Maclayhem

Moving to Sweden in 2012 Tatty and her family recently moved from Scotland to Sweden. Half-Swedish and half-English, Tatty grew up in the UK and works as a journalist. This is a journal of her first year in Sweden with her Scottish husband and four young children.

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Maclayhem: Thoughts from the Motherland

by Tatty Maclay

‘Birth in one place, growing old in another place. And feeling a stranger in the two places.’ All of us who, by choice or necessity, now live in a different country from the one in which we were born can undoubtedly relate to that sentiment in some way or another. They’re the words of Ayse Lahur Kirtunç, whose family was displaced from Crete and moved to Turkey after the Second World War, and part of an exhibition entitled ‘Twice a Stranger’ currently showing at the Army Museum in Stockholm. The exhibition focuses on the experiences of the men, women and children - from Greece, Turkey, Germany, Poland, India, Pakistan and Cyprus - forced to leave their homelands when the world map was redrawn in the second half of the 20th century, but many of the feelings they experienced as a result ring equally true for millions of refugees, immigrants and emigrants today. It’s incredible how deep the longing for the country in which you spent the first few years of your life can be. Eighty year old men who had spent the vast majority of their life - 70 years or more - in their new country, reduced to tears hearing a song from the ‘homeland’ or seeing a picture of the house in which they were born. I know my mother - split from her father and brothers in Sweden and taken to live in England when she was four - feels this, I can certainly relate to the feeling of not quite belonging in either of two countries and now I appear to have perpetuated the pattern by removing my children from the country they know. Will they ever feel fully Swedish? Or is just a few years of Marmite rather than Kalles Kaviar, Smarties rather than salty licorice, The Queen’s Speech rather than Kalle Anka on Christmas Day enough to make them feel forever foreign, other, different, strangers?

Of course, our situation and that of anyone who chooses to emigrate for lifestyle reasons is hugely different from refugees forced to leave their homeland, but these questions of identity and nationality remain. I’m hoping that my children will choose to see themselves not as ‘Twice strangers’, but as doubly blessed, citizens of the world – or, better still, as my son Max puts it: ‘International men of mystery.’

Photo: © Joe Maclay | www.joemaclay.com