Immigrants on the Move

My mum believes that thinking or talking about the past means she’s not living in the present. For this reason, she often avoids nostalgia or conversations around experiences from the past. She wants to talk about the future, to talk about how we can change the world now. She is an unapologetic optimist, which at times can be exhausting. But as I stood in a record shop yesterday, looking at songs and musicians from my youth, I wondered whether it is healthy to live without nostalgia.

Living overseas often takes that nostalgia away from you, where possible you will have your mementos, your personal belongings, your photos but you don’t walk into a charity shop and see a toy you used to play with as a child (well not that I’ve yet experienced anyway). You’re in a place with a culture and nostalgia of its own that doesn’t create the same emotional tug your own community can stir. I guess in a lot of ways it ties in with the ‘need for comfort’ aspect of living overseas. The need for the familiar.

Where we lived in France, before the days when I discovered Spotify, the radio options were French, French, or French. Weird that, given that I lived in France. The music selection was a mixture of English and French, often with the same eight songs played on repeat. There was a feeling of the comfort of familiar songs missing. Although the moment my French was good enough to understand the lyrics, was a highlight of my language journey.

Nostalgia is a strange and powerful emotion. As much we try and fight it and fight ourselves, it’s very hard not to. Robert del Naja.

This feeling of otherness intensified at Christmas when there were no Christmas pop songs played on the radio – why would there be most of them are in English? But the lack of those songs left a gaping hole in my pre-holiday season. There was something about the arrival of Noddy Holder, Maria Carey, The Pogues, Bing Crosby and so many more that reminded you to get excited about Christmas. In the UK they go overboard. Every shop you go into from the end of November has their Christmas album playing on repeat, my heart used to break for the slow the torture the shop assistants were suffering every day. Yet all of a sudden, this previously torturous sound was missed.

This is the power of nostalgia for me. Whether it is a comfort food you have when you’re feeling low, a song that plays on the radio by an artist you were in love with as a child, or the books/toys/furniture that connects you with a place. All these things create a feeling of familiarity, they remind you of who you’ve been, where you come from, of those rose tinted memories that feel special. Can we live without nostalgia? I don’t know, I think there is something about that reminder of the past that fuels human comfort, but maybe there are many who, like my mother, do furiously avoid it. What makes you nostalgic?