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Lion may not have got an Oscar, but for first- and second-generation Australians it is a gift

Ruby Hamad

 "We swan about in our privileged lives; it makes me sick. I want to go home."

And with those words, Dev Patel's Saroo tapped into the hearts of first and second generation children of immigrants everywhere.

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A five-year-old Indian boy is adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.

To arrive in Australia at a single digit age having been born elsewhere, as did Saroo Brierley – both the real person and the character in the film Lion – is to oscillate between feeling like you may belong in more than one place at once, and fearing that you actually belong nowhere.

Saroo is Australian. His parents adopted him as a five-year-old. He supports the Australian cricket team. His accent is as Aussie as they come. He was not raised "between two cultures" as many children of immigrants are.

And yet, as the years passed, and memories of his childhood in India began to haunt him, so too did a sickening feeling slowly arise – one many of us who were also brought here as very young children are familiar with: that it was all a big mistake. That you shouldn't be here. That it is not right that you live with such comforts when millions of people in the old country, the people that look like you, have less than nothing.

That you are not living the life you were meant to.

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And you start to feel the pull to go "home."

But of course, you can't. Not really. Because it will never be what you left as a child – and while you may romanticise it in your mind, the reality for those of us who do go back for the first time as adults, is that you know you couldn't live there now. Not after having the life you ended up with. And the locals don't see you as one of them anyway.

Watching Lion for the first time last week, I felt for the first time in many years, a pang of regret at my decision to (despite graduating from one the most famous film schools in the country) give up on my dream of writing and making films.

I grew up in Australia, but the stories I wanted to tell were in Arabic. I spend most of my time around non-Arabic speakers, but the only characters that seemed real to me were Arabs.

But I learned pretty quickly – or thought I did – that no one wants to watch movies about brown people speaking a foreign language.

We have all, whether we realise it or not, been conditioned to identify with whiteness. This is the centre, the default human form; everything else is niche with limited appeal.

But this film with much of its dialogue in Hindi and Bengali – albeit made by white producers and a white director – shows this for the fallacy it is; an untruth we have been fed in order to justify rather than explain the already existing whiteness of the industry.

Of course, very few of us were lost and adopted to a foreign land as Saroo was. We may have grown up in Australia but we were always conscious of our roots, our nationality, our difference, and our extended families back home. Nonetheless, many of us still wonder who or what we would be if our parents had made different decisions.

And many of us feel the guilt of having "escaped" war, or conflict, or poverty, or the small mindedness of peasant life that may have been our destiny of things had gone slightly differently.

We may feel uncertain about where our true home lies. Because, try as we might, we can't erase the past when it lives on our skin, or in our dark curly hair, or in the looks of pained confusion on our parents' faces when they see us slipping away from them and their culture.

I felt this in Lebanon last year when I returned for the first time since my family migrated to Sydney in the late 70s, as refugees from the Lebanese civil war. Ironically, I had returned to do a story on refugees from my mother's country, Syria, Lebanon's once domineering neighbour now engulfed in a horrendous war of its own.

When the plane descended into Beirut I felt an unmistakable familiarity, a sense of homecoming. But it was short-lived. The city was chaotic, my Arabic less than fluent, I was at once a prodigal daughter and a stranger. Like Saroo, I wanted to go home, but home was now a foreign land; they had moved on without me.

Lion is a film for everyone, but to the children of the diaspora that have felt the seismic upheaval of being scattered across the globe in the wake of that earthquake we call colonialism, it is a love letter.

We have been gifted a story that, however unique, is linked to our own stories of immigration; of guilt at having it "so good" compared to those back home, of our thoughts at what could have been, and of our fears that we may never know if we can find the place where we belong.

Lion may not have won any of its six Oscar nominations, but its stunning global popularity with audiences is a reminder that our stories matter too; they always have.

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