Congratulations go to the following top three essays, which can be read below!
1st place - Salma Mousa
2nd place - Zahra Naqvi
3rd place - Indee Thottawatage
1st Place
“This is My Home”
“Where are you from?” A seemingly simple question, yet one which I repeatedly find myself unable to answer. My home is Abu Dhabi, but I am not Emirati. My home is Cairo, but I’ve never lived there. My home is Toronto, but I left in the fifth grade. My home is in Jeddah, but I don’t own an abaya. My home is in Doha, but I have no family here. My home is complex and nuanced, and cannot be reduced to one identity, one house, one passport. I have several of each. My home is the tantalizing aroma of my mother’s Egyptian soul food, emanating from the kitchen along with Quranic verses drifting from the radio. My home is the fondness I have when I remember teaching my sister to ice skate on a frozen Ontario morning. My home is cruising along the Abu Dhabi Corniche, cheeks smudged with face paint and heart full of lightness, on UAE national day.
They say home is where the heart is. Another deceptively simple phrase, because my heart is not in one place, nor with one person. It is divided between four continents, and between the cosmopolitan clusters of close friends who have become my pseudo-siblings over the past two decades. I feel at home eating poutine in Montreal with my closest childhood friends over a frosty French-Canadian thanksgiving dinner. But I don’t feel any less at home lazing on the North Coast of Egypt, with my toes snuggled in the creamy sand in true postcard-like fashion. Does this mean that I belong nowhere, or everywhere?
Personal identity—or rather the lack of one—has been the most defining feature of my adolescent and post-adolescent life. I am the Cairo-born daughter of two Egyptian immigrants to suburban Toronto, themselves descendents of Tunisian and Turkish settlers. Since then, I had the peculiar, yet extraordinary, experience of living in Jeddah, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Washington D.C., Paris and Doha. When I first began high school, at the British School of Abu Dhabi, surrounded by my multicultural peers, I was more confused than ever. As one of the few students of Arab origin, I expected that the differences between my classmates and I would go beyond my “weird” sounding name; an aberration I was casually reminded of every time a substitute teacher would take roll call. My best friends, Brits and Australians, came from a different religious, cultural and ideological background than my own family. I attribute our closeness to the one factor we all have in common—we are just as lost as each other. None of us felt totally at “home” in our countries of citizenship, nor did we feel Emirati. We didn’t understand the cultural references of our parents, or of the locals. But we did understand each other.
To my delight, my own multicultural experiences continued to expand upon my arrival in the Education City residence halls; beginning with my Mormon American roommate on exchange from the U.S. Naval Academy, and most recently an eclectic mix of a Canadian, an Egyptian, an Eritrean-Texan and a Florida-born Cuban-Chilean. Whether we were debating politics over shawarmas, chatting over Mexican telenovelas or failing miserably at pronouncing words in Tigrinya, this experience re-affirmed why I chose Education City: to experience university life as it should be, teeming with diversity inside and outside the classroom. I was fortunate enough to embark on student exchange programs in both Washington D.C. and Paris; I have been to Canadian public schools, British private schools and Islamic elementary schools, and though these experiences undoubtedly broadened by worldviews, none of these experiences provided the impressive level of multiplicity represented in the unique multiversity campus of Education City.
My quest to resolve my personal “identity crisis” is by no means complete. I will surely grapple with it for the immediate future. However, I am confident that I don’t have to choose between any of my homes. As I matured and ventured into my college career, I realized that my home was a lack of a home, and my identity was a lack of an identity. My home cannot be confined to a space, race, or place. My identity cannot be constrained to a passport, apartment, or ethnicity. In Canada, I was considered the Egyptian, in Egypt I was considered the Canadian, and everywhere else, I was considered a foreigner. But time has taught me that the inability to categorize my home is a source of beauty, diversity, and enrichment. I might be destined to be a “wanderer,” but being lost is exactly where I feel most at home.
2nd Place
Walking down the street on a cold morning with my hand clasped around my mother’s index finger may be my first memory. I’ve seen pictures of that day, and heard about it that I have fabricated an entire storyline about what was going on, but I am sure only about the purity of that memory. It sits in the back of my mind, tucked away in a niche; it has no label associated with it, no reason that it is there, just a strong sense of contentment that fills me up when I think about it: kind of like a Patronus charm Harry Potter might use. I think back and, although I was not to know it then, within that memory lay my very first idea about what it felt to be accepted and loved.
When I hear about it now, I’m told that was the day we had bought our first house. We had been ‘homeless’ for four years, with my parents traipsing around the world figuring out where they wanted to settle and raise a family. During the first four years of my life, I suppose I must have thought it was normal to drive around in rented cars and never buy any furniture, but I was soon to be told that was not ‘a normal family.’
My parents kept an amazing scrap book of things they collected over their time on the road, and amongst my other artwork is a Crayola drawing of a square house with a triangular shaped roof and a tall chimney, with a walk way and two windows. I think my parents kept it mainly because that picture was nothing like any of the houses we had ever lived in, and certainly not one I had ever seen before. I feel at four years old, I had stumbled upon something profound: my ‘house’ was not even close to the reality of what ‘home’ meant to me. My home was not a simple structure of bricks and cement, it wasn’t a porch with a door mat on it, and it certainly wasn’t a drive way with flowers lining it. But then, what was it, and where was it?
For my mother, as for many others, the answer was simple: their birthplace. It’s a two storey house in the suburbs of Pakistan. That is where she grew up, where she studied each night, where she danced to her wedding music, where her children took their first breaths, and her parents, their last. Her roots are strong and permanent and her resolve, unwavering. But I am different to my mother; my birthplace is almost foreign to me. On the most superficial level, I don’t talk or think the same way, I don’t dress with similar intentions, and I don’t hold the same priorities or the same reservations. And no matter how strongly they try to convince me that I’m not, I am certain I am an outsider to them: someone on the side-lines looking in.
I know everyone laughs along to my broken Urdu, hoping to humor my attempts at pronouncing the different rolling ‘r’ sounds. They probably snicker at my inability to wear a Shalwaar-Kameez with the adeptness of a native. They probably wonder if my mother was able to ingrain in me the respect of belonging to our Khandaan, our family, and the sacrifices my forefathers made that allowed us to lead this life. They probably don’t question all the children. I am a stranger. I am not of their soil; I have not gone through the proper rites and rituals of belonging: I am welcomed but not accepted into my mother’s culture, or for that matter, my father’s.
But then where do I belong?
For the same reasons my first ‘culture’ cannot accept me so can’t any other. I could never fit in anywhere because I was set to fit a multitude of molds very early in life: education in an international school, with the ideals of old-school Pakistani culture, and the teachings of a specific sect of Islam would be enough to create a major identity crisis. I guess after seeing so much of the world with such naïve eyes I have realized that there is no place that would shout and say that ‘she was one of us, she should be buried here with her family and ancestors, and her story will be told for years to come by those who lived amongst her’ as it would be for my mother and father. I have no place that completes me, rather I have many little parts of me that identify with different aspects of life – so much so that home for me can’t be restricted to artificial boundaries of countries or a cultural context. Home is the 2 x 2m box that encircles me and makes me feel comfortable and at ease. I have to create my own comfort zone and it will be different from everyone’s. No one has had the same experiences as me, and I can’t have identical experiences to anyone else.
I think that is what makes it beautiful. We all clamber and climb to define our roots, thinking we are some sort of great tree, when maybe, we aren’t. We could just be hermit crabs that live in borrowed environments until we outgrow them and are ready to move on. We carry ‘home’ around within us regardless of cultures and society’s definitions of what we are supposed to be.
I look for that first home in my first memory but I can’t go back to four year old me. I have moved so far ahead that I can’t find my way back to that cold morning. But that is okay, because I don’t need to remember the story of my first house, but rather, the feeling of warmth and love that standing with people I loved gave me.
And that is home to me.
3rd Place
No Longer a Tourist at Home
The peril of being a third culture kid is that home becomes a foreign concept at times. While the irony in that is inescapable, it has become a distinguishing factor in my attempt to discover my home. Wonderful parents, summer holidays, a birth certificate and a passport, all branded as Sri Lankan, inevitably point toward me being a Sri Lanka as well. Yet, having spent only a quarter of my life – five years – in my supposed motherland; does that qualify me to call Sri Lanka ‘home’? I believe it does.
The better part of my childhood was spent in Salalah, Oman and Dubai, U.A.E. It was an idyllic period in my life, where a child does not have to spend time philosophizing about their ‘identity’ or potential ‘identity crisis’ thereof. Then in 2005, I moved to Sri Lanka to finish my last two years of high school. Finally, I was home, or was I? The first few months, I felt like a tourist, I did not look like one but definitely felt like one. I could not figure out the public transportation system, I kept getting lost nearly all the time, and taxicabs must have made hefty profits whenever I hired them. Eventually the foreignness did begin to dissipate. Great realization stuck when I grasped the fact that I needed to take off my ‘Middle Eastern lenses’ that I was viewing my country with and just admire everything with a naked curiosity. I began to immerse myself in the cultural experience, purposefully got lost in the streets of Colombo, utilizing it as a means of exploring my homeland; I got caught in the rain, bought food from street vendors and bargained with taxi drivers like a pro. What unfolded next was beautiful, I began to feel Sri Lankan, I began to be Sri Lankan!
I must reveal that my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka does bear certain cultures and traditions of our tiny island. The Sri Lankan customs inevitably entered my home. The neighborhood that I lived in was a stark contrast to the apartment-lifestyle I was used to in the Gulf. Neighbors walk in and out of your house, attendance at all events that celebrate birth and death and life in between is required, the older generation is always right, and you never refuse a cup of tea whether it is your first or tenth for the day. Initially, I felt like a fish out of water, unsure of how to conduct myself. But slowly, I allowed myself to be enveloped by the customs. If nothing else, my neighbors considered me a ‘project’ and enjoyed themselves immensely by giving me ‘advice’ and ‘tips’ on how to ride the ‘cultural rollercoaster’.
While the presence of this Sri Lankan culture was felt in my home, I have also had the opportunity to mold my home into something unique and different. My parents, while traditional themselves, have raised me with a hint of liberalism. My grandmother would have been pleased if I got married at twenty, but my parents are willing to give me another decade to work on that process. When girls have to be home before dusk falls, I have the ability to hop a plane and live and study abroad. At times, I questioned whether I was being the black sheep of the family by not conforming to the ideal. Later on, I realized that the concept of ‘home’ is not meant to stifle, but to be a source of peace and comfort, to allow me to be myself.
In many ways, I may never be the poster child for the traditional Sri Lankan woman. Yet, I have been able to carve my niche in my homeland. Even though I now live in Qatar, I still carry Sri Lanka in my heart. As Maya Angelou beautifully put it, “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” What is the purpose of home if it does not let us understand who we are? Just like a ship looks to the heavens for navigation, my Sri Lankan heritage is my north star. I may sail around the world, but I look upon my north star to guide me home.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments will be reviewed my the moderator. All posts should be respectful and not include profane, offensive or defamatory comments.