Cultural dillemas of Sudanese Canadian refugees

By Doyle Hatt and Deng Akol Kuot Leng

Exile, if it is of the right duration, can be beautiful and life-affirming. During the Second World War, thousands of British and Dutch children, alone, or in the company of their siblings and sometimes mothers, were sent to live with families in Canada to spare them exposure to the blitz and to Nazi occupation. And, notwithstanding the separations and stresses that were the very essence of this displacement, the social consequences that flowed from this temporary exile were in many cases positive and inspirational and have resulted in sentimental visits to the houses and farms where a few years of childhood were spent, back-and-forth visits to childhood chums, and lifelong exchanges of letters between those whom adversity briefly welded together in common purpose.

But if the factors of timing and duration are not right, political exile can be the source of long causal chains of complications and dilemmas that cannot be solved by a simple return to the homeland. This presentation deals with these complications and dilemmas, as revealed by a study carried out in the western Canadian city of Calgary, home to several thousands southern Sudanese refugees who arrived mainly in the 1990s. Many of these families and single individuals now have a decade or so of experience in a new land which is, in the language of Canadian immigration policy, “their land” if they want it to be.

Although political refugees may be admitted to Canada because they are refugees, and their admission may be expedited in contrast to the admission of mere ‘economic migrants’, they are – and this is the essential point – not admitted as refugees, that is, with any suggestion that their stay in Canada has even the slightest implication of temporariness to it. Once they arrive in Canada, they are accorded the status of landed immigrant, equivalent to ‘permanent resident’ in the US, and are legally on the same footing as any other immigrant, and entitled to apply for Canadian citizenship after three years’ residence. However, unlike immigrants who arrive with the job and language skills necessary to make a successful transition to Canadian society, most southern Sudanese are accorded a year of government-subsidized housing and tuition at institutes where they can improve their English and work on other skills to enable them to become self-sufficient members of society.

From interviews, it is clear that the great majority of southern Sudanese immigrants arrive in Canada in a state of cognitive and emotional conflict over their futures. In their own minds, they have come to a place of refuge, a temporary asylum where they will be able to breathe the air of freedom, away from the dependency of refugee camps and food rations... a place where they will be able to earn their own bread and have enough to send back to less fortunate relatives in the home country or in surrounding countries, until some time in the indefinite future when they are able to return home.

The inner cognitive and emotional conflict is reflected in the differing discourses of the Sudanese immigrants and their Canadian hosts. Almost no one among the Sudanese speaks as if he or she might settle forever in Canada. The Sudanese discourse has tended to be framed by the inevitability of return home at some indefinite time in the future when peace has descended upon the land and when the refugees from the Diaspora and the people left behind will join together in common purpose in a symphony of united minds and hearts.

On the other hand, the official Canadian discourse is grounded in the assumption that immigrants will now become part of the great multicultural mosaic that animates the mission of that vast bureaucracy known as Immigration and Naturalization Canada. This official discourse is grounded in a rhetoric of unity-and-plurality: there is no inconsistency between pride in being a Dinka and pride in being Canadian, but there is also no mention of Canada being a temporary haven or a stage in a life journey that takes an immigrant back to his or her place of origin.

Our essential point here is that this tension between two discourses of being and belonging is not a ‘phase’ or ‘stage’ in an immigration ‘process’ that some typical Sudanese refugee goes through. On the contrary, we would argue that it is the constitutive antithesis out from which an entire further series of cognitive and emotional conflicts flow, shaping the course of immigrants’ lives, differently – though in highly predictable ways -- in the case of single males, married males, married women, and their children.

The conflict between the two frames of discourse – is the refugee destined to return home after a temporary exile or to plant a seed that will nativize and bear fruit for a hundred future generations on Canadian soil – is played out in a myriad of ways in the first decade of the immigrant’s life in his or her Canadian city, with ramifications that most often go un-noticed because they are subtle and long term phenomena, below the threshold of anyone’s conscious perception. Whereas at first, the immigrants’ heart swells with pride when they are finally able to save a portion of their earnings to send back home to relatives in camps or resettlement villages, over time immigrants find it harder and harder to set aside a portion of his or her earnings – not because they internalize the materialistic and individualistic values of North American society, pawns of a commercial culture that identifies happiness with the display of commodity goods, but because the actual cost of daily existence in the new country takes a while to make itself felt. In Sudanese terms – as relatives in refugee camps might think of it – the weekly take-home pay of even a low-paid Canadian worker sounds attractive, but the costs of living in North America are great as well, and contain numerous hidden costs that are difficult to explain to relatives at home whose experience is with a very different type of economy.

Most Sudanese refugees in the city of Calgary live close to the bottom of the economic ladder, the most common occupations being (for males) in security services as night watchmen and (for both males and females) in janitorial services. There are a number who have found salaried jobs and who have managed to move out of subsidized housing and who have bought their own homes and cars and managed to accumulate some savings, but the majority struggle to pay the rent and utilities, put food on the table, and buy clothes for the children, often enduring periods of layoffs, and typically counting on two incomes to keep their families afloat, and, in a month, to have a bit left over to send back to relatives in Sudan.

It is easiest for single males, who can share accommodations and food costs, to accumulate savings to send home to Sudan, but married couples, and, in particular, couples with children, face an endless series of dilemmas that force them to choose between sending money to aged parents and destitute siblings in Sudan or Kenya or Ethiopia and providing children – who, being children, rapidly acquire North American consumer desires from their age-mates at kindergarten or school – with even a portion of what the children understand to be normal. The consequence is conflict: conflict between different value systems, choices between adults’ memories of relatives living in desperate conditions “there” and their flesh-and-blood families “here”. Not surprisingly, these inner conflicts and conflicts of values manifest themselves in the form of strains and conflicts within social relationships, most particularly within the family: between parents and children and between spouses. The lives of breadwinners are made difficult because of quarreling and disputes, and these quarrels and disputes spill over into other areas of social relationship – with neighbors and co-workers and employers. Sometimes differences between African and Canadian norms of disciplining children – Canada being a country where any form of striking or spanking is culturally frowned upon and in many places an infraction of the law – come into conflict, and in some instances children are apprehended by social workers and police and placed in custody for a few days. Other consequences of these inner conflicts are strains within marriages, particularly in two-families in which the wife works outside the house and has become an important source of household income. There has been a spate of separations and divorces within the Calgary Sudanese refugee community, as women come increasingly to view their lives in Canadian terms, and as they realize the degree of economic independence they have.

As the years go by, it becomes increasingly clear that different members of family units tend to be transformed by their Canadian experiences at different rates of change. Those who were less than ten or so years of age at the time of immigration are changed the most – within a few years, their memories of Sudan are completely extinguished and their entire life-world has been shaped by their experiences in Canada. For them, relatives in Sudan are only imaginary people of whom they have heard, in contrast to their real world friends and relatives in Canada. Through their school and playground acquaintances, they soon become completely fluent in colloquial English and its nuances and idioms, able to explain (for example) many things they see on television to their parents, whose English, acquired later in life, may remain limited. Within a short time, children are completely Canadianized and, although they are fully integrated in their families of origin, nevertheless become subtly estranged from their parents by reason of the North American values and ways of thinking they have internalized. Although their parents most often never gave this a thought when they immigrated, within a few short years their children will have changed so completely that they might never really fit in if they returned to Sudan.

In comparison to the children, the majority of whose lives have been lived in a North American cultural milieu, women who were adults or at least teens when they came to live in North America, and whose personal identities were, as a consequence, formed before their emigration, are not so completely dominated by North American values and cultural assumptions. Many of them who are wives in intact families and who have children are free to admit that they find any prospect of a return to Sudan troubling, and they acknowledge that “the return” has been the subject of quarrels and disagreements. Those who have separated from their husbands and are living on their own – which usually involves a combination of having a job of some sort and receiving some social assistance – talk more freely about this, and among these women, there is a high level of agreement that, come what may, they see their future and their future of their children in Canada. It would appear that, once a rupture has occurred in their family relationships, they can freely articulate the possibility that what for everyone began as a temporary exile has become a permanent migration.

And now we turn to men. Particularly men who were well into their twenties when they came to Canada, tend to be changed the least by their immigration experience, and to build their lives around the idea of one day returning to their homeland and, in the phrase they tend to use, to “build their country”, and to grow old there, to become elders, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, and nephews and grand-nephews, with a great herd of cattle to their name. Among these men, the dream of their return home, with their families beside them, has been the premise of their existence, the thought that has sustained them through the long years of exile. They are quick to say that there is much in Canada that has become a part of themselves, and that they esteem, and that they want to take back with them when they return to Sudan to build their country, but return they must.

Not imagining that their stay in Canada is any more than a temporary exile, these men are not as highly motivated to master English, compared to economic migrants, nor to invest in upgrading their skills, and this has the effect of limiting their employability, and is a major factor that helps to keep them at the bottom of the economic ladder. Likewise, their pattern of economic behavior differs from that of economic migrants who, by the time they have been in Canada ten or fifteen years, have acquired a house and investments and a good-paying job. The Sudanese work no less hard, but after ten or fifteen years they have less to show for it because they are investing in a different future, sending remittances and cash to Sudan.

Now, with the looming prospect of a peace settlement, and of the circumstance that it may soon be possible to arrange flights home, both the intellectual and emotional conflicts within individuals and the interpersonal conflicts among family members seem to be coming to a head. The irony should not be missed that political peace may have the effect of precipitating conflicts in other areas of life.

* * *

When we analyze things in ‘cultural’ terms we mean that human beings are affected by the totality of the social situation in which they find themselves. Humans are not simply beings who affect the world around them and are not affected by it. On the contrary, we are changed by it, slowly, and unconsciously, and imperceptibly. Of course, the older we get, the more the core of our being is already formed, and the less we are culturally influenced by our social surroundings, but even in this case it would be a mistake to underestimate the workings of cultural influences upon adults.

Earlier, we spoke of the unspoken contradiction that we suggested was at the root of a great many of the distinctive problems of social adjustment that affect the Sudanese-Canadians, and that do not appear to affect many other immigrants, namely that southern Sudanese refugees came to a Canada that treats them as immigrants, but who were, in their own minds, temporary exiles from their homeland. The entire refugee reception system of Canada is based on the premise that refugees are welcomed and received as ‘new Canadians’, not as temporary exiles, and everything that happens within the first two years of a refugee’s landing follows the strict logic of developing and actualizing the immigrant’s identity as a new Canadian. It is only in the privacy of his or her own mind, and in in-group discussions with fellow Sudanese immigrants, that the idea of temporary exile is kept alive. The idea is not without its uses. It is obviously instrumental in motivating immigrants to forego their own personal indulgences in order to be able to send money back home, in order to look after parents and siblings in the homeland and in refugee camps. It can help to deal with perceptions of exclusion by or racism within the host society with the tendency, with a few notable exceptions as we have noted, for refugees to remain at the bottom of the Canadian economic ladder, and with the subtly insidious inter-generational cultural conflict within every refugee household.

For ten to fifteen years now, Canadian Sudanese have lived in a personal universe shaped by the dream of ending their exile with a glorious return home. Yet, as the years have passed by, they have been imperceptibly changed in a variety of subtle ways -- though, as I have said, less than their wives and children -- that may make a return home more problematic than they imagined.

What will happen? Some will return home, and have to deal with their divided selves in Sudan. Others will remain in Canada and have to deal with their divided selves here. In either case, their cultural dilemmas need to be understood by those who have to deal with them.

*Paper read at the ‘Abyei Dinka Diaspora Conference’,
Phoenix AZ, July 2-4 2004