Skip to main content

Dual Identities

A picture of my parents and cousin from Diwali.
In my house we celebrate Diwali and have a small Christmas.
I don't know many Finnish people, even after being here for five months. But I feel that I've done pretty well, considering I'm in an international program and can say I have four Finnish friends (one isn't quite a friend, but he has helped me out quite a bit) and I can say I have nascent Finnish language skills. I've grown comfortable here, though I still feel like a foreigner.

One man who has been living in Finland for almost a decade came here from an African country for his masters. He married a Finn but cannot speak any Finnish himself.

And yet, I have the sense that he still does not feel like he belongs here. In one of our classes, he told us how he still gets called racial slurs walking down the street. He commented offhandedly one day “I don’t know what I am.”

I understand this feeling, to an extent. I have never been called a racial slur but I know what it feels like to be straddling two countries, never quite belonging in either one.

People have said that coming to another country makes you more aware of your own nationality and cultural identity. This has been true for me as well. I’m starting to see how I am a mixture of Americanness and Indianness. And I realize how much I don’t neatly fit into either category. So when people ask me where I’m from and I am forced to answer the US, I feel like I am hiding a huge part of me. Most people do not ask any more questions and I, being shy and reserved, do not elaborate.

Even if I were to elaborate though, how would I explain that I am Indian in my respect for elders, in my care and attention to others and in my tastes in cooking, music and clothing but American in my need for independence, order and discipline? How do I explain that I simultaneously fall under both categories and fit in neither category? Indians born and raised in India consider me American and Americans consider me Indian. With both groups I am the “other.”
This question of identity has cropped up at various moments in my life and for various reasons. I feel it strongest though when I am outside of the US. When we were in South Korea on a ten day vacation, I felt it because my family and I so obviously did not fit in with the rest of the crowd. I felt it in India because I took great effort to blend in as much as possible. There, my Hindi was good enough that a student’s father asked me if I was from south India. He knew I Hindi wasn’t my mother tongue but He couldn’t tell that I was not, in fact, Indian.

And now I think about it mostly because I have been forced to. As part of the Fulbright program I was required to give a presentation on an aspect of American culture. To me, this question was daunting because I didn’t feel I had reasonable knowledge about any aspect of American culture to give a presentation to a room full of very intelligent, thoughtful group of people. So I chose to make my whole talk about why I didn’t feel feel like an expert on American culture in the first place. A friend asked me to give the same presentation for an organization she is part of. Here is a video of the presentation. I started the talk off by showing this video and then explained why "Where are you from?" is such a difficult question to answer.

In case the hyperlinks aren't working here are the direct links to both videos. Hopefully these work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crAv5ttax2I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwyjLeH8Q2I&feature=youtu.be








Comments

  1. PRJanuary 17, 2017 at 11:38 PM

    As usual a profound observation that reflects all that we have felt as immigrants, Avanti. The video link does not work for me. None is second line is nine?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Monkey Mug

We have these mugs in our house that have Japanese-anime-style whales on them. Their smiles are wide and innocent, the shade of blue in which they swim is pleasant, not the sad kind that makes you cry inside. Years ago, my parents decided they wanted more of these mugs but the store they bought them in no longer stocked them. So we went online and discovered that there were yellow monkey mugs, and pink rabbit mugs too, a whole world of cute animal mugs that kept their chai hot long enough for them to slowly drink it each morning while they read the paper and ate khakra. So they ordered the monkey mugs. My mother only had my dad order 6 of them. Each mug is $12 so this felt like a splurge. The monkey’s joined the whales in the shelf, breaking up the sea of blue with their gentle yellow. She now regrets that decision. These mugs were already a Prized Possession then for their superiority to other mugs. But they are more valuable now because we can no longer find ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Heart of the City

The past week in New York was jarring to say the least. Though the city still makes me overwhelmed by even the smallest of tasks (where do you go to buy a pack of cards??), I have begun to slowly get used to the constant movement of the city and everything that comes with it. The sound of airplanes flying constantly from La Guardia over my apartment doesn't register any more. I can estimate how crowded the train will be based on what time I am leaving my apartment in the morning or TC in the evening. And although the feeling of always needing to do more still raises the specter of anxiety to make everything I do feel inadequate, I've become resigned to its presence to the point that it is part and parcel of the city itself. Solitude is rare in the city, but last week it was the norm All of these things fell apart this week though, one by one, as another phantom seeped into our lives. Starting with an email from our college president that optimistically called off only no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Songs of Stillness

Two weeks ago it felt like the world was ending. The numbers from New York, which captured me with their stunning speed and the realization that I had left just before the situation became so much worse, grew rapidly each day. It began to dawn on the US that this was going to change everything. The grocery stores were filled with empty shelves. Empty shelves could only indicate that the world was ending. Until I heard the birds singing . I was on a run in a park when I heard them. They jolted me out of a reverie thinking about the headlines. Pandemic, economy, toilet paper. I looked around at the space around me in the park. The prairie grass expanded around me even in its dormant winter state. I saw the sky, blue with flecks of white clouds drifting above me. Nature is still in business. Even though the news is dire and the world we humans have built seems to be falling apart at the seams, buds are appearing in the trees. I see birds now on the roof through my childhood bedroo...
Post a Comment
Read more