By Valeria Dauchalevich
Integration might suggest a change in one’s identity, an attempt to become local. However in nowadays context this issue is much more complex.
A lot of young people or their parents arrive to the EU looking for a new experience or a better life. Even though the issue of respect to the culture of a hosting country should not be questioned, their past cannot be abandoned, and becoming a ‘native’ is not necessary.
Born as a child of immigrant parents that came in the sixties from Morocco to Holland, a young girl says that she is always in some sort of identity crisis. In the Netherlands, the country where she is born and raised, she does not completely consider it home. The same ‘problem’ is also when she is in Morocco.
Valeria Dauhalevich, 20, went to study Hungary right after her graduation from high school. After three years living abroad she claimed that with all the experience obtained she cannot define herself Belarusian anymore. ‘’I rather identify my culture as a sort of all-embracing un-national essence, to which individuals from different backgrounds contribute’’.
There are different stories of different heroes, but they, too, are Europe, in a new global sense. In Morocco they consider me too Dutch and in Holland I am always the Moroccan girl. One thing is for sure: I, too, am Europe.
