Exile
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73 exile Marta RaquelZabaleta
abstract Marta Raquel Zabaleta's autobiographical piece takes us through the trajectory of her exile as an Argentinian refugee, first in Glasgow and then in London. Forced to flee with her husband, a Chilean UN refugee, she describes the differences between the ways her husband and herself were treated by those in solidarity groups and other aid organizations and the particular difficulties faced by women refugees. She explores the isolating effects of having her professional identity and status erased as a refugee and of being relegated to the sole status of 'wife'. Zabaleta also insists on the fundamental rights of refugees and asylum seekers to have both their histories and their desires for the future acknowledged by those in the host country.
keywords refugee; exile; Argentina; Chile; women
feminist
review
73 2003
(19-38) (? 2003 FeministReview.0141-7789/03$15 www.feminist-review.com
19
... the sun and a paper smile were left in my room ... Pipo Pescador Buenos Aires, 1975
I
like a duck in an alien puddle1 the
absent
(Between
an identity
duckling: 07:00,
Headquarters,
November
15th
in transition 1976,
the
Federal
Police
Co-Ordination
Buenos Aires, and 19:00, 16th November 1976, Holland Park Hotel,
London). I held my breath. And again I looked back, but this time with more apprehension. From the front seat of the car I was trying to foresee the destiny of my daughter, Yaninita's, duckling, lost now in Buenos Aires. We had left him alone, abandoned to his fate, in the city of terror. Would he now feel more of an orphan than before? The animal, however, was walking rapidly, but almost sideways...
He might have
felt a little tremor of anxiety, but was hiding it under a certain aristocratic
air, as
if defying freedom with a sense of offended decorum. At the same time, he looked That his little yellow wings and little newly sprouted
as if his legs had stretched.
black feathers had grown, to propel him directly to the lake. In short, Duckling was expectant. His future scared him, but at the same time, excited him. Everything was reduced to a philosophical
problem: how to feel an equal among equals, how
survival amongst strangers.
to guarantee
lay an unknown future, but also there would be certain options. And what about feeling like a New Duck with post-modern anxieties? Ah! Because of course we must not forget that freedom offers us the chance to acquire a new identity - a wide variety of options that are neither necessarily concentric It is true that ahead
nor always complementary. anticipated
and actual
Schizophrenia?
identities.
More like an incompatibility
between
The chasms that exist between the imaginary
self that inhabits fantasy and the boring surrounding reality. To reason or to feel, to act or to reflect. Ideas frequently fighting against each other (or others), in the ancient struggle of ideolog
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