Faith and migration

My family in an Indonesian refugee camp. I’m sitting on my grandfather’s lap in the centre of the photo.

8 September 2013

My interest in faith and religion in migration was first piqued by an exploratory trip to Morocco, before starting fieldwork. Coming directly from Australia, I remember feeling like I was entering into a world of faith, not only of the country, but also of the sub-Saharan African migrants I talked to. Faith as a lens through which to understand and see the world; and not necessarily a coherent one (just like a ‘secular’ lens is never always coherent and without contradictions).

I remember a migrant activist in Morocco telling me that you can’t understand African migration without understanding faith. Without understanding how migration comes out of a context where worlds of faith/s and faithless worlds interact and reproduce each other. As he talked about how migration with all its uncertainties and physical and emotional hardships, is always accompanied by faith, I remember feeling like this was a dimension that would be key to an understanding of the dynamics of migration in Morocco.

I also remember when he said faith is always a part of migration, I objected and said that yes maybe it is true of African migration, but when I reflect on my family’s own refugee and migration history it is not true, and that maybe the dimensions of Asian migration are different. I never remember my parents or wider family ever talking about the importance of faith when they have told us about their experiences of war and migration. In terms of religion, my parents always insisted that the Buddhist/ancestor worship cultural practices we did were always out of respect for tradition and our elders, but that they never believed in them. I always understood the ‘religious’ practices we did as being cultural and part of ‘tradition’. He insisted again that within migration faith is always an important dimension, but I was doubtful.

A year later back in Sydney after I had finished fieldwork in Morocco, my family and I went to visit my grandmother’s grave on the anniversary of her death. This grandmother gave me my earliest recollections of love and was like a mother to me. Sitting by her tomb, waiting for the incense to finish burning before we could pack up the food offerings, my mother started reminiscing about my grandmother, and our family’s journey over to Australia which spanned years from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia before finally arriving in Australia.

My family (grandparents, aunts and uncles on both my parent’s side, my parents, my sister and me as a few months old baby; about 15 of us in total) along with many others did the journey from Cambodia to the Thai border by foot in order to reach the UNHCR refugee camp that was on the other side of the border. This route was extremely dangerous, with bandits and robbers preying on the masses of people trying get there. My mother said that everyone got robbed along the way, several times usually, not just by gangs but also by the authorities and sometimes by the ‘smugglers’ (people that you paid to guide/take you there) themselves. Not just robberies, but killings and rapes, with bodies left on the roadside. They didn’t carry anything with them except gold jewellery that my grandmother had everyone hide in their clothes, in their shoes, and in their underwear. But each time they were accosted by armed robbers, it would be found and taken. “We were lucky we had something to give them”, said my Dad. “Those who had nothing were sometimes killed”. As I was a baby at the time, my grandmother had given my mother gold to hide in my can of powdered milk and in the baby blanket, but they found that too. “They really knew how to look”,  Dad said. The only thing they didn’t find was a necklace my mother had put around my neck, which was hidden by my baby fat (!). My mother said we used this to buy food once we arrived at the refugee camp, which was another “very dangerous place”. Apparently the robbers had also wanted to take me away with them, but my mother steadfastly refused. Luckily, they didn’t insist. I’m not sure where I would be now if they did; small incidences like these that change the fate of whole lives.

During one of the robbery incidences along the route, the robbers told my two young aunts (who were around 19 and 20 years old at the time) to go into a nearby forest with them. They were of course armed and there was no way to refuse them. My mum said everyone was shaking from head to foot in fear of what they would do to my aunts, if they would even return from the forest.  She said that my grandmother was terrified for all of us, for two of my uncles who had left before us and from whom we had not received any news, and now for my two young aunts who, while on the road as young women, were constantly at threat of being raped. “The danger was so real, so constant. The situation was so beyond us, beyond anything that we could do, that your grandmother could only see help as coming from above”. As they waited for the return of my aunts from the forest, my grandmother made a vow to Buddha that if we made it safely across the Thai border to the refugee camp, she would shave her head in gratitude. “She was crying, crying, and praying to Buddha to help us, to help your aunts”.

My aunts came back from the forest unharmed. They said that they had just been questioned and searched; the robbers found some jewellery that my grandmother gave them to put in their underwear, and they were then released. “Thank God for the gold” said Dad. “Without it, they might have been raped, or worse”. When we eventually crossed the border into Thailand (another story of terror in itself) and made it to the camp, my grandmother shaved her head. I remember seeing long ago some photos of us from when we were in camp, the emaciated figures of my family members and my grandmother’s shaved head, and remember thinking that was a little odd. She looked like a Buddhist nun.

I think that if we cannot speak of God or Buddha, we can at the very least speak of miracles. A miracle that we made it when so many didn’t ,“we were stepping over bodies as we walked”; a miracle that I am alive thanks to the ingenuity, perseverance and courage of my family, to sheer luck, and perhaps to something more. When at so many points along the way we could have perished as so many others did, I sometimes can’t find an existential/moral/logical explanation or reason for why we did; only that we know in our very bones the utter precariousness of life and the reality (and randomness) of its counterpart, death. That a political or social situation could change like the wind, and in the next moment you will be at the feet of the gods, praying for your lives. Only those who have never experienced a similar thing can believe in the illusion of control and security, and even more, can believe that they are entitled to it. “We could write a book about our experiences” my parents say, “We have so much we could tell you”.

It is not by accident that I have chosen to work on the topic of migration, but it is also not by accident that I have not chosen to work directly within the context that my family comes from. Although the dynamics of sub-Saharan African migration in Morocco is different, as well as a different period of time in world history; listening to migrants tell their migration stories and the journeys they took reminds me of the stories my parents tell me of our family’s migration journeys; the similarities in the unimaginable physical and emotional stretching of your limits in such an experience, but also similarity of the emotions they evoke within me. And hearing from my mother that part of the story about my grandmother’s vow while on the journey made me think back to what that migrant activist had said to me about the inextricable link between faith and migration.