[Individual articles from the Fall 2017 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog each week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website.]
Having to flee one’s home as a refugee is traumatic. Resettlement, which can be full of hope and seem like a way out of this trauma, is difficult as well. In 2013, I interviewed seven adults, now all Canadian citizens, who immigrated to Canada as refugees from Colombia over a decade ago. The study explored participants’ experiences of being refugees and starting new lives in Canada. Two key metaphors recurred throughout these interviews: uprooting and rebirth.
One source of refugee trauma stems from fleeing home. Agencies working to resettle refugees must understand and account for this trauma. A resettled refugee I interviewed, who had worked for the human rights of rural, small-scale farmers, offered an agricultural metaphor commonly used by displaced people from rural, agricultural areas to explain the essence of becoming a refugee:
Displaced people use a word that expresses very well what it means—arrancados—to be uprooted. . . To arrancar is to grab a plant and rip it out of the ground roots and all, it doesn’t matter if it is bruised—bruise it!—but pull it up with its roots from the ground. I think this is like the reality of a refugee. We are roughly ripped up from our land, and this obviously creates deep wounds . . . And so obviously you arrive with very profound feelings of emptiness.
He further explained that becoming a refugee is “a total life change and it is something that you are forced to do. It’s not a ‘free decision’ that you take because you want to look for a better life. No, it is something that you do because you have to, because you have no other option.”
Numerous study participants described the experience of resettling in Canada as a new birth, using metaphors of “being reborn,” “being a newborn,” “starting from zero” or “rebuilding one’s life.” One study participant explained what he meant by a new birth:
I want to leave all of that behind. I don’t want to go back. Never. I want to be reborn. I want to be another person and I want—yes, I would like to start a new life. That is to say, a new life, a new birth. Like I said, you don’t have English, you don’t know how to speak, you don’t know how to walk, you go out—you get lost . . . you don’t know how to read, you don’t know anything. You are a newborn here.
Another participant made references to losses in the process of being reborn:
Everything was lost. But it had to return. . . When we touched down on Canadian soil I said to my wife, “Here we will be reborn.” We have to learn the language, we have to learn how to survive, we have to learn how to make friends, we have to return to being a family. These are the big things that happen. And so each of us started.
Explaining the metaphor of being reborn further, he elaborated:
It’s like the stages of life, I think that it comes in stages. How was the birth? How difficult was the labor? My birth was difficult . . . with a whole lot of complications, which were my family beside me. . . Then, how we developed and how we ourselves became the physicians that dealt with the situation. And we began to find solutions and make our own medicines. . . After that comes the process of maturing in English . . . between zero and three years you are learning to listen and learning the words. Later, it’s like getting to know the world, knowing who are going to be your parents, who are your siblings. It’s like the book of life—being reborn and doing all that in a short period of time.
The challenge of starting over as adults was described by another participant as “starting from zero, in every sense. The only thing is that we are 40-year-old bodies, but totally empty because we don’t have the language, we don’t have friends, we don’t have money, we have absolutely nothing.” Such vivid metaphorical descriptions of starting from zero and being reborn highlight the challenges refugees face as they rebuild their lives, often in middle age, in Canada. Perhaps not as obviously, these depictions of resettlement as rebirth also contain hints of possibility, hope and determination.
Having started again once before, participants emphasized that, while difficult, starting again is in fact possible. In speaking about the idea of resettlement as rebirth, one participant described what being reborn could imply in the long run: “You arrive here to be reborn, to start to study, to start to grow. . . to learn to volunteer, to volunteer more than you already do. . . and to give what you have to help people who arrive.” Several women in the study emphasized their ability to overcome obstacles and barriers in the settlement process, and one mentioned the importance of “having time for everything” (work, family, friends, helping others) in life. She explained “You have to give to receive. . . We say ‘we were blessed, we have to bless others.’ And we have done so a lot of times.”
The two images of uprooting and rebirth open a window onto the struggles of resettled refugees. While the beginning of the refugee experience is one of being roughly uprooted and starting from zero, this does not define the entirety of the refugee experience. As the new country becomes home and as life is re-established, an opportunity for rebirth arises. While rebirth is fraught with challenge, it can be a hope-filled image to guide refugees to settlement in their new homes.
Shalom Wiebe is a program manager for HOPE International Development Agency. She previously served with MCC in Colombia as a support worker for internally displaced people.
Learn more
Munoz, M. “Continuum of Success: A Case Study of Colombian Refugee Women in Canada.” Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, 2011.
Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar, with Patricia Diaz, Amantina Osorio, and Martha Colorado. The Forced Migration of Colombians: Colombia, Ecuador, Canada. Corporación Región: Medellin, Colombia and Vancouver: School of Social Work, University of British Columbia, 2008. Available at https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/2592.
Wiebe, Shalom. “Colombian Refugees’ Stories of Navigating Settlement.” Master’s thesis, Faculty of Social Work, University of British Columbia, 2013. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44942.
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