diaspora

summary: reckoning with the cold tail of autumn and my relationship to my heritage.

prayer

every moment of grace by my goddess heals me. I will have everything I want. I will be satisfied by these waters. I will heal. I will be full with purpose and life and boundless love. the stone placed upon my chest will shatter into sand and gravel. it will all be okay, I am sure of it. oh mother, my lady of the abyss, fill my hollow heart with your seawater. make me like you, teeming with life in your tide pools, overflowing with contentment and happiness. may your tides rise forevermore.

doorways

I recently saw my friend Eleanor. we discussed drawing and art at length and caught up with one another, though we hadn't spent much time with one another in person at all yet. with no particular aim after we finished our coffee, we wandered around town and I took several pictures. we passed a tall apartment building that I've admired from the bus before with these long, red stripes down the side of its concrete face. I didn't realize they were window shutters.

the autumn air is a cool sheet of linen across my neck. ranks of golden leaves clatter in the skirts of maples. the sun begins to set. gold washes to gray as lean, young night-shadows crawl like ivy over every surface, save for the doorways, where the glow of lights above and behind each is an invitation to warmth and comfort and security.

it's half-gray out and the evening light is waning. we approach a low apartment building with a series of long windows across, each at regular intervals spanning the width of their respective apartments. in one, there is a mixing station replete with liquors and mixers and barware. in the next, many vases with flowers. a square picture frame sits beside them, facing away from us down below. in the next window, someone's desk and their office chair. the following window is obscured by garbage, by stacked plates, plastic bags, a paper soda cup, and wrappers. the last window is dark. still, a little light from outside illuminates the room faintly, and inside, there is nothing at all. nothing in the window, no decorations, and so far as we can tell, no furniture.

diaspora

it cannot be summed up neatly. god, how I wish it could be. I wish it could be simple.

I am asian. in the united states, this means something specific. I do not meet the american criteria for asianness. I am brown with large eyes. I am not from china, japan, taiwan, hong kong, macau, singapore, thailand, burma, vietnam, laos, cambodia, korea, or mongolia. (the asianness of filipinos and malays is contentious among the scientific racism whites of america as well.) I was not raised with my culture, and even if I had been, it wouldn't matter for this point.

one time, I filled out a demographic survey at work as part of a broader employment equity feedback project. our payroll specialist in the office beside mine was reviewing these and approached me, bemused and confused.
"wait, you're asian?"
"yeah, I'm indian."
"so you're not asian then, why'd you put that down?"
"isn't india in asia?"
"yes, but …"

it went on like this for a while before she resigned and returned to what she was doing. not accepted, to be clear. it had just ceased to be worth her time. even to a korean american, I was not asian. this interaction and others like it have sat with me for a long time, tying and untying knots inside my stomach. it wouldn't be until very recently that I would learn that this sentiment is a primarily american phenomenon.

I am indian and I'll introduce myself as such in conversation. how indian? india is an incredibly multicultural country. my father is a man I neither care for nor respect, and everything I've heard about him has led to my understanding that he is a monster with a heart of deep cruelty, and still better than his father before him. despite this, I know that I can reach past him, around him, to the greater ancestry beyond him.

but my indianness is complicated by the fact that my father is not from india. if it comes up in conversation which side of punjab my ancestry lies in, other indians I meet tend to immediately grow cold and distant or suspicious. there have thankfully been exceptions to this from those who recognize the partition of 1947 to be among the worst crimes of the british, and who believe in a pan-indian identity, superseding the borders drawn to separate the hindus and the muslims.

the partition split my ancestors' land down the middle. punjab is now half in india, half in pakistan. between the two, it's convenient that I believe in a pan-indian postcolonial identity because more americans will take kindly to hearing I'm indian than to hearing that I'm pakistani.

pakistan simultaneously means something significant and nothing at all. if I am compelled to specify, I just say I'm punjabi. it's true. my father's family are muslim, however, not hindu or sikh, and it feels disingenuous to pretend that east punjab, that the punjab of india post-raj, post-partition, is the one I wholly belong to. I want to have it, I want to claim it as my own. it is my own, in a slightly more distant sense. it would be sweeter.

but instead my lineage is in west punjab, in faisalabad. my family is muslim. I thank my swords and stars that I was born here instead of there. pakistan is one of the worst places to be transgender. I'll leave it at that.

and here, in the diaspora, I have met next to no one else from there. here is an exhaustive list of everyone I've met from punjab in pakistan. a pleasant guy who I shared a class with in college. a boy I liked who ended up sexually assaulting someone I know and now makes killing machines for a living. a girl who blocked me because I wasn't interested in fucking her in that moment. end of list.

what do I even have? I was raised without the culture. every grasp toward it feels futile. my people would not want me. they do not want me here and they do not want me there. I am denied even the name of my own blood by other asian americans. everything I could do towards connecting with my ancestry is something I would be doing alone. and throughout it, it hardly feels like it's mine to claim, even though I'm only second generation. it feels like tremendous struggle for something that doesn't feel like it's mine to hold.

these are things my white friends don’t understand. they can try and I love them so dearly for it. most of my friends are white and the deepest complexity they have in their ancestry tends to be in genealogies. otherwise, they are historically english, french, german, etc. each with complicated histories, certainly, but none of them being hard-pressed to find another person of german descent or origin.

I've been mistaken my entire life for being latina or brazilian. I've come very close, in fact, to denying my background and pretending to be that, to conjure up a story about my father being from Jalisco, MX or São Paulo, BR. latinos and brazilians already welcome me so warmly. and for it to be simple, to be one of them as I already have been assumed to be my entire life, tempts me.

I can't, though. I just can't. it would be easy, but my stomach churns when I seriously consider it. there is something that feels so deeply wrong about denying what I am, just as much as denying my gender or my gods. I want this connection so badly, I want to have my heritage, but for it to be false, to be a lie – even an easy one, a comfortable one – it would kill me. it would eat me alive every single day. I know it with certainty.

the fact is, I know where I'm from already. down to the tribe, even, and I know that they are indigenous to the region. for a very long time, none of this felt like it was mine, not in a real or meaningful way. it's beginning to change, somehow. even if I know that I'd be killed for going there, even if it's an uphill battle to get even a scrap of this, even if I have to do this myself, I have to take it.

it's mine. it has to be mine. I know this because it feels wrong when I imagine otherwise. I know it because I know that it is in imperial interests for me not to engage with it. I didn't know that I was allowed to be upset and indignant about other asian americans engaging in the model minority myth because I didn't know that we have more in common than not, being diaspora in the america.

I know it because I have spent my entire life trying to be white when I am not and I will never be, even though I was raised in a white family. I will never be white. I don't want to be white, either. it's welcoming and it's mine to engage with – I am half white, after all. but I don't look white. some people think I do. I'll talk about that another time.

for once, I just want to say that I'm not, though, and to really mean that I know what I am. for once, I want to stop having my identity diminished and whittled away, down into nothingness. I am tired of having the wholeness of my being and my lineage blown away and reduced to a single atom as everyone rushes to disown me.

my people – MY PEOPLE – have been in punjab for tens of thousands of years, thriving and flourishing. and not just being something that exists in the world, but being substantial, being storied and creating an entire history of their own art.

and it's mine. all these things are mine.

horses, by w.s. merwin

The silence of a place where there were once horses
is a mountain

and I have seen by lightning that every mountain
once fell from the air
ringing
like the chime of an iron shoe

high on the cloudy slope
riders who long ago abandoned sadness
leaving its rotting fences and its grapes to fall
have entered the pass
and are gazing into the next valley

I do not see them cross over

I see that I will be lying
in the lightning on an alp of death
and out of my eyes horsemen will be riding

a view, by me

the part of your lips
the palm of your hand
the camber of your head resting
there on my shoulders, they soften
and eyes soften
the heart, softened too
as with everything

there are grottoes lush with ancient treasures
once dear, they are secreted away
cached in the valleys of echoes that return
back & back again
and those we retrieve
they soften us anew
in old age