know, and learn. I took my backpack to explore the countries around me, not knowing how lucky I was to have an Italian passport: only because I was born in that particular place. I left my home country, Italy, 12 years ago. I was studying in Pisa at the time, coming from a small village on the Ionian coast, deep in the south, and it took me 12 hours by train from Tuscany to reach my childhood home. I left my home region, Calabria, three years before moving to Portugal. So, I left again, with a bunch of hopes: without questioning anything; without dealing with any bureaucracy; with open doors; with the unfair privilege of being free, young, white. In Europe.
I have humbly learned to understand and deal with the barriers we face as a multicultural family in a country that is not our native, especially as parents.
Lisbon has been my home ever since. My daughter was born here. My partner is from Angola, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. I have learned what it means to be a migrant in Europe. I have humbly learned to understand and deal with the barriers we face as a multicultural family in a country that is not our native, especially as parents. My daughter defines herself as Portuguese. But what does she mean by that? Is it about her language skills and sense of belonging?
Her father speaks the same language but is from a different background. Like any language spread by the colonizers, the hospes hostis, Portuguese in Angola has its peculiarities with beautiful shades of tones and slang from the Bantu family. I taught her my mother tongue and she is perfectly bilingual. It is our cross-cultural barrier, for Portugal will never be considered our nation. In addition to the bureaucracy and applying for citizenship, there are many feelings associated with an individual defining the place where they live as a space to which they actually belong.
Even after many years, there is a mixture of Angolan Italian culture in the walls of our home, from the food we eat to our times to go about our daily lives. We cannot close our eyes and erase the memories of the imprinted culture in which we grew up, even with a new passport. Our daughter has learned to move from language to language and culture to culture, like it is the easiest thing to do.
Being a migrant mother is a hard job, specifically when it comes to the linguistic development of a child born from migrant parents. A language can only speak about itself within itself, as French-Algerian philosopher Derrida stated in his masterpiece, The Monolingualism of the Other. Birth determines nationality only if all the documents are in order or if one has the privilege of being in their home country. This is not the case with us, as with many other migrants.
Being a migrant mother is a hard job, specifically when it comes to the linguistic development of a child born from migrant parents.
With nationality comes cultural identity, which is everything associated to your true self, from the institutions responsible for your upbringing, to the things you learn between the walls you call home, to the food you eat. Bilingual children of immigrant backgrounds, who do not have the nationality label of the place they were born, can feel lost in the process of acquiring nationality, which consists of honor statements, witnesses, offices, and even a post-competition test in elementary school to show that they are indeed able to speak the national language, which is an incomprehensible offense in their eyes.
Every time our daughter says that she is Portuguese, I try to explain that she actually is neither–yet. This assertion creates a link that is not easy to understand, both for the children and for their parents. Nationality is linked to language, which is the first expression of a particular cultural identity. It is not only linked to the production of sounds but a universe of traditions. The mother tongue became dual through a natural development in a migrants’ home, and from the beginning both parents and children are involved in a reciprocal relational and endo-cultural process of continuous learning. Having a child who identifies themself and their own identity with a linguistic reality that is different from that of their parents’, can lead to difficulties in passing on our own historical and cultural baggage.
My partner and I did not grow up in Portugal. All memories related to childhood games and sing-songs were in other idioms. I have a strong dialectal heritage from southern Italy, and her father is from the Mbundu tribe. I remember how frustrating those first few months in kindergarten were when our daughter started learning the doggerels and we couldn’t repeat them with her. It was as if we could no longer be a part of her games. As adult immigrants, we don’t have the knowledge of pop culture, there is this lack of information in our Portuguese-ization between the years. When we arrived in this country, I learned a new language from scratch; my partner adapted to a new semantics and accent of his own language. In this process of uniformity, everything that is part of popular culture and associated with childhood and adolescence has obviously not been incorporated into our learning process. It is as if we are missing some parts of Portuguese culture: It will always be so.
Learning a language as an adult means studying the logic and grammar beyond it; there is a whole world, an abstract world, with features linked to pop culture learned in early childhood and linked to the childish world that is not part of this process. How can parents convey their roots and values in the midst of massive distances in space and time? How is it possible to incorporate the individual baggage of national memory itself, completely reworked in a different context? Possibly when we show appreciation for the details, when we learn to listen when we give and receive.
How can parents convey their roots and values in the midst of massive distances in space and time?
Being a migrant mother means having a lot of patience to describe what comes with a cultural heritage, trying to water our roots in a different environment, trying to let them grow up in our own children, far away in space and time, while repeating bedtime stories, anecdotes and describing the world around us from our point of view, outside of phenomena and ambition, with the false hope, the silly dream that speaking more than one language might allow our children to live more than one life; to be accepted in more than one culture, country, nation.
Being a migrant mother means rediscovering our language as a tool for memory, across any border, thus redefining our identity.
Carlotta Pisano holds a postgraduate degree in Contemporary Anthropology from NOVA University Lisbon, and a bachelor’s degree in European Literature for Publishing and Cultural Production from the University of Pisa. She writes short stories, reads many books, and has lived in Portugal since 2009, where she works with international mobility projects. She also teaches the Ideas Club Course at NOVA for SPU international students. Her interests are mainly related to intercultural communication and integration.