My Father’s name squeezes itself neatly into the tiny box, whose creator didn’t anticipate the Jagarlapudis with all our extra names.
Birthplace:
India.
The box for “color or race” is not filled out.
Instead, I happily observe, it contains
a single horizontal line as if to mark the very category itself irrelevant.
43 years later, my year-and-a-half old son, soon to get his
passport, perches curiously on a stool, pointing at the camera flash.
We love the smiley picture, but the elderly black man who runs
the dingy store, warns us that the rules have changed: no smiling.
We choose the one where he looks puzzled instead.
He is wearing his favorite color, orange, unaware of how
this color is infamously linked to the 45th president of the United
States. Unaware of the president’s
attempts at travel bans. Unaware
that the world’s borders are tightening and that he may never experience the
freedom that I have enjoyed with my American passport and my Overseas Indian Citizenship.
This ¾ desi child who knows more Spanish than Gujarati, who
loves Bollywood music and salsa and who, like any almost two-year-old, simultaneously
tests boundaries and clings to security. And like every almost two-year-old, he knows you don’t need a big wall to feel safe, just a smile and a welcoming embrace.
I'm drawn to the multi-generational relationship to citizenship and migration. It feels very human, your father's careful handwriting, your son's sweet smile. I love the small acts of personal resistance -- refusing to fill out color or race -- the ways in which we do not easily fit institutional boxes -- the ways that our affinities and belongings do not always map onto nationality, birth, or heritage, with Roshan knowing more Spanish than Gujarati.
ReplyDeleteI agree, of course, that xenophobia and racism are taught to children. But I wonder if it is a little romanticizing to say that all a child needs to feel safe is "a smile and a welcoming embrace"? Physical safety and food security aside, children are so vastly different in how they respond to the unfamiliar -- how many times has a small child responded to a hug or even a smile from a stranger by crying?
From Sandra:
ReplyDeleteI love the cross-generational set-up. I love the highlighting of the "puzzled look"- an age where we learn the meaning of so many things, where borders, countries, on some level borders between people as socially constructed are meaningless still. Children react to people, but according to different measures. Those have to do with familiarity too though.
I think xenophobia,which we yes, is taught to children via socialization, has to do with fear of the unfamiliar- which is also somewhat normal for children ? THere are some unexplored complexities at the end...