_{Stockholm. Picture taken during my visit to see Nathalie last May.}

I was adamant I needed the voice of one of my oldest friends (also a fellow linguist), Nathalie Wilson, as I looked at the matter of women displaced, all around the world, geographically, culturally, politically, socio-economically, and more, for my Live talk last weekend.

A native of North Yorkshire (UK), Nathalie grew up mostly in West Africa, then attended boarding school back in England. She and I met in Autumn 2007 in Yaroslavl, Russia, when we were both studying there. Further to our studies we both ended up working as freelance translators/interpreters, sometimes working together on an improbably weird range of projects, when we were both based in London.

A few years ago, Nathalie relocated with her family to Sweden. She her husband and their sons are (I would say) the ultimate model new Swedes, both working in Swedish and their children having been raised bilingual from the very beginning of their lives.

Nathalie’s husband is partly Dutch, and Nathalie passed her Dutch citizenship exams a couple of months ago.

What it means to be a woman displaced in the world is something that has come up organically over and over in our lengthy and (magically) chaotic conversations over the years.

When I received Nathalie’s answers to my questions on the subject, about what displacement meant to her, I thought her answers deserved their own follow up post with Women’s Perspective.

Here are her thoughts:

To answer your first question… I think I first became aware of displacement as a child without being fully aware of what it actually meant or it as a phenomenon….in the early ‘90s as a result of the Rwandan genocide the media covered the refugee crisis provoked by the fighting there that caused millions of Hutus to flee to neighbouring countries following the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front taking control of the country. I can remember the images and reporting of this crisis and the mass displacement it provoked in the international media – viewed on my parents TV set in their bedroom on CNN news.

***

My mother and father were living in Nigeria during the mass expulsions of African migrants from neighbouring countries under the rule of President Shagari in 1983. At the time the president issued an executive order requiring all undocumented immigrants to leave the country within 14 days, with more than one million of these migrants being Ghanaians. My parents’ cook in Lagos at the time, Jacob, was one such migrant. My mother would recount to me how my father drove Jacob to a small vessel that was leaving for Ghana - they gave him food and a clock and some money, thinking this would be the last time they saw him. A decade or so later, my parents having had me and my brother and now living in Accra, Ghana, Jacob appeared at the gate of our house. At first when told there was a visitor by the name of Jacob who was there to see her, my mother didn’t recall she knew a ‘Jacob’, not thinking for a moment that it would be him after all those years. It was.

***

Meanwhile since 2023, along much of the waterfront in Lagos, Nigeria, there have been ongoing forced evictions of people living in what are termed ‘informal settlements’, makeshift housing and homes in areas such as Makoko, the largest of such informal settlements built on stilts in the water, where 40,000 people alone have lost their homes. These demolitions and evictions, condemned by UN experts as constituting domicide and crimes against humanity, have destroyed communities all under the governmental guise of ‘development’, yet all the while people are simply further deprived of access to basic services and infrastructure. Often local thugs or ‘area boys’ are contracted by the authorities to go around violently enforcing such evictions, while those who have tried to protest have ended up being tear-gassed and had their homes torched by police. (PS there is a really interesting NPR programme about it all here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5821608)

***

More recently, my encounters with displacement have been closer to ‘home’ in the UK. In 2013, on the road on which my husband was living in a flat share in Brixton, London, there were evictions of 75 squatters living in the neighbouring houses. It was claimed the residents had not been paying council tax, although some say the real reason for the evictions was to make the housing stock available for sale to private developers and further gentrification of the area. There was an eery quiet in the wake of these evictions, with the windows now boarded up and menacing-looking security guards standing watch at the entrances to each building. I don’t think we think of displacement so much in a UK context, but it is certainly there.

***

To answer your second question, about my own experiences of displacement, I guesssome of it I have touched on already what with the evictions my husband and I witnessed in Brixton in 2013.

I guess, having been an expat in my early childhood, and then an immigrant now living in Sweden, it’s something that has shaped my identity, become an inalienable part of how I perceive the world and my surroundings. It has shaped my relationship to my ‘homeland’.

I think ‘displacement’ in the sense that I have moved from my original place of origin so much, has elicited a certain amount of detachment in me. I think this is a security mechanism. I think due to the transience you experience as an expat, where people move on every couple of years, you learn not to get to attached to people or places. I wish I could remember how I dealt with this as a child and teach my adult self this. I really can’t remember how. Or how my parents dealt with it and how it impacted them. Obviously, ‘displacement’ in our sense was something we opted to do, not forced.

And yet, it does embed in you certain internal defence mechanisms, in the same way that it allows you to see the world from a wider lens. I don’t like goodbyes, I actively avoid them where I can, but also, I don’t give up on friendships or people just because they or I are geographically far apart from one another. At the same time, I am hesitant to revisit places from my childhood for fear that the reality will taint the fond memory. I remember for instance my mother’s friend advising us not to revisit our old house in Accra, because the now owner had altered it so drastically. I remember the last time I pulled out of the drive of said house en route to the airport to go to boarding school in England – what neither my parents nor my brother or I knew at the time was that this was going to be goodbye forever… My father unexpectedly would be posted to Russia. Not properly ever being able to say goodbye to aplace that shaped my childhood and in which much of my identity and sense of person was born has I think gone on to have a profound impact in me. I will never deprive my own children of this kind of a proper ‘goodbye’. I think even to this day, I have suppressed something deep inside of me as a result of that time that will remain suppressed forever.

I think the richness of experience I have had due to having lived in so many places has imbued me with a certain freedom as an adult – it instils in you a certain faith in humanity and a lack of fear of the ‘other’, almost to the point that there is no ‘other’. I think this perception of the ‘other’ is what is so profoundly limiting to the entire of the human experience. It does mean that the boundaries of your ‘parent’ culture vs. the culture you find yourself in start to blur – they shift along with your changing identity. I find it fascinating how as a foreigner somewhere, as you acclimatise and integrate (or maybe don’t) your attitude to your host and parent cultures are constantly shifting… In how you relate to others, in how you relate to your mother tongue, your second language, your third language… It’s like shelves constantly being reordered. Over time, the different entities occupy different spaces on the shelves.

In light of the above, I feel as though I almost belong nowhere. That ‘belonging’ is somethingyou forego. And seeing how my parents are, and their relationship to the UK, there is a ‘Britishness’ in them that I will never have, despite having been educated there and despite ‘90s Brit expat culture being rooted firmly in that ‘fete-loving’, ‘rule-Britannia’ old-school Britishness that almost makes the UK you return to seem somehow less British than its postcolonial expat outposts abroad. The Britain my parents pined for and lusted after was the Britain of their childhood. And yet, it didn’t feature in mine, so I don’t.

With my great gratitude and admiration.

To be human means, for most of us, to undergo displacement at some time in our lives.

We may experience uprootedness in ways both common and uncommon: going from school to school, maybe a childhood move (or several), family life and friendship groups undergoing transformations, and other shifts in life which transform our place in the world.

There is voluntary and involuntary displacement. There is displacement originating from our outer and inner worlds…. There is displacement due to relationships forming and to their breaking down. There is displacement that comes from escaping something, and displacement that comes from seeking something.

With the process come adjustments (mental and physical), transformation in the self (pursuits, interests, beliefs, struggles).

Why focus on the displacement of women?

Because women typically have a specific place, wherever they live in the world, there are forms of displacement, I would say, which are specific to them.

In 2026, women remain attached, at the global level, to a specific duty of care in the family context and often in the workplace. By this I mean that most care jobs worldwide (in countries in which women are a part of the paid workforce) are held by women, to say nothing of unpaid care hours worked by women, by default, in their daily lives.

Crucially, and alas always topically, women in families dealing with forced displacement (i.e. migration due to war, extreme economic hardship and other forms of major insecurity) continue to be faced with discrimination (often a knock-on effect from earlier discrimination, impacting upon their educational and socio-economic opportunities), linguistic barriers when caring for their children and dependents in unknown educational, health and social systems and crippling domestic isolation in unknown, unreadable surroundings.

The transition of women into parenthood almost inevitably entails displacement from the world of work, and, all too often, removal from an equal say in how household capital is managed.

Care for elderly relatives is the presumed remit of women in many environments and can entail their withdrawal from the wider world, too.

The gaze on girls and women travelling far (or travelling from far) to study or train professionally is a noticeable phenomenon, across cultural frontiers.

The aging of women can, I think, entail a specific form of displacement as well. Those past the age of procreation are understood to have, in so many contexts worldwide, less to offer society. There is a vast global spectrum of mechanisms in which older women can be removed from the public eye.

At a more abstract level, women are seen, typically, as guardians of morality in their cultures (being in the main the ones who raise the children). To transgress morality when you are female is to invite a specific form of displacement from your community.

And when states collapse, economically, politically, socially, the fallout in the domestic sphere is faced by women in a specific way. Family units must be kept going, sustenance and safety in the home secured as much as possible, but the blow to the agency and security dealt to women in this context means displacement from (what was) their society, too.

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The topic is gigantic….

And it could be broken down into a myriad of culturally and geographically-specific case studies.

I have chosen four (wildly unrelated) books I admire, two of them works of fiction and two of them non-fiction. My plan is to use some of the key stories they tell as kindle for my upcoming exploration of what displacement looks like and can entail, today, for women, during my live video, for which I will have interviewed (in advance, in this case) Nathalie Wilson. She (as well as a treasured old friend of mine) is a fellow linguist of British origin, living in Stockholm (as of recently also a Dutch citizen), who was raised mostly in Ghana and Nigeria.

I felt she was one of the very-best placed people I knew in the world to take a versatile look at this theme with me.

I. Jbara, in Confidences à Allah, by Saphia Azzedine.

Jbara grows up in a family of shepherds in poverty-plagued rural Morocco. Her resolve to escape misery leads her into years of sex work followed by inprisonment. Salvation as she sees it comes to her when she marries an elderly Imam with an older first wife. She builds her own unique intimacy with this man and with God. She tells her life’s story to God, some time after these events. It is not a confession.

“To believe in you, Allah, is anything but easy. It’s something you have to fight for. It’s a tough fight, like the one servants go through, fighting against dust. You can never win. The fight is eternal.” […]

“What keeps my faith alive is my love for you. Loving you meant I could love myself and loving myself meant I could love others. There is no such thing as Good or Evil. You are far too subtle for that. You are nothing but nuance, Allah, and that is why I love you.” (Translation my own.)

Jbara starts her life in a community of economic outcasts. Breaking away entails displacement from morality, as she knows it. (This has to be one of the oldest stories in the world…)

But she works her way back into society by building her own, personal relationship with God and with a world in which men have explicit power over women, from the sexual to the religious.

She tells the story of her life to God as a kind of pilgrimage, in which she regains a place in society by re-adhering to its moral and religious codes, even though the journey is a personal one.

II. Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake. A Journey of War and Peace.

“Your ancestors owe you a house, and you owe them your soul.”

“Whose are you, girl"?

“A girl must be somebody’s and the boys have the right to polygamy.”

Kassabova both belongs and does not belong in the lake area her grandmother Anastassia’s family left, rebuilding a life in New Zealand at the end of the Cold War. Her journey in To The Lake takes her around ancestral land of lakes and mountains at the border between Greece, Albania and Northern Macedonia.

Lake Ohrid, inscribed, as she phrases it, in her DNA, is “a bastion of Eastern puritanism”, replete with hammams and other trappings of an old orient which is Islamic, but also Christian and Judaic. A woman could not walk down the main street twice on the same day (she would be exhibiting herself if she did, Kassabova recounts.

Her grandmother’s house was estranged by Tito’s government, after the Second World War and the drop of the iron curtain. But Communism did not erase the ages-old mindset of the place, with its gender-based strictures. Kassabova describes how her maternal line’s intellectual curiosity was continually stifled in a society “preoccupied with death and with reputation.”

Her travels struck me as a kind of meditation on the move. What is the legacy she has carried around with her, all these years? That fragmented, at once painful and magical, Balkanic legacy…

At a monastery build around the resting place of Saint Naum, she ends her travels with these thoughts:

“Whose life are you living?” it struck me, is a question which all women, in the process of their displacement, ask themselves eventually.

III. Damon Galgut: The Promise.

Galgut’s arresting family tale stretches, with a kind of geometrical precision, from the untimely death of a Jewish woman married into an Afrikaaner land-owning family towards the end of Apartheid. Her children grow up. The son takes over the estate. The elder sister meets a violent fate. And the younger sister, Amor, has vowed, living a life of restraint and sacrifice much at odds with the ways of the rest of her family, to honour the promise made to Salome, a household employee, by the long-dead mother, to give Salome the deed to the house she lives in on the family property, and to the land surrounding it.

The displacement of women here (based on my personal reading of this extraordinary story) is not geographical. It is socio-cultural, in the case of Amor (she fights her family to uphold the rights of the black woman whom she loves as a maternal figure). And in the case of Salome, the displacement is political. She is “raised” into “real” citizenship, having lived thus far to serve this Afrikaaner micro-world. She remains poor nonetheless. And she has grown old. The bond between the women removes them, in a way, from their respective worlds.

Jessica Bruder: Nomadland.

I stumbled across this striking and painstaking piece of long-form journalism in the social sciences shelves of “Chapters” (no longer called that but my husband still uses the old name nostalgically and therefore so do I) in London, ON, several years ago. It would be quite a long time before the film would come out and could be viewed on almost all platforms (except, of course, on Amazon).

Bruder tells the tragedy of many, many members of the American generation born into unprecedented economic growth who would have to reinvent themselves as itinerant workers (inter alia, at Amazon warehouses), at what for most of them should have been retirement age, having lost their homes in the turmoil of 2008.

The protagonist in Bruder’s book is Linda. Linda’s middle-class existence, which she built for herself in spite of an unstable and traumatic upbringing, collapses in the midst of the Great Recession when she is in her early sixties. She receives Social Security checks but these no longer cover her rent. The woman who, if she’d been just a decade or two older, would have settled, most likely, into a sedate, safe retiree life makes an alternative plan: she works seasonal job after seasonal job in different states from Arizona to California in a bid to save enough money to buy land on which she can build an Earthship (a self-sustaining home).

This is the story of a woman turned out on her ear (like many others) by the conventional social contract. There is great hardship in this woman’s life in its later years, but there is (perhaps) an unforeseen liberation to it, as well.

Women displaced in the context of mores, religion, culture, geography, politics and economic strife, seen through these and other narratives, is what I will be looking at during my live on 18 July at noon Eastern.

The overarching questions I would like to address are:

• How might the displacement of women impact societies, both local and global?

• Can we characterise the impact of displacement on women themselves?

Do please join.

Cheers everyone,

Louise

Those who are familiar with my writing know I have proven my ability to over-share on numerous occasions.

“I own it, I write it,” is my justification for exposing much of myself to the general internet public (and thank you so much for reading).

There is one respect in which I am typically an extremely private person, however. And this is childbirth. It is not, in fact, something I have ever written about.

So (yes) here I go…

My first out of seven pregnancies (and the one which would give me my treasured and only child) ended in 2019 at forty-one weeks with a hasty early-morning induction (“your water broke days ago and you didn’t even notice?” I was asked).

There followed many hours of being in my room unassisted, but for my poor defenceless husband saying “contraction?” every once in a while, the question being met each time with a “Shut the [expletive] up.”

Eventually the midwife I had been assigned to (and who had been busy elsewhere) found me curled in a ball on the bathroom floor having vomited profusely from pain, said “oh, you’re not ok at all,” and from that moment on probably left the other (likely less dramatic) lady she was taking care of in the hands of a trainee midwife. I was brave at no point. I took all the drugs I could get and demanded more. I barely remember being on the delivery table. That glorious evening on the threshold of Midsummer, my extraordinarily pretty newborn (not just my doped-up New Mom’s view) was wrapped in white cotton, a white cotton hat placed on her head, her precious buttery skin squirming against mine.

I was in the system from the word go. From the first positive test. I attended every appointment with midwives and OBGYNs and was so powerfully good at freaking myself out at the slightest (perceived) change to anything going on in my body, I went out of my way to make up reasons for more appointments (and French maternity care is on the whole very thorough).

I read masses of pregnancy-related books, listened to masses of pregnancy-related podcasts and could never tear myself away from Mom-to-be blogs and online fora for more than a couple of hours at a time.

In trawling through the content on these online spaces, I came across a story.

It was a terribly distressing story. A woman somewhere in the US without a fixed abode, with, from what I could tell, a rather alternative lifestyle overall, had chronicled her pregnancy online day after day from its starting point, until the time her labour started (at term).

She had no medical monitoring whatsoever. This was the choice she had made. One line of hers, in her online journal, as I recall, went something like this:

“ “You need to get check-ups” this friend said to me at a BBQ when I was five months along. “Only a doctor can tell you if you’re healthy or not.” Wait, what?!…”

In this particular case, this unmonitored pregnancy, this “wild” pregnancy as I came to learn it was called, did not end with a living baby.

I came to look (kind of despite myself, as anxious and darkly fascinated parents-to-be sometimes do) into the “movements” or the “communities” across the Western world (but mostly, as I understand, in North America) practising pregnancy and childbirth with no medical care or intervention at all, by choice.

I was raised by two doctors. I was obedient to the fullest (as mentioned) as an expectant mother in the (rather bossy) French healthcare system. I have my own views on the phenomenon of wild pregnancies. But they will not be the focus of my live with Dr Cassandra Yuill.

In preparation for this Live (20 June 12:00 Eastern) I have been exploring understandings, across society, media and art, thus far, on this particular choice made by parents-to-be.

I will be discussing with Cassandra the voices most heard (in support of, cautioning against, etc) this position adopted by individuals navigating pregnancy, the views of the midwifery profession in various Western countries on how to approach it, and how she sees this particular (niche) reality progressing, in an age of increasing mistrust in medical practice (perhaps somewhat aligned at times with “anti-vax” mentality), strain on healthcare in the majority of developed countries, and evolving conceptions of womanhood, parenthood and community, and the (not entirely new) wish to “count on nature” and on women’s physical and perhaps even spiritual belonging to it.

Ahead of this interview, we warmly invite input from anyone able or unable to follow this live event. Please DM me with any comments, experiences, questions or anything you would like to share.

Looking forward to Cassandra’s insights and to what should be a different and enriching discussion.

All best,

Louise

More on Dr Yuill and her research:

Dr Cassandra Yuill • City St George's, University of London

Cassandra Yuill — Critical Midwifery Studies Collective

Me:

I am not a straightforward woman. Not a straight-up or straight-down-the line woman (and no, not a straight woman either).

I accept the pronoun "they" with the same readiness as I accept the pronoun "she." I default most often to referring to myself as a "person," a "parent," a "sibling," a "spouse," etc. It just feels more comfortable, somewhat liberating, and perhaps, in the socio-cultural sphere I inhabit (a lot of social scientists form my immediate family and friendship groups), perhaps even more "correct" or "progressive."

"Neutral" identification is a habit I have fallen into, simply put, somewhere on my path, even though I couldn't tell you exactly why.

It could be that talking about my identity, laying emphasis on myself as a woman, makes me feel, well, reduced to something, subject to a certain gaze, a certain historic weightiness, and to certain expectations of who I might be, bearing in mind that I was raised in a highly inclusive environment in which I always had first-class access to education, health and pursuits (of pretty much any nature- I took flying lessons aged fifteen, before I even started to drive).

It gets more complicated.

At thirty-eight years old, I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter and an aunt (I tick all the corresponding in-law boxes, too). I am a fundamentally family-centred individual. I am highly domestic (just look at the title of my own Substack publication). I am a caregiver. In my current iteration, overwhelmingly so. (Crushingly so, I might tell you, on a bad day.) To a child with special needs, most of the time unassisted. To octogenarian parents with a range of complex health issues. To my nephew and niece also, on occasions (and much to my delight).

The jobs I have had before and since starting a family have been in teaching, childcare, marketing, humanitarian work and in the strongly female-dominated sector that is translation and interpreting. Girl jobs, right? Girls are carers. Girls are communicators. My mother (born 1945 in England) is a long-retired pediatrician and anaesthesiologist. My late grandmother (born 1920 in then-British India) was a journalist. Fancy, privileged girl jobs (outstanding, too, especially for their generations), but girl jobs nonetheless. However smart, however high-performing, all of us along my maternal line have inevitably held a clear, traditional womanly function we couldn't quite be rid of. Degrees and salaries were never a way of escaping traditional domestic roles when home from work or at the weekends. (My sister is a political anthropologist-turned-banker; she arguably has done the best job of undoing our paradigm.)

This is where the gender blindness I took to be rock-solid, growing up (again) in a place of considerable privilege, starts to look shaky to me.

I have been known to have the occasional heated late-night "discussion" with my husband on his "mansplaining feminism" to me (i.e. making the case to me, as a man, that we should all be more feminist). I never rush to centre-stage when a "feminist" issue is raised. I have demonstrated, I have campaigned, but never in relation to women's rights. If insistently pressed, I will concede to being probably some sort of low-level "equality feminist." Probably a cop-out one.

Something is wrong with this picture, and I will be taking the invaluable opportunity that is joining WP to delve properly, for once, into what exactly holds me back from fully identifying and from fully accepting myself as a woman, and from engaging with challenges which have followed women around since the dawn of civilisation and yes, still do.

What I most admire about WP is the eclectic nature of its material, its ardent honesty in tackling complex social, moral and cultural questions and the beautiful diversity to be found in the voices of my three co-authors.

My plans:

I have identified two key themes I will be covering here, in posts and live discussions.

I. A series of posts focused on the theme of Displaced Women. I choose to keep this topic as broad as possible, the better to make use of my own (fiction and non-fiction) library and seek collaboration with contributors able to offer unique insights into what it means to be displaced, with the added particularity of being female- whether in the context of migration, education, work, class, spirituality or other contexts.

II. A series of live interviews on the topic (profoundly dear to my heart as you may guess) of Parenting on the Edge (echoing Postcards from the Edge intentionally, here). I will be interviewing fiction and non-fiction writers, social scientists, artists and others on what our society does not see when it comes to parents who do the job they are meant to do, every day, in adverse conditions including health issues, poverty, social isolation, abuse, and much more.

My most heartfelt thanks to and for making me feel at home on Substack from day one (two whole months ago and feels like years) and my great gratitude and admiration to as well (as the daughter of a retired Royal Navy Surgeon Commander I will be avidly following everything you do without fail :) ).

Cheers all,

Louise.