Distractions

Progress: still writing
Physical state: eyes watering, can't stop yawning
Distractions: daughter is having a pool party, bar-b-que lunch, making jewellery, playing Monopoly. It's such an old game. I used to play it years ago with the princes's children in Beirut. We played in French and English. How can they stilll enjoy it today?
Drinks: lots of coffee
Food: packets of chewing gum
Music: Steven Halpern's 'Music for Accelerated Learning'.
More distractions: my elderly aunt has given me two handwritten pages of addresses she wants me to type out for her. I'm tempted to start on that; Germany, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Australia.
What to inlcude in my chapter: transnationalism is a new big topic. I could include something about transnational links maintained by my research subjects.

Do the laundry, water the garden pot plants and then keep writing.

A brainwave

My writing wasn’t progressing very well today. I couldn’t get a clear perspective on assimilation. The politician’s were out of synch with grassroots immigrants, too many different issues. I couldn't focus, too many contradictory discourses. My daughter wanted me to bake some cakes with her.

We were creative and made a marble cake in three colours: white, pink and brown. Just to be different we put them in mini muffin tins instead of one large round one. Baking clears the mind. It’s a form of meditation, very relaxing. All that is required are slow, gentle movements in a fairly confined space in the kitchen listening to Green Day’s rock songs and ballads. The smells of vanilla, butter and chocolate intoxicated our inner senses.

The music was interrupted by the radio announcement that Al Grassby died. He was the Labor Minister for Immigration from 1972 to 74. I was going to cut him out of my second thesis draft, too much detail, irrelevant to my topic. I felt sad that he died just when I decided to reject him. We licked the spoons and started laughing. Then we dipped and licked our fingers into the mixture, once for each finger so as not to double dip until we had chocolate tipped pussy cat claws. We licked the spatula and the bowls.

The news broadcaster said Al Grassby made the most significant contribution to multiculturalism of all the immigration ministers. We put the cakes in the oven and set the timer. People remembered him for his colourful ties because they were symbolic of the colourful cultures in the multicultural community, said the radio voice. His ties? A man deserved more dignity than that upon death. If they remembered his ties maybe I should include him in my chapter.

A sudden ringing in my head – I’ve had a brainwave. The oven timer just rang. The cakes are ready. I will trace the evolution of assimilation and multiculturalism through the main ministers of immigration: Arthur Calwell, Harold Holt, Al Grassby. They are the ones who made the most memorable public statements. I can juxtapose the covert and overt ethnic activities of my research subjects to coincide with precisely the same eras of each minister. The perfect snapshot of the move from assimilation to multiculturalism and how ordinary people responded to the policies.

The cakes were over-baked. I should have checked them when the timer rang. Daughter said she likes them crisp. We didn’t enjoy eating them. It was more fun making them.

I'm rich

A cheque arrived in the mail today from the university - my study grant. For a short while I’m rich again.

Student life is an impoverished existence. Just keep writing. Remember the Stardust space shuttle. Its job was to collect samples from the universe to provide a window into the distant past, helping scientists around the world to unravel mysteries surrounding the birth and evolution of our Solar System.

My job is to collect snippets of human behaviour, compile them, organise them, write about them to provide a window into the past about people who have ventured far from home and made border crossings to create for themselves a ‘third place’ that lies somewhere between the familiar and the other. I unravel the differences about those who appear to be assimilated.

In my thesis I decided to reject my favourite academic quote:

“To leave one's homeland is to embark on one of the most difficult of journeys, a departure from the familiar: one's native culture, mother tongue, family and friends, neighbourhood. It involves a process of uprooting, a time of mental turmoil and physical insecurity. To emigrate is almost never a first option, rarely gladly embraced, the trauma of departure often hidden from self with the consolation that it is only temporary, that there will come a day of return.”

Markus and Clyne 2001

Why did I cut out this one? Too painful to face? Include it, highlight it and use it to make a point that the trauma was even greater for the involuntary immigrant – the accidental immigrants. The losses and the newly found riches are about self-making, changed identities. Write about it. I am the insider, one of the accidental immigrants. I am the one who can write.

Full steam ahead.

Lit Review chapter

My writing task: At least its flowing. I’m reviewing all academic literature on survival strategies, assimilation and adaptation of immigrants in the context of visible and invisible communities. What makes an immigrant community go ‘underground’? What are their survival strategies? How do they sustain their continuity? It’s OK, I’m getting there.

My drink: A potent cup of hot chocolate, cinnamon, ground cloves and a pinch of cayenne pepper to give me the kick I need.

My background music: a violin sonata by Secret Garden to release my creative alpha and beta brain waves.

My desk: Open books, pages, papers, my scribbling piled high in utter chaos, feeding my mind.

My anxieties: worried that my university supervisor will retire before I submit my next two chapters.

Secret Garden

My surprise parcel came in the mail today. I felt like a young birthday-child. An audio CD by Secret Garden called Earthsongs. The Celtic songs are more heavenly transcendent than rooted in the earth. The Irish violin virtuoso, the drums and haunting voices remind me of melodies I used to hear on my travels in the Arab countries.

I have a ‘secret garden’ that I go to with my daughter when we want to do nothing more than be together. We don’t tell anyone where we are going. It has an art gallery with ever-changing exhibits. I remember the first time we went there we stepped into a new age jewelery exhibit. We became Cleopatra and Nefretiti pouring over our jewelry troves. There is a café and sometimes we share a platter of exotic roti bread with spicy dips or we are consumed by the sheer indulgence of the easy moments together and order giant solid chocolate baskets filled with raspberries, blueberries and cream. Then we go for a walk around a manmade lake on a winding path that meanders in a landscape of tangled weeds. We laugh at the antics of the acrobatic water birds that surely put on displays just for us. No-one is there. The whole complex of buildings and nature is surrounded by a ring road of strange residential houses that have won Architect Awards. We admire their desert gardens of pebbles, cacti and stylishly stark high walls that look like boxes piled up, and then we pretend we are in the secret places that we have been to in Damascus. Times expands and we connect in an easy rhythm, walking as one, breathing in synch until we reach that state before her birth when she was still in my womb. She told me once she wished she could have stayed in my womb forever. I told her she has, forever.

Thank you sister-in-law, for the Earthsongs. They have transported me to my secret garden.

Resistance and Writers Bloc

My current task is to write about the effects of the post-war assimilation years on immigrants. My problem is that friends and family believe they assimilated very well and are proud of it. My job is to demonise the assimilationist ideology, to suggest that they did the wrong thing, lived improperly, lived a lie because they ‘went underground’ with their culture and mother-tongue and never really assimilated. They lived in denial, marginalised themselves, and distanced themselves from their offspring.

Resistance raises its ugly head and my writing procrastination sets in.

Resistance is my inner small child tugging persistently at my skirt. She springs from my subconscious anxieties and signals danger, don’t go there. It is too dangerous to reveal the content of my work. I ask myself, why is it so hard? My conscious mind wants to proceed but my subconscious urges are much stronger. To use willpower to overcome my bloc is a flawed concept, a Dr-Phil-on-Oprah bullying millions of viewers to set goals and start working on them while they burst into tears and wail that his theories don’t work or they smile in self-denial and choose to remain silent when they ought to speak. Expel the bully, crush-the-Dr-Phil.

My inner psyche can only be seduced with kindness and gentleness. The subconscious mind responds best to pleasure and seduction not seven-step goals. Decisive action only increases resistance anxiety. So now when resistance comes tugging at my skirt I am curious and gentle. I listen to the little voice that says, don’t go there for it feels too dangerous. I coax her ever so gently and encourage her to connect to me, with ease and comfort, rather than tug away from her and leave my computer to do the laundry or make yet another cup of coffee.

I ask her ever so gently, what does the danger stand for? Separation anxiety, yes that’s it. My beliefs about the community’s ‘false assimilation’ endanger my relationship with them. I see their ‘dilemma’. They call it ‘successful settlement.’ The threat of exclusion looms ahead. Should I be confrontational in my writing? Should I risk losing the connectedness I worked so hard to build up? Do I proceed into the darkness of the cave to face the dragon? I hear the sharp criticism of the parent voice in my psyche. I want to be comforted, reassured, not criticised. I seek love and approval. Separation anxiety is my problem. If I write the wrong content in my thesis, my case study subjects will be filled with hate and disapproval.

How can I overcome my writer’s bloc? The same way I would enter the forbidden cave – with curiosity and ever so gently. That’s my style in life – slow and gentle. That’s how I need to write.

I choose to write about assimilation ever so gently.

Read about The Captive Muse:
http://www.thecaptivemuse.com/muse_excerpt.html

Hospital to Uni

The morning at the hospital with my teenage daughter for her serious illness check-up left me feeling crushed and depleted. Even though her health is fine these days and we just went in for observations, as soon as I entered the hospital I felt that I lost all control as a parent, as a writer, as a human being. I handed over my inner power and strength to the clerical staff, the medical staff and even the cleaners. I found the atmoshpere emotionally draining, even just to watch so many sick children and adults exhausted me.

In the afternoon I attended a university seminar on 'Immigrant Transnationalism' and my self-esteeem was revived. I found my true identity. I was in a world that made sense to me - a world of writers trying to come to grips with idealistic concepts and hypotheticals. A mother sat in one corner breast feeding her baby with another teenage daughter beside her. I wondered what they were doing in the university. It must be hard for a young mother to do a uni thesis.

The speaker was searching for a term to describe the postwar migrants who felt the anxieties of exile. Exilic anxiety she called it - a term she made up. I offered the term 'accidental immigrant.' She wrote it down and I wondered if she would use it. It was a new label she hadn't yet come across. I was going to use it my thesis. I borrowed it from my recent book about an 'accidental pastry-cook'. I liked the term. I felt like an accidental writer. A combination of chance and necessity caused people to fall into a role by accident. I knew an aquaintance, a married man who became an accidental adulterer. He said he was driven by that perfect combination of the two conditions and if he had only one of them in his life he wouldn't have done it. Should I believe him?

Academic Breakthrough

I've done it :-) My mind has made a quantum shift. I am now writitng my Literature Review chapter like like a good academic writer. I'm analysing resources. I'm evaluating them and making insightfull connections. It's so easy and obvious. Best of all I have somehow slipped into the register of academic writing that had eluded me for so long. I've crossed over, made the transition. How did I do it? I seduced my inner counciousness.
My motto for the day is: I am willing to see my magnificence.

For some personal inspiration have a look at:
http://www.libralion.com/hay.htm

Musings on my thesis writing

I want to improve the academic quality of my Literature Review chapter. I need to change the quality of my thesis and make a transition from good writing to a sophisticated product.

My subconsious urges are much stronger than my conscious mind.
I feel great when I know I have:

• collected lots of research sources
• made appropriate sub-headings
• organised my lit review
• evaluated the resources
• established links within the body of my review
• used clear and insightful writing

But then my confidence ebbs away and I am gripped by a suphocating anxiety and I can't breathe because my greatest fears begin to emerge and my writing is reduced to nothing.
I worry that

• I don't know the seminal and landmark studies for assimilation and (integration then) multiculturalism; for cultural identity formation and for adaptation strategies for immigrants.
• I am studying as an external student, in isolation from peers, mentors and with no real regular contact with other academics and library resources.

My conscious mind tells me to get back to my thesis writing but I can't. I know what I need to do. I must seduce my subconscious. Seduction is based on pleasure and flattery so I must seduce my inner self to believe that I am really good at what I do.
My lit review is not even adequate. I need to work on transitions and build up my bibliography.
I am a writer. I can do and I will enjoy doing it

Stardust

I am in stardust in outer space.

The four names of our family members were listed on the microship in the Stardust space capsule.

Stardust was launched on February 7, 1999 carrying the two microchips. Two copies of each chip were installed on the spacecraft (for a total of four chips). Two of the microchips (#1 & #2) are inside the Sample Return Capsule, and will return back to Earth with the capsule in the year 2006. The other two chips are on the spacecraft body and will remain in space forever.

The Stardust mission was launched into space in early February 1999. Its destination - Comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt 2 after its Swiss named founder) its mission, to capture cometary materials before returning to earth in 2006.

Stardust will encounter Comet Wild 2 in 2004, while nearly 390 million kilometers (242 million miles) from earth. En route to the comet, the spacecraft will collect interstellar dust particles. These samples will provide a window into the distant past, helping scientists around the world to unravel mysteries surrounding the birth and evolution of our Solar System.

Want to know more about Stardust visit:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/importance.html