Naadia Manuoullah: Finding My Sense of Belonging
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My childhood felt pretty normal as I was growing up. Despite being on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, isolated from the rest of the world, I never felt that I lacked anything. The small island community made me feel safe and loved, and my parents made a lot of sacrifices to give us a childhood that they hoped we would remember. I grew up in a middle-class family, but I had relatives who would visit us from abroad almost every year and who would spoil us with gifts that we couldn't find at the time in Mauritius. I suppose I got a taste of what first-world countries had to offer through them.
During my teenage years, something changed, and I started feeling this urge to go abroad. I became less complacent. My first experience traveling outside of Mauritius was when I was 17. My family planned a vacation to North America, and that was a trip of a lifetime, but after coming back from that trip, I knew I wanted to pursue my studies in the US, where my brother was also studying at the time. I had to convince my dad, with my brother's help, that America was the place to be. Although, at the time, I had no idea what I was looking for other than getting a degree in Fine Arts from a university in the US. Most of my cousins had also left Mauritius for other parts of the world, and the idea that I could be the only one in my family, from my generation, to live on the island felt daunting.
I left home in September 2004 and spent four years in the US, thousands of miles away from home and family. Although that experience helped shape my personality and identity, I chose to move back to Mauritius for reasons that I don't think are relevant to this blog. However, sometimes I feel that it was the wrong choice, but I have come to accept that it is what I needed to do at the time. Although I missed the US, coming back to the family nest felt good. Having lived four years abroad as a student did not make me feel disconnected from my home country. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with my parents and my friends, although I knew that someday, I would be leaving again. I could not give up on the longing feeling to live abroad. There was so much more to experience, and the autonomy that would come with living in a country without people I knew was weirdly attractive to me at the time. For some reason, I believed that the emotional struggle that comes with it would help me grow as a person. I wanted to leave my comfort zone and make a life for myself. I knew that as a student, I had not fully experienced what it meant to be on my own and be responsible for my own self. The reason that I gave everyone for leaving though was that I wanted to become a professional artist and that Mauritius was not conducive to having this type of career. Deep down, I think I knew that was not true, but I was too scared to admit it.
I was 28 when my husband and I left Mauritius for Montreal, Canada. Emigrating to a new country can add a lot of stress to a relationship, but we pushed through and eventually really enjoyed our lives in Montreal. There was this explosion of culture that Montreal offered, and we immersed ourselves into it. Although we did not have a wide social circle, we felt like we belonged and that our inner selves aligned with what Canada represented. Our son was born in the summer of 2017 and within the next two years, we had started discussing a return home. "It takes a village to raise a child," but we did not have our village, and it started to take a toll on our mental health. We started feeling more lonely as time went on, and everything that once filled our lives with meaning was not enough to make us happy anymore. We fought the idea of moving back to Mauritius for quite some time because despite the emptiness we were feeling emotionally, Canada was the country where we were raising our son and we had made it our home. It was the hardest decision we've had to make, but we had to make a choice, so we chose to go back in fall 2022. Unlike the US, where I knew that the chances of going back were slim, all three of us were Canadian citizens, and Canada was not going anywhere. That was reassuring and comforting.
Fast forward to the present, we have now been living in Mauritius for the last 9 months. Mauritius has not changed much other than its infrastructural development, and the truth is that we are not the same people that we were 10 years ago. Some of the people we once socialized with had gotten used to life without us, and they have also changed as much as we have. Although we feel like having to build a new social circle, it has been less challenging than when we had to do it in Canada. The memories that we were hoping to recreate based on the nostalgia of the past are slowly becoming more real. They say that "Home is where the heart is," but your heart can also be in two different places at once. Although I chose to physically move back to my heart's original home, I feel grateful to have found the joy of finding a “home” away from home. I am now in the process of rediscovering my home country, and the best part is that I am doing it with my son who is discovering it for the first time.
