Mothers on the Move by Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

Author:Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg [Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Emigration & Immigration, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780226389912
Google: HK45DQAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-11-09T05:48:02+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter opens with a quotation from Ariane juxtaposing a familial sense of belonging with the emotional burdens of everyday microaggressions suffered by migrants whose difference is visible as well as cultural. Ariane worries about what growing up in an environment of strange looks will mean for her young son’s development. She proposes that grounding her son in a strong identification with his familial and cultural roots will give him the resilience he needs, as a black boy, to move through the German day-care and school system.

The child-rearing strategies presented here are Cameroonian mothers’ best attempts to ground their German-born children via an emotional identification with Cameroon and a network of social ties to fellow Cameroonians. Mothers seek to forge belonging (depending on the situation, as black African, Cameroonian, or Bamiléké) for their children while simultaneously giving them the best chances to adapt, be successful, and even be upwardly mobile in a German environment. In their depictions of migrant parenting, Cameroonian mothers defuse the tension between the social reproduction of a culture of origin and social mobility in a destination society by defining attributes that contribute to adaptation and success as specifically Cameroonian characteristics.

The general story of a tricky balancing act between cultural continuity and adaptation is similar in other accounts of immigrant parenting and immigrant childhoods. Distinctions from a wider pattern emerge from the relatively small scale of the Cameroonian immigrant population in Germany, its youth, its high level of education, its geographic dispersal, and its visibly racialized difference. An additional contrast to immigrant families in other colonial metropoles—such as Britain, France, and Portugal—is Germany’s short and truncated colonial history, an inglorious history that ended in 1916. The uneasy relationship between diasporic identities and assimilation poses itself in other ways where higher concentrations of Cameroonians live in former colonial metropoles sharing the same language and bureaucratic organizational forms (Bouly de Lesdain 1999; Kamdem 2007).

The feeling-tone of the tension between fostering a Cameroonian diasporic identity and encouraging accommodation to a new society is captured in two oft-repeated phrases that summarize themes from this chapter. “I have a German child” expresses mothers’ ambiguous feelings regarding their children’s socialization. “Where do you come from?” is reported speech in which mothers poignantly acknowledge challenges that their children encounter every day. Mothers are proud of their children’s adaptability to German orientations and habits; I suspect they are also a tad envious of their children’s easy fluency in German language. In many ways, they want their children to “belong,” to feel comfortable and at home, in Germany. Nonetheless, mothers do not aim to raise culturally German children. They prefer to raise flexible, adaptable, successful Cameroonian children in Germany.

From mothers’ perspectives, their children are Cameroonian by birth, regardless of their legal citizenship in Cameroon or Germany. Keeping their children Cameroonian implies two understandings of Cameroonian belonging: a performative aspect and an interior, social-psychological aspect. Children perform Cameroonian belonging, for example, when they act on Cameroonian codes of respect toward elders. Children feel their Cameroonian belonging when they view themselves—as individuals and in relation to other people—as Cameroonian.

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