The Literature of Immigration

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There are about 186,579,300 immigrants in the world, according to the World Population Polices 2005 United Nations Report. Politics labels them differently: as aliens, foreigners, criminals, strangers, intruders, illegal, legal. The face of the individual dissolves into a stereotype—a faceless item to be manipulated through the agenda of the host country.

“We may have all these statistics, all this information of arrival, departure, economic status, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the person’s life, the person’s soul, the person’s sorrow, the person’s joy,” says Marjorie Agosin, a Chilean-American author and poet.

To solve that, three writers from different continents met recently in a chandelier-lit room at the Americas Society in New York City. Marjorie Agosin, Neil Bissondath and Amara Lakhous were there to challenge the boundaries of their language and ethnicity. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, the difficulties of migration and assimilation gave them a great deal to talk about.

A new language, culture-clash, racism, poverty and an overwhelming sense of homelessness: these are common themes in the stories of Agosin, Bissondath and Lakhous and other thousands of uprooted and displaced peoples. “Immigrants so often lead hidden lives,” says Bissondath, who moved from Trinidad to Canada at the age of 18.

This conversation of diverse storytellers was sponsored by a non-profit organization that publishes an online magazine of international literature called Words Without Borders, whose goal is to raise awareness of all the world’s “foreign” literature through translation.  

It is the hope of all three writers that others with similar experiences can find solace in the characters that they create—to show them and their countries’ “natives,” as Agosin says, “how difficult it is to be the other. How difficult it is to have an accent. How difficult it is to be an outsider.”

“Every character is a sum of many characters,” says Lakhous, “many people I’ve met. I think immigrants or the experience of being an immigrant is the kind of experience that touches humanity, that touches all of us in one way or another.”   

In fiction, “you find the human being,” as Bissondath puts it. “You don’t find the immigrant.”

Watch Video >> Marjorie Agosin on the emotional importance of literature written by immigrants.

Watch Video >> Neil Bissondath on telling the immigrant story.

Watch Video >> Amara Lakhous on the problems and opportunities of literature written by immigrants.