WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Sthala puran is the origin story of a place in the Indian tradition – how it got its name, the ancient legends associated with it, and so on. But when we become several generations removed from our places of origin, our own stories get complex.

Where are you from? The simple questions stymies me. Specially so, if it comes from other desis.

For while “I am from India,” suffices most of the time – unless the person asking knows a little of India, and then they might ask for specifics – with desis, it gets a little complicated.

My parents were from different parts of India and my father’s family would have been considered pravasi – expatriate or immigrant – for having left their original home province a generation ago. And my brother and I were raised in a whole other part of India, absorbing those cultural influences, too.

Before the term was perhaps coined, I celebrated my “multicultural” self. More languages! More festivals! Different cuisines!

But was I from where my father’s family came from or where he came from? Was I from where my mother came from? Or from where I was raised? It took me a few years to formulate what I knew instinctively into words: I am from all of those places. All those influences shape me, make me who I am. That plurality lives within me.

But how I see myself is not necessarily how others see me. In Canada, because of the way I look or speak, I will always be identified as South Asian. On visits back to India, my responses to certain situations label me “not Indian enough”.

It’s a paradox. In Canada, I bristle at not being seen as Canadian enough. In India, it hurts when they think I am not Indian enough.

I recall the wedding of a nephew for which the clan had gathered. My sari blouses were the subject of much teasing. How did I not know shorter sleeves were trendy now? Why were the necklines so high?

A cousin came to my rescue, linking my cluelessness, my not being on-trend with latest Indian fashions to my “foreignness”.

That got me off the hook, but it pricked, just a little. In the laughter that ensued, I was aware of a feeling of sadness. If I was not “of them” who was I?

Identity unpacks in different ways – hyphenated Canadian, South Asian, of Indian origin...  and many of us who “come from away” so to speak, struggle with this dichotomy, of a division of our entities.

Countless authors have presented their take on it in previous interviews in Desi News.

Over the last twenty-five years, Shyam Selvadurai has earned a distinguished reputation as one of Canada’s most acclaimed writers. His long-awaited new novel is being published this month (see Bookworm, page 25).

Many people mispronounce his first name as Sha-yam but he’s never been tempted to change it to Sam to simplify things.

“Never crossed my mind! My cousins and siblings would have laughed at me had I done so,” he said. “We were raised to be proud of who we are. I could have taken on a more Canadian accent, but I retained mine. There’s a musicality to different accents.

“I am not Sam, I am Shyam.”

He came to Canada in 1984 at the age of 19, and describes immigrants as hungry ghosts. “Caught between worlds, our craving for homes growing ever larger because we cannot feed it.”

But he feels no conflict in his dual identities.

“I can best explain it using a Buddhist story. My core self is Shyam. That’s likened to the naked body on which we put on different identities like we change clothes. Like I do, literally so, when I travel from Canada to Sri Lanka.

“I’m from the 1.5 generation, neither first, nor second generation Canadian. I slip in and out of identities. A part of being me is feeling a little different wherever I am. Like shopkeepers in Sri Lanka instantly recognize me as being ‘not from here’ even if I am wearing local dress. But my core self remains unaltered.”

Recognized as an anti-racist educator who developed an anti-bias curriculum, Shakil Choudhury has helped organizations work through their differences to nurture environments where all people feel like they matter and belong. He described his work in Deep Diversity.

Born in Pakistan, Choudhury comes from a family with Hindu and Muslim roots in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. “I have experienced both the love and the tensions of these contexts, they reside within me. That is perhaps partly why I do the work I do. It informs why I am so committed to building relationships.”

Growing up, he avoided other brown kids and felt a distorted sense of pride at being mistaken for being Italian or Spanish. 

“Desi parents who are new immigrants may be going through a culture shock themselves,” he says. “Even those who have been here a while may underestimate the drive to belong. This drive is a core part of human behaviour – as central as the ones for food, water and shelter. Adults and children adapt in different ways and some of the things we do to adapt are healthy, others not so much. Which of the strategies we adopt promote our self-esteem and which are damaging? It is important to have that conversation.”

He gives the example of anglicising one’s name. It is not a bad thing in and of itself, but parents who allow that to happen for the sake of ease then send mixed messages when they tell their kids to be proud of who they are, to stay true to their identities.

Is he sometimes seen as a brown man with a chip on his shoulder when he launches into all this talk about identities? “Usually not!” responds Choudhury with a chuckle.

“I have learned that how we teach is as important as what we teach. I don’t go in as someone who has all the answers. I share my vulnerabilities, I tell them I have had my own share of bias and their shoulders relax. They think it’s okay to have made mistakes.”

Anar Ali is an author and screenwriter who worked on the acclaimed medical drama from CTV/NBCUniversal, Transplant.

“As a fiction writer, you make up a lot of stuff, but you also end up taking things from life,” says Ali. “Some emotional truths in Night of Power are close to me. How do you find yourself in a new place, for instance?  What happens to us when we can’t be what we want to be?  This can happen to anyone, but we see it specially in immigrant communities where people struggle to control the change within the family structure while dealing with the sea change outside...There’s also so much history in the book – the Ismaili community has had multiple migrations – and I wanted to traverse that emotional landscape respectfully.”

Ali came to Canada as a child in the mid-70s as part of the wave of Ismailis seeking safety. Her family is from Tanzania, her grandparents having moved there from Gujarat and Kuttch and found success as businessmen.

At her school in Alberta, kids didn’t know where Kenya was. They didn’t know what being a Muslim meant and she didn’t even want to get into explaining Ismailis. She grew up with the last name Mohamed Ali and the school was convinced that she was related to the boxer.

“I’m so not an athletic girl, I believe I was a great disappointment!”

That feeling of being different shows up in the book: “No, but where are you really from? As if they were border guards and he was trying to enter the country illegally. It left him feeling like he doesn’t belong here. But he doesn’t belong anywhere else, either.”

 Ali quotes the poet Meena Alexander who described herself as “a woman cracked by multiple migrations” and says she writes because this is her process of making herself whole.

“You tell your story and it becomes a universal story because we are all connected.”

In grade six, under What I Want To Be When I Grow Up, Harnarayan Singh wrote he wanted to be a hockey commentator.

Though their family physician, also a desi, told him “No one looks like you in broadcasting,” Singh became the first Sikh to broadcast an NHL game in English. And to host the phenomenally successful Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi.

His identity as a Canadian goes back more than 100 years – his great grandfather Chanda Singh was one of the first 100 Sikhs to enter Canada. And yet when he was in grade 10, in an incident he describes in his book One Game At A Time, a door-to-door salesman said, “Oh, and I just wanted to say, welcome to Canada!” before he walked away.

“I was in my own bubble,” says Singh. “Going to school, hanging out with friends. I never questioned that I belonged.”

That really hurt. “That guy thought I was a newcomer because of how I looked.”

He wrote a letter to the editor. It was a small town, and his letter resonated with people. A stranger came up to him at the grocery and said she was so sorry this happened to him.

“Learning my family history totally changed how I saw myself as a Canadian. Be comfortable in your own skin. Be proud of your heritage. You don’t have to change to fit in.” 

Award-winning author Rabindranath Maharaj captures emotions that many of us struggle to express. The sense of belonging, of coming home, for one. Where do immigrants truly belong? Does it have to be either/or, or can it be both? Does the hyphen in our identities bring us closer or does it divide us?

It’s never one or the other, he says, you take from one and add to the other. “I am both fully Canadian and Trinidadian-Canadian. My sensibility is Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian. With French, Spanish and English influences, because I was born and raised in Trinidad. I have been shaped by all of those. And all of the things that enhanced my writing were derived in Canada.

“In academia and the media, immigrants are portrayed as one kind of people, almost a stereotype. But there are so many different kinds, people who don’t proceed along prescribed lines but often reinvent themselves.”

Our idealized picture of ‘home’ is laced with dollops of nostalgia, says Maharaj. “The concept of home changes over time, but to me, home is where you feel the most comfortable. Where you understand things.” 

Carolyn Abraham’s daughter Jade was in Kindergarten when she asked her mother a tough question. “Mom, what are we?”

Abraham spun the globe and pointed to India, China, England, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, the west coast of Africa, and Jamaica, to explain where the family was from and what made them who they were.

The birth of any child pushes the past into the present, Abraham wrote in the prologue to The Juggler’s Children. “The past is never lost, not completely; we carry it with us, in us, and we look for it in our parents and our children, to give us our bearings and ground us in the continuity of life.”

Abraham’s own journey in Canada began in 1972, when her parents immigrated from England. 

“My brother had asked me how finding out about our ancestors was going to change me. Well, it did, it gave me an appreciation of the connectedness of humanity at a concrete level, not just in the abstract. I discovered how closely I am related to people I’d never have imagined. Now when I pass people on a bus stop, I think we might be related and not even know it.

“But I also completely stand behind the notion that this is a social invention. There’s no basis in science that the DNA of any race is distinct from that of other populations. No one is 100 per cent any one race. We are all products of a mixing bowl – each slice of cake is different, but the same. When it comes to questions of culture and identity, DNA only has as much power as you give it. You can choose to be defined by genetics or not, it is just a biological script. You have to decide what your genes can or can’t illuminate about you. Genes can explain the where of you and the why of you, but not the how of you.”

Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, identified as Black for much of her life – embracing her Indian heritage in recent years. She exercised the privilege to pick a side while almost everyone else I can think of seeks a sense of belonging in both (or sometimes multiple) worlds.

For members of the diaspora, the threads are even more tangled. Their ancestors came from India, they are of Indian origin, but others see them as Guyanese or Trinidadian or from South Africa.

They speak a version of the languages their grandparents or great grandparents spoke in India, follow many of the customs, and yet are not Indian enough.

Talisha Ramsaroop came to Canada from Guyana with her mother when she was two.

She studied sociology and anti- racist research and now works as a community project co-ordinator at a satellite office of York University at Jane and Finch.

She teaches, guest lectures, and conducts workshops at high schools. Her role is to engage with young people, helping them see career options that they might not have thought were open to them.

Speaking for herself and how she is perceived, she says Toronto is so diverse, and there are so many people of Guyanese origin, that most people know she’s Guyanese.

“Maybe it’s the way I dress... but I think that for anybody looking at me, in Toronto, they know who I am. If I go two hours north, they want to know if I am Indian or South Asian!”

In an interview with Desi News in 2014 she had spoken of being told to stop pretending she was Indian by some desis, of being told that she was not a “real” Indian.

 “I’ve never said I am from anywhere but Guyana,” she says. “I’ve never seen myself as anything but Indo-Caribbean. But how we are perceived hasn’t changed where we need it to change. I don’t think there’s a lot of conversation happening around it. Lots of desis don’t even know that there are so many people of Indian origin in the Caribbean.”

And among those who do know, she senses a way of seeing Indo-Caribbeans as of lower status, of a lower caste.

“I believe it stems from anti-Black racism. They think we were around Black people, we absorbed Black culture, and now by pretending to be Indian, we are trying to distance ourselves from that, we are trying to align ourselves with people of a higher caste. When that is not the case.”

She goes back to visit family in Guyana every few years and says that as she’s spent more and more time in Canada, she’s seen as less and less Guyanese there.

“I realize I have a very romanticized notion of Guyana. It’s ‘home’. A place where things are easy. But over the years I’ve realized that I go on vacation and enjoy exotic fruits, but I’m not aware of many issues in that society. I don’t speak the language enough. I am different.”

On a recent visit to Berbice in Guyana she stumbled upon a monument commemorating the arrival of Indians in Guyana in May 1838. In it are statues of indentured workers, men and women holding familiar items such as a karahi, tawa, drums and a cutlass.

Over the last few years, Ramsaroop has witnessed Indo-Caribbean youth in Canada creating a space for themselves.

She herself is one of the founders of Lotus Toronto, a space for Indo-Caribbean women to come together and celebrate their culture.

“The new generation is changing things. They have access to so much information, so much more connectivity. See the dance videos on tiktok, for instance, they are so cool. They are mixing aspects of their dance and music with Western dance and music and creating something uniquely theirs.”

Is a month “celebrating” South Asian culture a good idea or not? Does it reduce “culture” to saris and samosas? Are food and clothing the only cultural markers, the essence of our identity?

Ramsaroop doesn’t think so.

“It doesn’t highlight differences. It’s great to have a month with a hyper focus, but we need more than a month! We need to have conversations all year-round. Contributions of the Chinese community, of the Indians or Indo-Caribbeans need to be taught in schools as part of the curricula. Because South Asian Heritage Month tends to be only celebrated at schools or among those in government jobs, most folks in regular jobs are unaware of it.”

She is married to Victor Godinho who is originally from Goa. The couple have a four-month-old daughter they have named Veda, after the Indian scriptures.

Veda will be raised within both her cultures, both her ancestral heritages.

Ramsaroop is hoping that by the time she is old enough to ask questions about who she is, such questions won’t be necessary.

“I’m hoping we’ll be done with this whole ‘Who are you?’ thing! Nobody is just one thing any longer. Veda will know of her lineage from folks from Guyana and her lineage from folks from India. We are open to letting her choose how she sees herself as opposed to moulding her views on identity. Will race even be a part of her identity? Will race even be relevant for her? Or will she be shaped by her music and art?

“She’s going to grow up in a very different time and I think there will be more of a Canadian aspect to her identity than there was or is in mine. My mother was completely Guyanese. I was second-generation, almost, as I was raised here. Veda will engage with the world as a Canadian.”

The sentiment echoes something Carolyn Abraham had said about her daughter Jade and younger son Jackson growing up in a vastly differently world than the one she grew up in.

“Everyone is mixed. In their roster of friends, they don’t stand out. They are aware to the extent that kids their age can be of their ancestors from India, China and Jamaica, but they are people of the world. They won’t let boundaries define them and that makes me happy.”

I am reminded of the little boy who came home and excitedly shared details of a new friend he’d made at school. Her name was Maya.

Was she from India, asked the parents with great interest.

“No,” said the little one, looking puzzled. “She’s from Canada.”

Happy South Asian Heritage Month!