What do you’'ll answer if someone questions you where u are from?
colorado voices
Where I am from
By Rashna Singh
It’s a simple question, but one that I find extremely difficult to answer: “Where are you from?” They hear an accent they can’t quite place, although they recognize British tones.
“Where are you from?”
What should I reply? It depends on my mood and how much time I have. If I’m in a rush, I just say, “Oh, I live here in the Springs.”
I have lived here for only about eight months. If I have a little more time, I tell them that I’m from Massachusetts, which feels a lot more like the truth, if not the entire truth. I lived there for 20 years and attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“Massachusetts, eh? Boston?”
I was expecting that.
No, the western part of the state, the part that Boston forgets even exists. Gov. Mitt Romney famously pronounced that he had traveled the length of the state from Boston to Worcester, neatly truncating its western half.
“But where are you really from?”
Now we get to the real question, or rather the unspoken questions: “Who are you? What are you?”
Not a New Englander - not really, that’s obvious. “India,” I answer. “I am from India.”
“India?”
They always seem surprised. I don’t fit the stereotype. I am much lighter complexioned than they expect. My eyes, too, are a lighter brown than makes sense - not black, for sure, nor almond-shaped.
“India? You speak beautiful English.”
I explain that I have spoken English as early as I have spoken any other language, that I studied all my life in schools where English was the medium of instruction and Hindi a required second language. I tell them that I heard at least three languages around me as I grew up, and when we moved from one part of India to another, I heard three more.
If the queue is really long, and we are not going anywhere, the conversation continues.
“You’re very light - I didn’t know that Indians could be so light.”
We come in all colors, I explain, from almost white to very black. It is a multiracial, multireligious, polyglot nation, hard to pin down, and there is much more to it than the caste system, the sacred cows, the dot on the forehead and the call centers.
Unlike Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, I don’t need to question my identity, but I often need to situate it. By nationality, Indian, my ancestors came to India from Persia more than 1,000 years ago. They fled to escape forced conversion and to preserve their religious faith: Zoroastrianism. Legend has it that the leader of the Parsis, as they became known, demonstrated their intent to blend by stirring sugar into a glass of milk.
UNESCO recently declared the Parsis a World Heritage Community. My green card tells me I am a resident alien - no sugar symbolism there. On the street, people ask me for directions in Spanish. A Greek pizza shop owner insists I look Greek. Once someone apologized for wishing me “Happy Easter” because he realized I must celebrate Passover instead.
I have come to believe that it is not your passport or your driver’s license that determines who you are, but your sense of your people and your sense of place. My people are an ever-expanding and shifting body; natural features, not nationality, mark my place. In a recent “60 Minutes” show, an Indian businessman gleefully proclaimed: “Geography is history.”
Not so fast - not for me. Geography gives me my bearings, keeps me rooted. When I wake up and gaze out at Pikes Peak every morning, the “sense sublime” that comes over me tells me where and who I am, as does the indigo light on the low hills of the Holyoke Range or the cobalt mountains of my childhood.
To borrow again, from Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey,” my dwelling is no longer demarcated by state lines and national boundaries, but by “the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky.”
Rashna B. Singh ([email protected]) is a professor and author.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~156~2156556,00.html
