Published in Ceylon Today
This is the third year that the 'Work In Sri Lanka' organisation has convened a conference to encourage expatriate Sri Lankans to 'come home'. A whole day of presentations by speakers was intelligently interspersed with interactive panel discussions and participatory group brainstorming sessions, and it was a successful and encouraging event. The theme of the conference was 'Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges'.
The speakers were direct and honest, and ready to share their challenging experiences and frustrations as well as their accolade-embossed resumes. There was - to the audience's great relief - no grandstanding or self-indulgent, hubristic posturing of the 'much fanfare no substantial outcome' school of public event organisation. The speakers on this occasion each had their personal egos under good management, and were focused on the big picture.
What I found of particular interest was that the 'Barriers' and 'Bridges' encountered in this reverse migration process were seen not only as external facts and figures, demographics and statistics, as detailed by the Deputy Minister for Public Enterprise Development in his opening address, but also discussed on a more subtle and personal level, in terms of actual lived experiences and pressures operating on individuals in their lives.
The golden island icon at the centre of the visual backdrop for the platform subtly pulsated with lights and electrical currents throughout the proceedings. The subliminal message of this was strong, and supported by every presentation in an integrated way: that the time has come for the far-flung, much-travelled daughters and sons of Sri Lanka to return home. The reverse migration has recently begun: Lankan children and grandchildren have started to revert, to return to source, to re-settle in the country, to delight the eyes of their parents - and to invest themselves, their skills, their hopes, and their progeny and resources, in the land of their ethnic and cultural provenance.
The 'brain drain' of the past is being transformed into a present-day 'brain gain'. This terminology is of course not exactly a compliment to the owners of the brains who have been here all along.
The people who spoke in the panel discussions had all been able to gain access to education abroad: in Britain, in Australia, in Europe, and the United States and Canada, usually through an International School examination sitting, and subsequent undergraduate or postgraduate training and professional experience in a 'developed' country.
Their reasons for coming back were individual and diverse, but usually centred on family ties, in some cases family business and property, and filial consideration for the older generation of parents and grandparents who would otherwise be cut off from knowing their Westernised grandchildren in any meaningful way.
Is 'home' where the 'heart' really is? For expatriates, and particularly returning ones, 'home' is often not a clearly demarcated location. And the 'heart' is neither easily accessed nor understood.
Several people noted the ways in which 'traditional' aspects of Sri Lankan society, and its 19th century hierarchies and rigid social structures, operated as barriers to their sense of freedom and fulfilment, and how liberating it had been to experience life in societies which were more progressive and self-questioning, more set up for business and organised and transparent and accountable, where 'business as usual' was a norm, a guarantee, and not a bonus.
The contrast between expectations and reality is sharp and significant, and these discrepancies may at times lead us to form perceptions which may not be accurate. One of my friend's family memories is that, when a relative of his was very young, he had told his cousins with great authority that Bombay (as it was then) was an 'underwater' city, simply because the plane had stopped there briefly during the monsoon.
That is a child's eye view, but it sometimes feels like that. It is profoundly disorienting, as though you are moving through a different and intrinsically unfamiliar medium, where it is difficult to operate with skill or grace, because it is water, not air, that you are traversing; curves and implications and ambiguous fluidity you are interpreting, rather than clearcut angles and facts and specifics; and translucent layers of resonant history, not the realm of the clear and present day, which you are seeking to navigate.
An expatriate returnee often faces scorn, resentment, misplaced envy and derision. They seem to be professionally courted and openly valued by local employers over their locally-educated counterparts, and are consequently hated by their co-workers for their foreign credentials. They are often seen as arrogant, entitled and condescending, because they speak in British or American accents which they do not attempt to modify with Sri Lankan idiomatic phrases or culturally inclusive mannerisms and gestures.
Returnees are often frustrated by the apparent evasiveness and indirectness prevalent here, which seems like hypocrisy to someone brought up to speak and be spoken to in a more straightforward way. They are frequently startled by the levels of unchallenged ethnic and gender-based chauvinism which they encounter in every echelon of this society. Their frustration and disillusionment is interpreted as an indication that they are 'spoiled' and 'ungrateful'. Elitist brats!
The common denominator is surely this, and it is an uncomfortable truth to admit: every returnee faces the often unspoken but powerfully insulting perception/accusation that their perceived privilege was not earned by their own effort or their individual talent. Instead, they are now seen as being 'where' they are, with more opportunities and qualifications in a competitive marketplace, only because their parents were financially able to leave, while those who stayed could not: to seek opportunities for self-advancement in other, less troubled and dysfunctional countries. Misunderstandings and offensive comparisons abound in relation to this stereotype, and its implications.
I was recently told that many of those who left Sri Lanka in the 90s in fact educated their children in relatively 'dubious' universities abroad, but that the children who were these 'gold-plated' products of overseas training were still seen as 'superior' to more talented local students and professionals - whose 'Lankanness' brands them as 'second' or 'third-rate' in comparison. This is colonial cringe operating in national disservice.
My own observation is that Sri Lankans abroad are very competitive, and keen to acquire the best of what is available in the world: they have competed well internationally, and been very successful. Many of the best, most qualified, and most highly respected professionals in the world are - disproportionally - Sri Lankan. The generation which was educated in the 1940s and 1950s went forth and explored the world in a way which produced an open minded global access that subsequent generations were denied. Now the economy is growing at an impressive rate, and national expectations and aspirations are in lockstep with it. The 'traditional' society is changing forever, around us, and our beliefs are altering within us. And we are creating and participating in that change.
The socio-cultural challenge the country faces now is: in what ways can the country of origin make it worthwhile for its expatriate children to return? Instinctive, unquestioning love for their Motherland is not ingrained in them. They have not sacrificed anything for the country of their ancestors. They are largely removed from its rituals. They have been brought up in a materialistic global culture where (to paraphrase John Pilger in his brilliant documentary on globalisation, 'The New Rulers Of The World'), every human value is affixed to a dollar sign, and assumed patriotism is no exception to this reality.
The question they ask themselves when they do return is: can the pluses of the re-orientation process incrementally outweigh the disadvantages? Can contemporary Sri Lanka find and develop a middle way between welcoming them with open arms as investors and skillset providers, and yet simultaneously in practice deriding and 'white-anting' them for their perceived entitlements and their educational and professional privilege?
We were told at the commencement of the conference that we needed to re-imagine and re-visualise our current reality. That 'the past is the result of the present'. The past was a quasi-feudal society; the present is a much more fluid one, trying on many versions of itself to see if they fit, positioning itself with pride and acquisitiveness, aspirational anxiety, and a certain amount of preening, in a rampantly global world.
To really facilitate the choices of returnees, the differences & the reasons for these differences between local and international experiences and realities need to be faced: differences in actual quality and effectiveness of education, in standards of professionalism, in direct access to beneficial aspects of global culture, in moral awareness, in generational gaps and disconnects, in attitudes to ethics and codes of conduct, in working knowledge of human rights, and socially progressive challenges to damaging forms of cultural privilege.
The most obvious and understandable barriers returnees face, as they are ushered in to the new Sri Lanka, lauded as young internationally educated professionals, returning to make their mark and steer the country into renewed prosperity, are professional jealousy, and petty-mindedness. People who did not 'make it into the ark' were deluged by diverse disasters, and these tragedies have certainly left their mark on the old folks at home. Returnees reconnecting with their old schoolmates may find that under the fraternity and sorority there are unconscious and understandable hostilities also. With no recourse but to work in relative isolation, restricted, underpaid, subject to social limitations and operating in combative mode due to thirty years of cultural chaos and social dysfunction, professional people here can often seem bitter and disappointed, ground down and weary, to someone coming in to the culture.
It is clearly difficult for human beings on both sides of barriers and bridges to offer each other benefit of the doubt, when they themselves feel disadvantaged, or to collaborate and find common ground without compulsively competing and taking offence at differences that are pretty clearly pre-determined, by different upbringing, contexts and experiences.
Barriers and bridges are often made from the same materials. Breaking and building are two sides of the same coin, and can be seen as opposite but connected forms of value.
Several participants in the conference panel discussions noted that the more obvious shortfalls and deficits in this country provide a vibrant opportunity for entrepreneurs, and people who wish to contribute socially in the long term to make a visible and direct difference to the society. Certainly, if the defeatist mindset and iterated cant of 'this is the way it has always been' can change, even profound stagnation can be reversed, and innovation and openness of ideas and commitment to greater effectiveness would transform the reality of living here, and not only for a few. The country would surely then not be called 'our Blessed isle' with irony, by its inhabitants.
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