What It Means to Be a Refugee

Identification with Refugees, Outsiders

The refugee experience was part of my childhood. That is why I empathize with refugees, those that do not fit in, those that are part of the current global refugee crisis. My parents were asylum seekers too, included in the post World War II worldwide influx of refugees. They had no money and spoke no English when they came to New York City with their baby, me. HIAS, an organization that aids refugees who have been forced to flee their homelands, helped us to get an apartment and resettle in East New York, Brooklyn, largely a community of outsiders made up of Eastern European refugees, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, and a sprinkling of poor whites. The outsiderness of the refugee experience has stayed with me, a self-taught artist making art about outsiders in contemporary society, evocative narrative artwork rooted in humanity’s suffering.

Outsider/Insider Artist

Many think that an outsider artist must be either a mental patient or a poor, uneducated black person from the South creating “raw” art uncontaminated by the larger world. But in reality an outsider artist can also be an insider, someone well-educated who has lived a close to normal life without an opportunity to attend art school, someone like myself driven with a passion to express herself propelled by psychological wounds that need healing, someone with an intense desire to complete herself, to act on innate impulses stifled in childhood, to finally make the art that must be made, art that expresses emotional experience.

The Psychological Anxiety of The Refugee Experience

Haunted by the past in their war-wrecked homelands, there are countless pressures on refugees in strange lands: loss of status, identity confusion, language difficulties, poverty, concern for separated or lost family members, guilt, isolation, a terrible loneliness. Their experiences are still alive in their minds, sometimes tormenting as much as before if not during the day, then at night. My artwork reveals how it feels to be a child of traumatized refugees under such strains, to be caught up in the emotional thicket and carry the emotional burden from birth on. It reveals the effect of the refugee experience on their children and future generations. I use my art to illuminate the psychological aftermath not readily understood by the public at large.

The Intergenerational Transfer of Trauma

Refugee parents unconsciously transmit much of their own trauma and emotional load to their children, especially to their first born. I identified with their pain. I absorbed and assimilated their moods and fears and lived with the idea that disaster was close at hand. I grew up with a constant feeling of uneasiness, anxious. My artwork is fueled by trauma inherited, by my suffering as a child who was invested with all of their hopes, expected to make up for the losses, designated as a solution to their problems, intended to fill their emptiness, expected to achieve extreme academic success.

Medium as Metaphor

Discarded clothing is my medium, a symbolically loaded medium alluding to devalued, discarded humanity, and the refugees whom I rescue and to whom I give new life. Clothing is the “second skin,” a lived-in skin that holds the essence of the wearer, an extension of the self, a lived-in skin, an autobiographical medium that triggers emotional memory. Clothes absorb a person’s energy; they envelop and cling to the wearer just as emotions do. As a child of refugees, I was “clothed” in sadness. Trauma is what I wore. I grew up uncomfortable in my own skin.

Clothing has strong connections to identity. Discarded clothing raises the subject of a former self, a foreign self discarded and transformed in a new land. For adult refugees loss of identity, identity switching, and identity creation are an accepted part of the refugee experience. My parents changed their names and mine upon arrival in America. They called me Linda since I was a baby, never telling me about the foreign birth name that was on my birth certificate. When my mother registered me for school, her confusion and language difficulties prevented her from explaining that I did not identify with the birth certificate name. And so my first day of kindergarten resulted in an emotionally disturbing and lasting shock. I was traumatized when the teacher called me by a strange foreign name I had never heard before. I felt lost and betrayed not knowing who I really was.  I use clothes to figure out who I am.

Process Mirrors The Refugee Experience

My artistic process parallels refugee assimilation. Refugees must transform their lives, reinvent themselves, shed old skin. I transform and reinvent discarded clothing, creating new skin from old, transforming the skin I was in. Just as the refugee must do, I dismantle, deconstruct, reconstruct, and construct something new from the old with visions of a better reconfigured future. The theme that courses through both the refugee’s life and my artwork is wear, tear, and spiritual repair. My treatment of surfaces as complex layers of strips of clothing corresponds with the layers of difficult experiences in each refugee’s history.

Positive Lessons Learned from Refugees

There are numerous ways I benefited from the refugee experience. Because they suffered so much, refugees are unafraid to be creative and take risks, unafraid to be aggressive and innovative. Post World War II asylum seekers like my parents did not surrender to a life of limited possibilities and neither have I.  As an artist I am unafraid to boldly push the boundaries. to push the limits of materials, techniques and concepts, to push notions of portraiture, to subvert the traditonal technique of rug hooking. I did not settle for the teaching career my parents chose for me, nor for my second career as a retailer, but instead I became more aligned with my true self, an artist.

Another positive lesson learned from refugees is patience. My father had to wait to move from initial menial jobs to better paying jobs and his own business. First he had to become familiar with the new culture and gain better language skills. I learned that hard work, determination, and perseverance lead to success, and to never give up. I am unafraid to work slowly and persevere in an art career. There is joy in overcoming obstacles.

From a refugee aunt I also learned how to party hard, laugh, and enjoy life too. I continue rewriting the sad refugee story and creating myself anew.