From Assimilation to Belonging
Once again, scholarly literature has led me into deep reflexive thoughts. While reading Pauline Adams’s chapter Making the Invisible Visible: Poetic Explorations of a Cross-Cultural Researcher, I encountered a poem that took my breath away. Adams describes the complexities of being seen, or not seen, through the lens of cultural identity. As an educational researcher, she begins by asking herself a question:
What do you see
When you see me?
Do you see you, when you see me?
Or do you see through the parts of me
That are like you, so you only see
The parts of me, that separate we?
Will we ever connect, you and me?
Or will I always be seen,
Suspiciously?
What do you see
When you see me?
What do you see, when I am unseen?
Pauline Adams (2020, pp. 174-175)
There is something about these words that resonates deeply with me. It often feels as though people are so focused on our differences that they overlook the commonalities that connect us. And I find myself wondering why that is. Why are we so quick to notice what sets someone apart, yet so slow to recognise the things we might have in common?
Reading Adams’s poem took me back to 1983, when I was a seven-year-old Hungarian girl trying to assimilate into life in Aotearoa. We had escaped from Hungary, leaving behind everything I had ever known, and suddenly I found myself in a country where the language, customs, and people were unfamiliar.
I so desperately wanted to be like everyone else. To fit in. To be accepted. To not be the little girl who came from somewhere nobody seemed to know anything about.
But I wasn’t like everyone else. I was Hungarian. And no matter how much I wanted to blend in, there were things about me that made me different.
The irony is that, in recent years, I have been actively reclaiming the very cultural heritage I once tried so hard to conceal. I embrace my Hungarian identity, take pride in my heritage, and actually thrive on being different!
Yet there is another part of this story that hasn’t changed quite so much.
For much of my life, I have felt as though I exist somewhere on the periphery. An outsider, looking in. And although I no longer feel the need to assimilate in order to be accepted, that longing for connection and belonging remains.
Perhaps that is why Adams’s poem struck such a chord with me.
I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is the same. How utterly boring would that be?! I love the richness that comes from our different cultures, histories, experiences, and ways of understanding the world.
What I yearn for is a world where we look for commonalities in order to form connections, instead of focusing on differences that drive division.
And, of course, my mind wandered back to Threads of Exile.
Anyuci and I escaped from Hungary together, but our experiences of arriving in Aotearoa were undoubtedly different. I was seven years old, desperate to fit in with my peers. Anyuci was an adult, navigating an unfamiliar country while trying to build a new life for her family.
I wonder how she experienced that process. Whether she, too, felt pressure to assimilate, or whether she held more firmly to the identity and culture she had grown up with. And how might those experiences have influenced the ways in which she subsequently raised me?
Then there is Ünnepi, who remained in Hungary. Her experience of cultural identity and belonging would have been shaped by an entirely different set of circumstances.
Three generations of Hungarian women, connected through family, language, and cultural heritage, yet each with her own experiences of identity and belonging.
I hadn’t anticipated that reading a chapter about poetic inquiry would send me wandering down this particular path. But then again, that seems to be happening rather frequently these days!
What began as a response to another researcher’s poem has brought me back to something I have carried with me since childhood: the desire to belong.
The difference is that I no longer believe I need to become like everyone else in order to do so.
And I wish more people could recognise that being different doesn’t mean we have nothing in common.
Reference
Adams, P. (2020). Making the invisible visible: Poetic explorations of a cross-cultural researcher. In E. Fitzpatrick & K. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Poetry, method and education research: Doing critical, decolonising and political inquiry (pp. 172–182). Routledge.
