Hurricane Harvey saw tens of thousands of Texans forced from their homes. Two weeks later Irma saw 6.5 million Americans flee, clustering in uncomfortable shelters, a small taste of the refugee life experienced by 66 million people across the world today.
Some Texas residents and Floridians experienced losses they will never recover from; many of those in the Caribbean face total devastation. Hurricane Katrina taught us that many people would remain homeless, unable to achieve the status and levels of comfort they had before. Government aid will be late and insufficient, a caring public becomes distracted — its gaze shifts and when it returns, months or years later — it lacks empathy for those caught within rising floodwaters and now trapped in a whirlpool of debt, poor or no insurance payouts, and government disinterest.
Americans become refugees in a nation that doesn’t recognize them as such. They lose identity, purpose, and status. They are as one — even though most will never recognize it — with the maligned foreign immigrant or refugee. And too, everyone who leaves their birth country, even if by choice, will lose their identity. In their home country they are defined by a shared culture, family origins, and status — but when they go to a new land, and are not part of an existing structure, e.g., a college where they studied and shared common experiences with others — in this new place where the sort of jokes shared, food eaten, or ways of living are strange, they become lost. Even sharing a similar language with other immigrants does not help because accents, dialects, and word use are different than in their native land.
The refugee (including those displaced by disaster) or immigrant may have had status in their old country, but now they are often nothing and nobody, spoken down to by those they may have previously considered inferiors. This is particularly true for refugees. Those from Syria, as an example, tend to be the wealthier classes; they can afford to be smuggled. They go to Europe and can’t get work, are reviled, and live in disgusting refugee camps. Their sense of self dissipates. In the U.S. (and elsewhere) the immigrant may not speak English well. They may find their children Americanize quickly and reject their home country’s culture and look down upon their parents.
Climate change will increase displacement within countries. University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist, Matthew Huber, tells author Peter Brannen in his book, “The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions”: “None of the economists is modeling what happens to a country’s GDP if 10 percent of the population is refugees … What happens if one person who was doing labor in China must move to Kazakhstan, where they aren’t working? In an economic model, they’d be put to work. But in the real world, they just sit there and get pissed. If people don’t have economic hope and they’re displaced, they tend to get mad … It’s the kind of world in which the major institutions, including nations, have their existence threatened by mass migration. That’s where I see things heading by mid-century.”
Diminished identity is a factor of displacement creating a higher order construct of complicated grief, according to extensive research by Dr. A.K. Tay of the University of New South Wales in Australia. We already know that moving to a new house creates grieving like that of a death for your old home; how much worse then is it if your home and belongings are destroyed in an earthquake, hurricane, or storm? Even if you are one of the fortunate with adequate insurance, you can never replace the lost photographs, books, or beloved possessions that accompanied you for years.
In China, research has shown that the loss of a child, not only created personal grief but upset collective identity. Women who survived the genocide in Rwanda, where Human Rights Watch estimated that there was not a woman or child who escaped rape, experienced “trauma-induced identity transformations.” Identity distress has been found not only in those who survived wars, but also among survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Community and government support, not just in the dramatic short-term news glow of a disaster, but over the long term — long after journalists have left town — is critical to the positive recovery of people and communities.
Displacement and the cultural impact on the brain is a growing area of neuroscience, with the first question being: What is culture? How does it impact upon us? Hannah Arendt writing in the 1940s, in an essay titled “We Refugees,” observed, “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ ” She added, “The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to pump up a front, to hide the facts, to play roles … The recovering of a new personality is as difficult — and as hopeless — as a new creation of the world … One may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction … We lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us; we are — and always were — ready to pay any price to be accepted by society.”
