Alien Nations, Alienations

By Andrea Dejean

Perhaps some of us are born immigrants. 

This is not meant in any way to belittle the terrible fact that there are countless numbers of people who have been, and continue to be, forced against their will to leave their homes and their homelands. However, many of us “choose” to leave our homelands at some point in our lives. 

Among us are people who choose to immigrate regardless of the personal risk of destitution, injury, or even death, although there are others, even in the most war-torn areas of our world, who choose to remain—despite, oddly enough, those very same risks. Regardless of whether we immigrate for reasons of love, conflict, famine, persecution, or because we are seeking adventure or a drastic change, can the decision to immigrate be a choice? Could it be that immigration is driven by a sense of alienation so innate that our early experiences nurture and reinforce it, and that it carries on throughout our lives?

 Perhaps we are foreigners in the hearts of our own families and nations before becoming foreigners in a foreign land. That sense of dissonance may be why many of the greatest contributions to the Arts and Sciences have been made by immigrants. The distance created by the sense of not belonging either here or there (or anywhere) as well as the personal turmoil caused by a festering sense of estrangement, may be an important catalyst for the creative and analytical processes for many. 

More than three decades after I permanently left my country of birth, I no longer feel particularly at ease there because I don’t share many of the daily concerns and overriding ideas of the majority of my compatriots. The deeper truth, of course, is that I probably never truly did—which is, no doubt, what made my immigration possible from the start. But I will never be entirely at ease in my country of adoption, either, because the culture I left behind is also the one that shaped me first and, although I have been influenced by other cultures and experiences since then, much of that core remains; I remain a stranger in both lands. I am bi-national and bi-lingual and, curiously enough, truly “at home” in neither nation. 

The question that arises in even the most “benign” cases of expatriation such as mine (i.e., I met, fell in love with, and married someone from a different country) is this: Do we as immigrants run from something or run to something or both? Or do we even or ever know? The irony of immigration, of course, is that there is alienation on both sides, since we carry it within ourselves and across borders. 

According to the two-volume, printed copy of the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993 edition; Lesley Brown, Editor), the concept of “alienation” was first introduced by Karl Marx, and has since been used in a variety of contexts. Loosely defined, it means the separation of the individual from important aspects of the external world, accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness or lack of control. A person may feel alienated from themselves or from society. Another of the several definitions presented for the word “alienation” is the following: “the action of transferring ownership of anything and/or the state of being held by someone other than the proper owner.” 

Whether or not one accepts this viewpoint, one thing seems certain: if immigration is about leaving, being an immigrant is about letting go. Part of the immigration process is learning to let go of the things one once owned or had the potential right to own—houses, land, or other physical assets. The sense of belonging to a place often comes with the sense that certain things there “belong” to us. With ownership comes attachment; the lack of ownership can create a feeling of alienation. 

But immigration is also about letting go of a whole host of psychological paradigms with which we were nurtured, even if we fought against the feeling that we were being pigeonholed by them from the start. This is a lot trickier because it often involves confronting concepts concerning family, including the extended family, and community long before we ever get to aspects of nationality or national identity. Our decision to take a different path by leaving home is often seen by those who did not also choose that path as an inherent criticism of their lives and often leads to underlying (and sometimes quite open) tension. 

The tension on the other side of the border can also be great because, regardless of how long one resides in another country, one is always and forever a foreigner. It continues to amaze me that friends in my adopted country whom I have known for decades will almost always introduce me to a new acquaintance first by my nationality, then by my first name. 

One woman with whom I shared a leisure activity over the course of several years and spent quite a lot of time with, never failed to remind me how much she “hated” people of my nationality—all of us including, I’m assuming, me. This is based on a long list of stereotypical flaws she attributed to the citizens of my birth nation. 

There are two reasons this bothered, and continues to, bother me. The first, of course, is that national stereotypes are cartoonish caricatures of the citizens of the nation concerned that generally have little to do with reality or grossly distort it. The second obvious reason is that by lumping me in with her (ridiculous) sweeping assessment, she denied me the right to be an individual—an individual she had known for several years. Isn’t that attitude the basis for all of the “-isms” in the world: racism, nationalism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and so forth? 

When I was a graduate student in Applied Anthropology in the 1980s, I became interested in the then growing topic of the “literary criticism” of ethnographic texts. What was it about early ethnographic monographs that seemed somewhat false and even contrived? Wouldn’t the ethnographer intend to provide the most honest and sympathetic portrayal of the ethnic group as possible? 

It seems to me that the answer might be that, by trying to present an overall yet concise portrait of the “other,” generalizations were made that created or reinforced prejudices rather than eliminating them. Worse, many ethnographers depended on information provided by one or several “primary informants” who were willing and/or able to “explain” their culture to the ethnographer. The irony is that many of these “primary informants” were marginalized by their own people, therefore atypical of the culture they described (otherwise, they may not have stepped forward), leading to a skewed description. 

In many ways, those of us who are immigrants are like these informants, because we are often seen as representative of a culture for which we are not truly representative. And yet, we must explain it, and sometimes even apologize for, or be held accountable for it, creating an even greater sense of alienation. After all, we left that culture behind, didn’t we?

Consider the terminology that shapes our attitudes toward the immigrant other—“alien” as in legal or illegal alien. As I write this, I can hear in my mind the refrain from Sting’s song, “An Englishman in New York.” A perusal of definitions for the word yields a laundry list of loaded words: foreign, strange, different, outsider. Oh, yes, and let’s not forget that creature from outer space!

All joking aside, there is a kernel of truth to all of those definitions—perhaps not the last one. The challenge of immigration—has been and will always be—integrating people for whom total integration may not be entirely possible. We are seen as foreigners by others and often feel like foreigners in our own skins no matter where we are living. 

I have often joked that I can live anywhere, but am entirely at home nowhere. This does not mean that I have no respect for the culture, mores, and laws of the place where I’m living. On the contrary, the fact that I have lived in several different countries and am a permanent resident of a country other than the country of my birth has only reinforced my civic sense, because I cannot in any way take my presence in my adopted homeland for granted. 

Every day when I step out of my home, and someone comments on my foreign accent, I am reminded that my presence here is tenuous. Oddly enough, when I return to my homeland, people there also comment on my “foreign” accent because my native tongue has become infused with inflections from my adopted language. I’m an alien. I’m a legal alien. But, like all other “others,” I’m also an individual, a person with a name and a story and a history, as well as the need to find adequate food, clothing, shelter, and a means of economic and emotional sustenance—just like everyone else. 

In these difficult times, when issues around immigration are again at the forefront, and many countries are also experiencing a swing to the far right and toward more “nationalistic” tendencies, the questions facing us are both myriad and complex. The sheer number of immigrants is so staggering that suggesting that each immigrant be considered an individual seems simplistic and naïve. But if we continue to see these “new” immigrants as a faceless other, the way many of us, our parents, and grandparents were, or are, seen, then the issues related to immigration will never come close to being resolved. 

I know because I am an immigrant. 

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Andrea Dejean is a writer and translator based in southwestern France. Her translation credits include a book on biodiversity as well as numerous scientific articles. She is the author of two novels: Terra Firma (Running Wild Press, July 2025) and Sphinx (Middle Creek Publishing, October 2021). Other creative work has appeared in various literary journals and in an anthology of stories on climate change.