“Where are you from?” you ask and I’ve learnt more about you in that question than you will ever learn from me. It’s the manner in which you ask it, you see, what you want from me in my answer and my inability with words.
Brown men who drive taxis have asked me this question, a short, pointed look in the rear view mirror. They note the mini-skirt, early hours and post club high-heel hobble. They want to know how bad is this bad girl? Indian-bad? Muslim-bad? Do-I-know-her-family-bad?
The white collegue, asks hesitantly, fumbling over the words and drawing out the question with ‘erms’ and ‘uhs’. They want to dip into their exotic, tell me of their taste for faraway food and landscapes.
The brown sisters, usually they ask as a matter of course. After a head to toe scan for clues they want confirmation of which sub-sub-sub culture of brown woman I belong to. Religion, country of origin and caste. It’s ironic how the most similar, search the hardest for difference.
Usually I feign ignorance and pretend I don’t know what or why you are asking. “I live in England” or “I’m from Yorkshire”. I may relent – “I was born in the North-east of England”, “My parents are from the Punjab in India”. It depends on how pissed off I am in that moment about your need to ask this of me. To use this lazy interrogation to attempt to understand me at best, or at worst, place me somewhere in your neat and simple catergorizaton of the world.
In the uncommon event that I want to answer you fully, I’ll tell you, “I’m from nowhere”. You will look at me like I’m a crazy women and I won’t have the courage or the words to tell you what I mean by that.
That I’m a kid of the diaspora and I am from no one place. Not only because my parents migrated but because I refuse the limitations, the simplicity and the comfort of being from one place.
I’m from a place that you can’t easily find, it’s not on a map and doesn’t have borders. It stretches back and forth through time in a way I cannot speak of but can feel instead, as I, a girl from the future, cannot let go of the past. I’m from a place of fire and fight, it’s poetry in a language I don’t understand, green abundant fields I’ve never seen yet I know they’ll feed me still. It’s the place that I’m forever migrating to or is it from?
And sometimes, I see that place I’m from in you. In the friend who speaks in foreign tongues but when she inquires into her people’s horrors and histories, I can see that place I’m from too. As the restaurant owner, bellows in a typically Punjabi fashion and calls me, sadi Punjabi kuri, I feel the place I’m from. When the DJ plays melodious sounds like Paar Langa De Ve and we dance, only partly on the dance floor and mostly in that place – the place where we are from.
Those moments, when we are from the same place in this present moment, are electric. I would almost call them home but I’m not the settling type
It’s an unruly, unpredictable energy that draws me unconsciously to these shared spaces in those who dare to reveal. Despite the trepidation and risk of revealing too much I am always driven by the thought of who knows what that could set in motion and where it could take us.
Don’t ask the question for I can’t answer but if we put the words aside for a while and if you can show me the places we’ve both frequented, we may get somewhere.
parveenoo 