My father-in-law recently shared Peter Godwin’s memoir “Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars” with me. Like my father-in-law, who grew up in Zimbabwe before migrating to Australia, Godwin is intimately familiar with the peculiar grief of belonging to multiple places and none fully. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, educated in England, and eventually settling in New York with his English wife and “transatlantic children,” Godwin’s life has been defined by displacement and loss – of a birthright, a nation, and ultimately his marriage.
The book is primarily his account of caring for his dying mother in London, a formidable woman who spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe before finally leaving at nearly 80. But woven through this intimate family portrait is something far more universal: a reflection on what it means to live as what Godwin calls a “cultural centaur” – never fully one thing, always straddling worlds, carrying exit wounds that never quite heal.
Reading Godwin’s memoir, I found myself unexpectedly moved. Here was someone articulating an experience that felt deeply familiar yet is so often left unspoken.
The Resonance of Displacement
For those of us who have built lives across borders, Godwin’s writing offers something rare: validation of an experience that defies easy categorization. Born in Germany, I’ve lived in several countries, married an Australian, and have now been based in Spain for 18 years where our two kids were born. Each move, each decision, each cultural adaptation has subtly but irrevocably shifted who I am. My cultural identity is no longer a fixed point but something more fluid and complex.
This matters for anyone working globally or leading multicultural teams. The experience of multiculturalism isn’t just about learning to navigate different cultural norms or becoming proficient in new languages. It’s about something more fundamental: a transformation of self that comes with both profound gifts and real costs. Understanding this tension – what we might call the multicultural paradox – is essential for supporting global professionals and for appreciating what they bring to our organizations.
Insights from Exit Wounds
What makes Godwin’s memoir particularly valuable is how he uses vivid metaphors to capture experiences that are notoriously difficult to articulate. Three of his images have stayed with me.
Storks stranded in northern climes. In a moving passage, Godwin watches Zimbabwean nurses who once worked with his mother gather around her London hospital bed, noting they are together again thousands of miles away, “like storks stranded in northern climes.” The metaphor is very fitting indeed: migratory birds designed for warmth and wide skies, now huddled against an unfamiliar cold. Multiculturals often carry this sense of being fundamentally displaced, adapted to one climate while living in another. We may be highly capable, professionally successful, and personally resilient. Yet something in us remains oriented toward a different horizon.
The scurvy of the soul. Godwin draws an extended parallel between the scurvy that killed thousands of sailors during long sea voyages and the cultural isolation that afflicts many who live far from their origins. Just as those sailors lacked Vitamin C, perhaps multiculturals suffer from a deficit of another C – Culture or Community – the deep, effortless belonging that comes from being surrounded by people who share your reference points, your humor, and your unspoken assumptions. This resonates powerfully with research on expatriate adjustment and the importance of maintaining cultural connections. The remedy, like with scurvy, requires intentional supplementation: seeking out cultural communities, maintaining ties to origins, and finding others who understand the experience of living between worlds.
Wars fought twice. Godwin references Viet Thanh Nguyen’s insight that wars are fought twice: first on the battlefield, second in memory. He uses this to explore how we construct narratives about our lives, often manipulating or reshaping the stories we tell ourselves about why we left, what we’ve gained, what we’ve sacrificed. For multiculturals, this is particularly complex. We create narratives of adventure and opportunity, and these may be true. But we also selectively forget or minimize the losses – relationships that faded, family moments missed, the subtle erosion of fluency in our first language, the way our children’s cultural identity differs from our own. Examining these narratives honestly, rather than accepting them uncritically, is part of the work of living authentically across cultures.
The Multicultural Paradox
What emerges from Godwin’s memoir, and what I’ve observed in my own research and life, is that being multicultural is neither purely positive nor negative. It’s paradoxical.
On one hand, multiculturals develop remarkable capabilities. Research shows that living and working abroad enhances self-clarity, as the process of continuous cultural adaptation forces deeper self-reflection. We become more cognitively flexible, more comfortable with ambiguity, better at seeing situations from multiple perspectives. These are invaluable skills in our interconnected world. We develop what I’ve elsewhere called cultural humility: a recognition that our cultural lens is just one of many valid ways of seeing the world.
On the other hand, these capabilities come with real costs. The storks remain stranded. The scurvy persists. There is a particular loneliness in being perpetually translating, perpetually explaining, perpetually navigating between worlds. Our children may grow up as “third culture kids” who struggle to answer the simple question “Where are you from?” Our relationships with family back home become more complex as we change in ways they don’t fully understand. And there is often a subtle but persistent sense of being not quite at home anywhere – what Godwin describes as the “ineffable sense of loss” that marks the multicultural experience.
Implications for Global Work
What does this mean for organizations employing global professionals or individuals considering international assignments?
First, we need to recognize that multiculturalism is transformative, not merely additive. When someone lives and works across borders for extended periods, they don’t simply add new cultural competencies to an unchanged core identity. They become fundamentally different people. This transformation should be valued and supported, not treated as a deviation from some imagined cultural “norm.”
Second, the challenges of multiculturalism are real and deserve acknowledgment. Organizations should provide spaces for multiculturals to connect with others who share this experience. This might mean expatriate communities, multicultural employee networks, or simply ensuring that conversations about culture acknowledge the complexity rather than defaulting to simplified national stereotypes.
Third, we should be more honest in the stories we tell about global work. The dominant narrative tends to emphasize adventure, career advancement, and cultural enrichment – all real benefits. But we should also acknowledge the losses, the persistent disorientation, the ways that building a life across borders can leave you feeling perpetually between worlds. This honesty helps people make more informed decisions and prepares them better for the emotional complexity of global work.
Finally, we might recognize that multiculturals bring a particular kind of wisdom to organizations. Like Godwin’s storks, they understand displacement. They know what it means to adapt to unfamiliar climates, to maintain core identity while changing, to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. In a world of increasing migration, cultural mixing, and global interdependence, these are essential capabilities.
The Beautiful Ache
Godwin’s memoir left me thinking about something I rarely discuss: the beautiful ache of being multicultural. There is genuine beauty in straddling worlds, in the expanded consciousness that comes from intimate familiarity with multiple ways of being human. But there is also an ache, a persistent low-grade grief for all the belongings that remain incomplete, all the homes we carry but never quite inhabit fully.
Perhaps the key is not to resolve this paradox but to accept it. To recognize that the exit wounds Godwin describes – the scars that mark where we’ve left people, places, and versions of ourselves behind – are part of the price we pay for lives rich in experience and perspective. These wounds may never fully heal. But they also mark us as people who have dared to build lives that cross borders, who have chosen complexity over simplicity, who understand that home can be multiple and portable rather than singular and fixed.
For those of us living this reality, and for the organizations that employ us, perhaps the most important thing is simply this: to see and acknowledge the full complexity of what it means to be multicultural. Not to romanticize it, not to pathologize it, but to recognize it as a genuinely different way of moving through the world – one that brings both profound gifts and real costs, and deserves to be honored in its full complexity.
As Godwin’s storks remind us, we may be stranded in northern climes, adapted for elsewhere. But we’re also here, together, finding ways to survive and even flourish in the cold.