Where Are You From?

It’s a common question. A normal question for human beings whose story is about being on the move. By choice. Sometimes for no choice. Sometimes driven out from their home turf, uprooted callously by powers that be. “Where are you from?” We ask one another, curiously, innocently. Growing up in India, this is how we open up conversations on trains, buses, in places of work or education, and in reply , we get names of places, often nearby , but also from other parts of the country. India is always on the move. But when I brought this casual conversation opener to America, I was blunder-fully lead into the wounds of this question, and its politics.

The first time I asked this question to a non-Indian may have been to an Asian girl in a lime green dress and yellow boots, playing at the edge of the Barton Creek. “Where are you from?” She looked at me with the most bewildered eyes, planted her hands on her hips, and answered matter of factly, “Austin!” Looking back, yes, my question was a stupid one that instinctively came out because the little girl did not look white. And I myself had just arrived here, and I still moved around like a tourist in this country.

That was a good lesson. I think I took it to heart, and was careful after that. I never asked that question to a little kid ever again. And to adults, it was never the first question I asked. And I always placed “originally” as a cautionary qualifier in the question. “Where are you originally from?” Years later, I would ask people what their ethnic background was. Somehow, I am unable to leave my Indian curiosity out. I love stories that people carry from their journeys, and fish for them at the slightest opportunity.

Many years later, my father asked this about his friend’s daughter-in-law. My father’s friend was born and raised in the same town in Kerala as he, but then he had married a woman from Bombay and had moved to US about 40 years back, running his own small business here. His son married a Pakistani-American girl, and it was during a visit, as we watched the wedding video and saw that the bride’s mother had some very distinct features, that my father blurted this question out, “Which part of Pakistan is she from?” In the company of an old friend, who shared his cultural background, my father should be forgiven for being his normal Indian self, and an Indian self is the excessively curious self. It was not my father’s friend who responded , but it was his American son, the bridegroom in the video, who seemed slightly offended, as was evident in his reply. “We have all migrated here from various parts of the world, and when we are here, we have become Americans. There really is no reason to think beyond that!” he said. My father seemed emabarrassed by the reply, and it still seems like an overreaction on the son’s part when I think about it. But, he must have had his reasons.

A few years after that, I heard another passionate rebuke of this question, “Where are you from?” Some women had gathered to hear from converts to Islam about their experiences being part of the Muslim community. It was then that a black sister passionately pleaded for people to be spared from enquiries into their past. “Some of us here don’t have great pasts that we want to look back to and talk about! Some of us simply don’t know where their family came from!” It was part of an urgent monologue on her part to imbibe the spirit of the Quran and be a walking Quran. “Be the book for the many that may never ever open and read it!” I forget the exact flow of ideas in her speech, but what she said about people’s pasts struck me, because of the highly emotional nature of her plea. After a while, as women chatted, two women bonded over the fact that both felt connected to a certain part of a certain city, having called it home at one point in their life. “See, this why the question is not all that bad,” I remarked with a smile, looking at the black sister, who smiled back kindly.

How significant is our past? Is it the eventual goal of our live’s journeys to transcend our pasts, as I boldly imagined at the end of my post “The Changing Flavors of Eid?”

“Like the silvery dandelion, dry and frail, scatter I must. But I ask this: when the dandelion, trapped in sunlight and flailed by the wind, finally gets scattered, is it not also because it has come of age? Is it not because it has finally been released to embrace much more than the ground that grew it?”

And yet, here I am many months later realizing that we live many cycles of that dandelion’s life in our own. Rooting at the slightest chance, we flower and seed and disperse. Again and again. And that first cycle, that first rooting, soon after being born, remains the most important. Family, home, hometown. Those draw you ever closer in a tighter embrace.

Then, what about those for whom that early childhood is a bad memory? Of those people whose collective history begins from an uprooting rather than the healthy nurturing of a fertile soil and the beneficent elements surrounding it?

I was led into how this feels and affects people as I listened to Sherman Jackson teach “Islam in Black America” on Bayanonline. The first slaves arrived in the year 1619 in two ships belonging to Dutch privateers- The White Lion and the Treasurer ( two names we do not hear as much as we hear about the Mayflower). Dr Jackson, in his quintessential theatrical style, forces us to be in their shoes and the shoes of their owners, as the latter constructed whiteness to give themselves an identity at the expense of the former, and thus thrusting over them blackness and its associated denigration as their identity. But in this country, what followed that uprooting of the slaves was a rooting, in the barest and harshest of conditions. Have you ever wondered at that dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete? That is blackness. Today, blackness is a majestic tree. Proud and confident. Defiant when needed. Sherman Jackson explains why the designation of blacks as African-American is misleading, even though blacks in America have an African past that they embrace and celebrate, since the term elides a millennium of New World history, giving the impression that blacks are African in the same way as Italian Americans are Italian. Blacks do not enjoy a hyphenated identity where “the right side of the hyphen assumes the responsibility of protecting the cultural, religious and other idiosyncrasies of the left side.” Jackson prefers the term Blackamerican as this better reflects their struggles and their transformation into a new people in this continent.

An innocuous, curious question about someone’s past is thus also a launchpad for much politics. I arrived in US just before 9/11 and thus, I arrived here just as immigrant muslims who had been here much before me were being shaken into new realities as Americans. Immigrant Muslims who had found their way to the United States after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, that revoked the restrictions and quota system of the National Origins Act of 1925, were mostly from privileged backgrounds in their home countries. They found themselves legally white, aspiring for whiteness, and thus at odds with the Blackamerican Muslims whose religion was grounded in a protest sentiment to whiteness as much as it was based on Muslim characteristics. After September 11, 2001, “anti-immigrant muslim backlash made it clear that the immigrant Muslims had acquired a social non-whiteness that could not be offset by their legal whiteness” (from the book “Islam and the Blackamerican” by Dr Jackson) . I am not surprised that I myself felt lost in those new realities when I came here. If America had its shine, it seemed a bit hard to get. I was faced with an uphill task of understanding a new cultural context, with only a naive mind to my aid. Often questions of identity seemed like a burden preventing me from the adaptations that were required of me. And I wished to transcend the need for an identity. I embraced the foreign and looked out the window, at the new people and new ways, always unsure how to blend in. Islam seemed to offer an answer, a universal idea to stand on. I resisted the conflation of islam with identity, and sought an interpretation that would agree with American values of individualism, democracy and freedom of religion. It is these ideas that led me on, and I imagined prophet Muhammad to be a to be vanguard of the democratic spirit. In theory, it was all perfect. There would be no conflict between my Muslimness and my Americanness. But in practice, I was left standing by the window and looking out! Muslimness as well as Americanness happen in community. These ideas are negotiated, contested, and shaped by cooperative action. Alone, I am nothing but insignificant.

If it was not for the black lives matter movement, Muslim Space may not have embarked on the group learning of the course “Islam in Blackamerica” on Bayanonline. The course opened my eyes to contested nature of identities, especially in a racist/ casteist social system. On the one hand, there is the racist, for whom the ostracized communities are lesser human beings. On the other hand, there are the liberal humanists, who tyrannize with their false universals. “Why talk about race? Why hold on to limiting identities, when you can just be human,” they will admonish. But it takes some education to open our eyes to the fallacy of being “just human”. A human is always situated in a history, a culture, and a place. But then, as Dr Jackson says in his book “Islam and the Blackamerican”, some history is “internalized, normalized and then, forgotten as history.” This allows some to speak in absolutist, universal terms about being human, but what is really happening in such speech is a conflation of humanness with the perspectives of the dominant group. For a person outside of the dominant group, following the admonition to be “just a human being” would result in a solitary particle separated from one’s religion, family, ethnic community, much like the dandelion seed I imagined, but one without any germ within to germinate and grow.

So, now the question is, “Where have I come from?” It is certainly an interesting time for a person like me. One would think that my Indianness, the outcome of being born and raised in India, would not be a contested issue, yet it is so today. The rumbling against Muslims in India began with the demolition of Babri Masjid in the year 1992 by the hindutva mob. I was in high school then, and I overheard a classmate musing, soon after it happened, “Why don’t they just go to Pakistan?” The attack on the identity of India’s Muslims that began in all earnestness then, brought us to Modi’s India with its accompaniments of public lynchings and legal discrimination in the form of a Citizenship Amendment Act. And then one day, an Indian friend introduced me to her Pakistani friend saying, “She is also from Pakistan.” All that she must have meant to do what to convey to her friend that I am a Muslim.

So, I realize that my Indian identity is slowly being stripped off from me, even though my roots run deep in Kerala. Muslim community emerged in Kerala as a result of the trade links that thrived with Arabia. Legend has it that a local ruler traveled towards Makkah to meet the prophet, and died during his onward journey to be buried somewhere in Yemen. In Kasaragod, my hometown, rests Malik Deenar (d 748 CE), the Persian disciple of Hasan al Basri, who was one of the first Muslim scholars to arrive in Kerala. Arab merchants and travelers brought the new faith, intermarried and thus grew the mappila community that I am from. When Portuguese arrived with the intention of colonization, it is that very Muslim community that fought them under the banners of local kings. Even today, mappila community has its distinct characteristics, and a thriving community exists in America too.

But I realize that my past will mingle and merge in this new context. My children hardly speak Malayalam, though they do understand, and did speak well in the initial years of their lives, only to lose it to schooling in English. I think I held a callous disregard for preserving my past and my heritage. For one thing, my education in a curriculum designed by the Central Board of Secondary Education gave me little appreciation for my own local heritage. I never learned Malayalam in school, my whole education was based in Hindi and English, both languages that I never used for day to day conversations, except when necessary in the classrooms. I had a terrible inhibition to speak English in social contexts before I came to US. But then, Malayalam is a language that I never mastered beyond conversational levels! Talk about twisted relationships with language. So, I am not surprised that my children don’t speak Malayalam. When they are in India, I do wish I had taught them as best as I could, especially because it would have fostered a better connection with their grandparents and grand aunts and uncles.

So here I am, between many worlds and cultures. Many conflicting ideas and notions. Amidst all that, it is certainly faith that brings a perspective that keeps me grounded. There are moments of utter loneliness, but I am always drawn back to life by my roots. Engendered by my pasts and nurtured by God’s ever present love, made visible through family, friendships, and communities.

Now tell me, where are you from?