RIVER VOORIS
This collage is made from images and words from several different types of magazines, along with a world map from National Geographic. I have included the image of an airplane, as I spent many hours traveling back and forth across the Atlantic.
The images of the people reading books shows how the narratives of immigrants helped me understand my own family story and complicated sense of identity. While my family benefited from white Anglo privilege, having a transatlantic childhood, and a mixed-nationality family, meant that I grew up with a complicated sense of self and home. When I read Shara McCallum’s “This Strange Land” about her experiences as a Jamaican immigrant, I was struck by how connected I felt to many of her poems, especially lines like, “when memory becomes a synonym for home.”
The bird in the center of the Atlantic Ocean is a British Kingfisher, and its beautiful feathers make me long for the British countryside and the waterways by my grandparent's cottage in South Kent. The roses make me think of my grandma’s and Aunties’ gardens. The spool of thread represents threads of identity and connection across space. The person standing in front of plants (above the rose) reminded me of myself, and the rain falling outside the window reminded me of England.
Many of the words that are across the collage reflect my different feelings around identity, family relationships, and finding myself. They also reflect the leaving and departures and loss that I felt every time I moved back and forth between my two home countries.
What is the significance of this piece for you or your family?
Ultimately, this collage is a reflection on my identity as someone who grew up in rural Maryland, but who also lived in England several times as a child and young adult. I spent most summers and holidays traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to visit my family in Europe. My mum is British, and I have dual citizenship with the US-UK. My British grandparents lived in the Netherlands when I was a child, and I had extended family living in France, and Scotland.
While I knew that I wanted the piece to reflect on my identity as the child of an immigrant, as with all my collages, I didn’t know exactly what the finished piece would look like. I cut out words and images that resonated with me and the theme, and then I arranged them on the page. Collage is an iterative, ever-changing process, and the final product is often a surprise.
How did you (and or your family) move to the U.S.? Why did you move to the U.S.?
My mum spent a summer in the US when she was 18, working as a nanny in Baltimore, Maryland. She was introduced to my dad, and when she returned to the UK, they had a three-year long-distance relationship before getting married when she graduated college.
Although the original plan was for them to live in England (she always said she would never settle in America), my dad’s teaching license was not recognized, and so they ended up moving back to the US. My siblings and I were all born here in the US, but we spent parts of our childhood in England. We moved there when I was six, and again when I was 11, and I also studied abroad there when I was in college. Ultimately, money, and other family obligations meant that we kept returning to the US, and this is where most of us have settled for now. My younger sister works for the UN, and lives in Pakistan, my grandparents are back in England, and I have relatives in France, Nepal, and Ecuador, so we are still a very international family.
I always felt more English than American and had a lot of internal conflict about my identity growing up. This was partially shaped by the fact that my mum never wanted to live in the US and had a lot of grief about being here. At this point in my life, I have now lived here in the US more than I have in Europe, and I feel more settled here, but integrating the many parts of me, and processing my mum’s grief, took time.
What does it mean for you to share these stories with the community here at Cortland (and beyond)?
Most people do not know that my mum is an immigrant or that I am a dual citizen. I lost my British accent when we returned to the US when I was in middle-school, and unless people notice the way that I pronounce words like “banana, yoghurt, vitamin, aluminum, basil, and tomato” I do not often have an opportunity to talk about my identity.
I know that my mum’s experience of immigration was shaped by whiteness and our Anglophilic culture. Our family story is different from many other immigrants. However, there are connections and similarities in terms of homesickness, missing family who are separated by distance, learning new cultures, and the struggle to fit in.
