From primal to colonial wound: Bolivian adoptees reclaiming the narrative of healing

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a critical analysis of the narratives of Bolivian adoptees in Belgium. We discuss how the adoptees look back upon the imagery of family and culture invoked by their parents and wider social environment and how this imagery has affected their sense of self and belonging. We argue that the adoptees’ narratives testify of a discursive struggle to reclaim control over their lives and histories. While they draw upon prevailing discourses that tend to imagine adoptees as ‘wounded’, they do so in diverse, complex and at times contradictory ways. Their perceptions of the familial and cultural imagery show that while they do not entirely reject the idea of being hurt, they seem to make a shift from explaining this ‘wound’ in individual-psychological terms to explaining it in social terms, making use of emerging anti-racist and decolonial perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational adoption
• Bolivian adoptees
• colonial wound
• culture work
• identity formation
• healing

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Bolivian adoptees who participated in the study on which this paper is based. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘colonial’ to refer to not just historical colonialism but also to ongoing forms of ‘coloniality’, i.e. the perpetuation and reconfiguration of colonial legacies in hegemonic discourses, practices and social relations (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2005).

2. Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. Available at https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/full-text/?cid=69 (accessed 30 May 2018).

3. We place terms such as ‘transracial’, ‘race’, ‘white’, etc., between quotation marks the first time they are used in the text, to emphasise that they are socially constructed – as opposed to objective biological markers.

4. The number of Bolivian children that have been placed in the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium, is unknown.

5. The names of all the participants are replaced with pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

6. The word ‘Indian’ was used repeatedly by the participants to refer to indigenous people. We aim the emphasise that we are aware of the colonial connotations of the word.

7. Te Awa's recommendations concerning intercountry adoption are available at   http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d0abee_e7965980e22941f49043de71fb87b999.pdf (accessed 7 November 2018).

8. Kim (2007) uses the term ‘unnatural histories’ to refer to adoptees’ shared histories of displacement and search for belonging, while at the same time their lives have been marked by untraditional forms of kinship.

9. East-Fleming refers to being an inhabitant of the Belgian province of East-Flanders.

10. Hübinette’s (2007) use of performativity theory suggests that transracial adoptees’ white subjectivities destabilise dominant notions of whiteness while they at the same time underline how colonial power mechanisms set the limits of racial identity formation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders under Grant [number 11B8718N].