Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards
‘And like all first-generation immigrants, they looked backwards as much as forwards’. This line is taken from the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels, and refers to the origins of the industrial working classes in all countries, who are all ‘first generation immigrants from pre-industrial societies’.1 Even if they never actually moved from their place of birth, they became immigrants in the sense that their old way of life was irrevocably destroyed by the forces of capitalism and industrialization.
I am a historian of migration and psychiatry, not of labor. Yet Hobsbawm is my favorite historian, and I find the terms in which he describes the shift from country to town, peasantry to industry, strikingly applicable to the immigrant experience. Hobsbawm’s writing is replete with such descriptions of what it was like for the peasantry to be wrenched away from their established way of life, and to be uprooted from all that was familiar and thrust into an unrecognizable world. In the first book of his tetralogy on the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union - Age of Revolution 1789-1848 - he describes the aftermath of the introduction of economic liberalism on the land in similar terms of loss and bereavement: the old social structure is decimated, leaving in place ‘a solitude called freedom’.2
Solitude, like the other states this word conjures - isolation, alienation, loneliness - is the price of freedom. To insist on the rejection of the values and traditions one has grown up with, and to shape one’s own individual destiny, is to accept the possibility of being rootless and deracinated. Those raised in the liberal, individualist traditions of the West who speak wistfully of values of social solidarity and communalism tend to forget how incompatible such notions are with their cherished individual liberties and freedoms.
I am not a forced migrant, though the circumstances which encouraged me to leave my country of birth were, like they are for all migrants, outside of my control. Like all first-generation immigrants, I look backwards. I spend the majority of my paid vacation time in the country of my birth, because that is where all my family is. I cannot help but compare what I observe and experience in my current country of permanent residence, the United Kingdom, with what things would be like in Egypt. Like all those who leave their country of birth, I can occasionally fall victim to what Gabriel García Márquez called ‘the charitable deceptions of nostalgia’.3 And like all those who live in a land that is not theirs, I cannot help but see it as a temporary stage, even if it has lasted a decade. To quote Márquez again, or rather the main protagonist of One Hundred Years of Solitude, José Arcadio Buendía, ‘A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground’.4 Perhaps because of a personal tendency to always look backwards, I became a historian. This was not a conscious choice in that I did not set out to become a historian, but, as an immigrant and a physician, when I did become a historian it was only natural that I would become a historian of migration and medicine. Specifically, of my chosen specialty of psychiatry.
‘Nostalgia’ comes from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming; and algia, meaning pain. Nostalgia is thus the pain one feels from a longing to return home. It was intended to refer to a pathology of geographical and not temporal separation, referring to the loss of place rather than the passing of the past. From its initial coining in the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, it was a disease with potentially fatal consequences. Essentially, it was a disease of a disordered imagination.5 Its postulated causes began as physical before being demoted to psychological by the end of the nineteenth century, and a mere curiosity by the twentieth. Today, nostalgia is nothing more than a benign, wistful longing for one’s past or youth. Yet every immigrant knows the dangers of nostalgia, the best cure for which is often a short trip back to the place one used to call home.
This Substack is borne of my experience as an immigrant, psychiatrist, and historian. Some articles may discuss one of these themes, others may discuss all three. Writing something of this sort has been on my mind for a long time. A nice round number of an anniversary - next week it will be ten years since I arrived in the UK - seemed a good occasion to finally write something.
Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, p.108.
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution 1789-1848, p.194.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
George Rosen, ‘Nostalgia: A “Forgotten” Psychological Disorder’, Psychological medicine, 5(4), 340-354, 1975.