Yasmin Gunaratnam - Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care

Death and the Migrant

Death and the Migrant

Bodies, Borders and Care

Yasmin Gunaratnam

For all those facing and caring at lifes borders

Contents

Thank you to the copyright holders for their permission to reproduce the images used in this book.

Many people have contributed to this book. Thank you to: Bob and Marjorie Bailey, Joanna Bornat, John Burnside, Denise Brady, Neera Deepak, Nigel Dodds, Helen Findlay and Majliss Care, Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Nela Milic, Colin Murray Parkes, Patricio Rojas Navarro, David Oliviere, Ann Phoenix, Nicola Rattray, Heather Richardson, Stephen Rumford, Suzanne Scafe, Vic Siedler, Gail Wilson, Michelle Winslow, the staff at St Christophers Hospice and Kings College (London) Archives, Caroline Wintersgill and Mark Richardson at Bloomsbury.

I am truly, madly, deeply indebted to the enthusiasm and generosity of Libby Sallnow and Nadia Bettega, both of whom gave me and the book considerable time. Nadias images have transformed and lured my writing. Nigel Clark always believed in what I was trying to do, walking and talking with me through ideas and stuck places and allowing me to filch from his library. My thinking has been stretched and invigorated by students and colleagues in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. I was able to finish the book because of a term of study leave. Heartfelt thanks to Mariam Motamedi Fraser and Nirmal Puwar for their spirited dialogue and friendship.

My family, dispersed to all sides of the globe, are a continual reminder of the deep bonds, surprises and losses of migration. My head and my heart are so often all over the place. Sometimes I wish that the world really was getting smaller. Real love and virtual hugs to the Gunaratnams, Sourjahs and VanReyks; to David, Tracy, Carl and Darrell, and to my parents. Zac, thank you for the lessons in football, love and ethics. I will keep practicing.

This book would not have been possible without the people who gave me their time, trust, and stories. I will not forget. Thank you.

I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint versions of Auditory Space, Ethics and Hospitality: Noise, Alterity and Care at the End of Life in Body and Society, 15 (4) (2009), 119; Learning to be Affected: Social Suffering and Total Pain at Lifes Borders in The Sociological Review, 60 (Issue Supplement. S1) (2012), 10823. My poem The Bed in The Prince and the Pee was originally published in Caroline Malone, Liz Forbat, Martin Robb and Janet Seden, eds. Relating Experience: Stories from Health and Social Care. London: Routledge and Open University, 1201.

The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

John Burnside for the poem Geese from Asylum Dance Jonathan Cape, London, 2000.

Irit Rogoff, The Exergue All is Fair in Love and War. Dictionary of War, June 2006February 2007, http://dictionaryofwar.org/node/415.

Michel Serres. The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders. If any acknowledgements have not been made, or if additional information can be given, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary amendments at the first opportunity.

It is 1992. Winter is on its way. The Buddhist vihara in Croydon on Sundays is more frenetic than usual, with children rushing from one activity to another. My brother and I are at a Sinhala class trying to relearn a language that we have forgotten. Our teacher, a monk, is patient and kind, if a little puzzled that we are adults of Tamil and Euro-Sinhalese heritage, brought up as Catholics.

Our teacher does not seem to have a methodology. We learn a wild assortment of grammar and vocabulary that changes every week so that it is difficult to grasp underlying patterns. The monk knows that we are planning a visit to Sri Lanka. This week he asks if there are any phrases that we would like to learn for our trip What do you want to say? Pen poised to capture phonetically the monks translations in my exercise book I ask How do you say I am bringing my mothers ashes to be buried?

In my minds eye I was already imagining arriving at the Bandaranaike Airport in Negombo. The scene is sensuous, bursting with heat, noise, kinetic energy and smells. It is a memory as much as fantasy. I had been at the airport earlier that same year with my fathers ashes. My mother had been there then to explain and to hand over the paperwork to the immigration officials. Now we would be on our own. Small certitudes shaken, losses strung like lanterns across time, oceans and language. How do you say in a language, that has at one time or another despised the heritage worn in each of your names, Im lost. What now?

This is a book of stories about an unfolding wave of transnational dying and end of life care in British cities. It is also a book about shared human predicaments about how ordinary people do philosophy, how they live with estrangement, how they improvise their way across chasms.

I first got caught up in this world of border crossings in 1985 when, at the age of 55, my father was brain damaged following cardiac by-pass surgery. My mother, brother and I looked after him for seven and a half years and I forgot all about wanting to do any postgraduate research. My mother, a nurse, died at home under hospice care, six weeks after she had been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. Despite the relative advantages that their professions provided, my parents lives in England and their work in the National Health Service (NHS) the uncanny experience of being able to participate in a sphere of privilege just enough to be able to feel your own marginality.

After their deaths I became more interested in migration, illness and care. At the time I had wanted to do two things. The first was to understand an emptiness. The second was to improve care. The void was a silence as much as my personal losses. It was an absence in the library, in the archive, in the cultural imagination. I was tearing through libraries, searching for anything about migrant death and bereavement. Surely there must be others who have gone through this? I may have been looking in the wrong places, but I found little. The absence of a contemporary dialogue about diasporic dying became a provocation that would shunt the trajectory of my life, leading to ethnographic doctoral research in a hospice and an eventual return to academic life.

Through my research and my ongoing work in palliative care education, I have witnessed the unfolding of patterns and novelty, especially with the ageing and dying of our post-war cohort of migrants. There have been concerns about inequalities in accessing palliative care and about whether care is culturally sensitive. But sometimes the differences that migrants signify and make real are not problems at all. They flow into the singularities and roominess that is good care. This is one of the forgotten legacies of migration. I am not only referring to the ways in which care systems in the global North spin on an axis of migrant labour and vast disparities of health and other resources, I have in mind the ways in which care is being continually endowed and reimagined because of difference, from within institutions, at bedsides and in front-rooms, building new hospitalities.

The professional chameleon Cicely Saunders (philosopher/nurse/social worker/doctor), who is regarded as consolidating the contemporary hospice movement, credits her ideas about hospice care to her relationship in 1948 with a dying Polish Jew and refugee, David Tasma. Saunders idealized vision for the first modern hospice St Christophers in south London is such an apt inscription for global multicultures A working community of the unalike.