I’m just a foreigner – forever
Where are you from? A few years back, I wrote a contentious column for this paper and, though I don’t recall the topic, I remember the dissent it caused online, particularly when the mob realised I was nonresident.
“She doesn’t even live here,” they bayed, which rather sucks if you have an opinion on Trump and don’t live stateside, or on Syria but work for the UN in Geneva, or on Brexit when you’re a South African living in Ireland with a British passport …
I’ve been in Ireland 13 years and yet I still hold tight to my South African heritage, my South African family, friends, and home; I’m forever big-haired in 1993 in my green ID book.
In many ways I’ve assimilated to Dublin – the buses, the high streets, the book shops, the need for an umbrella, the washing powder brands – but I’ll never be considered Irish here. I’ll always be asked “where are you from?” – and yet I don’t mind it, because I still get excited when I see South African wine on a menu or South African naartjies in a shop.
I still say hello when I hear a South African accent in Dublin.
I still arrive back in Ireland every time with a suitcase filled with koeksisters, NikNaks, fishpaste, and cherry vitamin C, little bits of South Africa hidden amongst my socks and takkies. And of course I still say takkies. I am South African. Or am I? I was born in England, though my parents moved to South Africa when I was two, so Britain is where I came from, though I remembered nothing about it.
Growing up, people would sometimes remind me I was not South African and yet, when I returned to the UK at the age of 26, nobody there considered me British. A woman in the Citizen’s Advice Bureau even told me to “go back to where you came from!” So I did. There, in Johannesburg, I met my Irishman and eventually followed him home.
Fast forward to today and to Brexit, and my status is under question again. Will I be able to live in the Republic of Ireland after the great divide? Will my children?
Thus begins the process of applying for Irish citizenship, with documents piling up on my desk, and hoops to be jumped through. So where am I from? Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m foreign wherever I go.