In a Thousand Setting Suns, I See My Reflection

Do you have a couple minutes? I need to do an interview for my class about another culture. I just have 3 questions to ask about family, food, and social customs. 

The Education major stood in the doorway of the communications office looking hopeful. I, the quintessential survey taker, was only too happy to oblige. My colleague laughed and said, Which culture? She has a million! Do American, then.

I protested. American was so cliche, and anyway, it wasn't my ethnic culture. The student sat down across from me and for a moment I panicked. Which culture did I want to represent? For a moment, it suddenly seemed to be very important to pick the right one.  

Dutch. Wait, no, I don't know enough about it. Let's do American, it's easy and I lived there the longest. No, not American. Mauritian. That's what I want to do. Mauritian. Here's how to spell it: M-A-U-R-I-T-I-U-S.

For the next couple minutes I answered questions about what the family system looked like, what types of foods were most commonly eaten, and what types of traditions I'd grown up with. Though I'd only lived in the same country as my Mauritian relatives for 3 years under the age of 5, we had gone home for summers so I could remember enough to speak knowledgeably. At first I was worried about the accuracy of what I was sharing, then I remembered.

This is me. 

I wasn't giving a history lesson or sharing anthropological insights. No, I was speaking about me. I'm Mauritian.

The joyful yet painful tension of being a TCK is that we claim multiple identities, moving from one to another without notice depending on which one the situation calls for. When I had a 3-hour layover in Heathrow, I came back speaking with a British accent that my friends remarked on. Sometimes we slip so deeply into one identity, wanting to fit in so desperately to feel like we belong, that we forget we have other parts to us that are equally as valid.

We can't handle the jarring those parts cannot resolve within us, a discord that state ambassadors are unable to mediate between countries, let alone all found in one person. So to manage, we place identities into neatly labeled boxes and shove them into a dark place in our mind that we don't visit unless we need to switch an identity, like changing from an afternoon's sporty gym outfit to an evening formal for a special dinner.

For 17 years I existed in a culture I fought to integrate into an already fragmented identity. Like Terry's son, I felt distressed that I had to forget who I was before in order to fully integrate into a new identity that I did not choose but had to learn to live in due to life circumstances. When I finally left, returning to the place I felt happiest before that steel door had slid shut on who I was, the joy returned. Slowly, too, the pieces of who I'd been began to drift back together as I started to assemble the puzzle.

I began to explore the 11 distinct cultures that defined me up to now. I began to claim my ethnic heritage, proud in my Dutch-Mauritian identity flavoured with all the countries I'd lived in scattered around the world. Like a ratatouille, a hodgepodge that tasted best after simmered for hours, I began to accept my fragmentation as valuable. To pull the strings of my cat's cradle life story in tight, then let them fall into a design just as complex as the first while not being afraid to add in more loops to create an even more beautiful design.

Last year I spoke at FIGT, joining international speakers to encourage TCKs, ATCKS, and those who are a part of their lives, to acknowledge the losses as we move between identities. In recognizing the frustration we face of trying to claim a single home or tell people who we are, I ended by affirming that I had found home within myself. Yet even then, I hadn't completely integrated that understanding of home with an understanding of me.

Having a place to claim was important, and to realize that it may not be a physical space was good. Yet even more than that, was understanding who I was. More than experiences, losses, environments, and people in my life, my identity was based in the cultural perspectives that had written my innate understanding of how I approached those experiences, denied or validated those losses, adapted to or fought against those environments, and drew close to or held people at a distance in my life.

Last week I chose to be Mauritian. Tomorrow I may pretend I'm Lebanese when the taxi driver remarks on the weather or switch to Dutch when he asks if I'm single, dashing his hopes to snag an American for the price of a meal at a fast-food restaurant. The reality is that I'll never be able to fully claim one identity, just as I cannot speak the languages of my childhood flawlessly. It is not a weakness, though. It's simply a reminder that who I am is beautiful in its complexity.

Because this is me.