‘If I Knew How to Speak English…’: How language shapes refugee mothers’ perceptions of past, present, and future in Canada

Abstract

What role does language learning play in refugees’ memory-construction on the one hand, and imagining of the future self on the other? Using a temporal perspective on migration, I extend scholarship examining the role of language in the space-time continuum of resettlement. With three waves of semi-structured interviews with twenty Syrian refugee mothers (N = 60) who have recently arrived in Canada, this article examines how their experiences with time and future projections are influenced by their experiences of language learning in the host country. First, mothers’ lack of English proficiency and struggle to learn leads to a sense of nostalgia towards the past, where their proficiency in Arabic is associated with past feelings of comfort, security, and mastery. In addition, mothers find themselves ‘stuck’ in the present, where multiple structural barriers (e.g., absence of extended kin; limited government support) and individual challenges (e.g., health issues; having children with disability) significantly slow down their language acquisition process and prevent them from achieving other goals. This leads to a clear conflict between government expectations for the long-term future and the mothers’ immediate priorities. Finally, despite those government temporal expectations building on newcomers’ language acquisition, mothers do not want to envision the future due to past experiences of uncertainty, belief in divine control, and a foreclosure of the future. This article demonstrates the ways in which language, space, and time co-construct notions of the future, and a sense of potential ‘stuckness,’ well beyond the temporal limits of intensive state intervention in refugee lives.