I am twenty-six years old. I moved to the US when I was fourteen. Until I had moved to the US, the longest flight I had ever taken was from Islamabad to Karachi i.e. moving to the US was my first time stepping out of the country. I want to take this time to explore the "Pakistani" in me vs the "American" in me.
When I had just moved to the other side of the world, I was elated. I had always dreamt of wanting to move to a country where the schools had no uniform (yes, that was the root of my excitement, I was fourteen). I knew that moving to America meant you have to clean your own bathroom, you have to do your own laundry, and you have to pick up after yourself. I also had some vague idea that high school was of utmost importance in America, that Americans generally were bad at Math, and that for some reason the entire world was obsessed with both hating America and wanting to be America. Mind you, this was in 2008 when Facebook had only recently become global, when your Newsfeed still had FB statuses that went "[insert your name] is...." and you would fill out the rest. This was the time when Superwoman was barely that brown girl with cool braids who made a funny video on YouTube and when MLID (My Life Is Desi) was the coolest new way to find home away from home. (Side note, main purpose of YouTube was to catch up on Indian dramas and there really wasn't any money in YouTube). The point being, when I had just moved here, what it meant to be Pakistani, or Desi, or Pakistani-American was just as awkwardly being defined by the people around me as it was in my head. We didn't have a Hasan Minhaj with Patriot Act on Netflix or Mindy Kaling with her own show. Our version of brown comedy was Russell Peters with his hyperbolic impressions of what it meant to be raised in a brown household. That was funny then because we didn't know comedy could take a more realistic form. We didn't know that you could be both Pakistani/Desi and American and be true to yourself.
I paint this picture because I struggled with homogenizing the two identities for a long time. In fact, it wasn't until the APS Attack in 2014 that I actually took the time to re-evaluate how I had been looking at these sides of me. There was time where I held on to the Pakistani identity with my dear life while abandoning any attempts to learn what it meant to be "American." There were also times when I abandoned what it meant to be "Pakistani" and tried to catch up to the "American" culture in full speed. Perhaps those phases were necessary for what I will end up learning but during those times, they felt halfhearted. I mention the 2014 APS attack because at that point in time, I was going through my "American" phase. I was hell-bent on ignoring everything remotely Pakistani about me. I remember going to the kitchen to make coffee in the morning and my mother telling me about this developing story where a school filled with kids was gunned down. I remember then going to the university to take my Intermediate Analysis final exam and walking out of that exam completely numb. I spent the next few hours scouring through countless articles online trying to make sense of it all - the grief I felt, the anger, the heartbreak. I remember thinking "am I allowed to be in this much grief when I have not cared about this country I was born and raised in nor kept up with anything going on there for a long time?" I would spend the next few weeks in complete mourning of it all. Understanding the selectivism in my own grief because it was the army kids who were attacked and not those of civilians from a rural town. Evaluating why it still hurt so profoundly. Thinking through the actions I could take and if *anything* at all would be of any help. But the most resounding thought in all this was the idea that I cannot let go of Pakistan. It was the most clarity I felt amidst all the chaotic emotions. That I can move to a different country and assimilate but I cannot let go, entirely, of where I am from. And that was a momentous shift in my thinking.
I do think that if I was fourteen in 2020 and moving to the US, the distinction in my mind would not have been so rigid because I would have been exposed to a lot more via social media/the internet. But it is interesting to note that my generation, people who were in high school between 2008-2012, were truly the first generation to go through the left being very stringent about calling out Islamophobia. Here was a country that had elected its first black president, a country that was just starting to forget a bit of the 09/11 and not look at all Muslims (Muslim looking/sounding) with hate because the left had started to call out Islamophobia pretty stringently. There were of course still attacks on Muslims (looking/sounding) but the hurt wasn't as recent as for those who were right before us and were in high school or college when 09/11 happened.
My generation had the unique opportunity to break away from a hate and define what it meant to be Pakistani-American, in a way. It is tough, as a fourteen year old, to understand that you can be both Pakistani and American. That you can look at both identities of yourself and find a way to create something that is true to you. That you can love and appreciate Faiz and Ahmed Faraz and Iqbal Bano and you can also love Plath and Anne Sexton and Sontag. You can find humor in Jordan Klepper and Biswa Kalyanrath simultaneously. You can care about the impending war between India and Pakistan and worry for their safety just as much as you can care about the collapse of American Healthcare system. That the two don't have to battle for your attention. Holding on to your "culture" doesn't mean not progressing. Salima Hashmi (Faiz's daughter) very eloquently mentions that every generation holds a responsibility to their own generation to take the works of those before them and examine it in the "current" times. So what we owe, to the country we belong to and the country we live in, is that examination of ideas in "our" light. We must, as a generation of immigrants, analyze what it means to live with an identity that holds on to our roots but flourishes with the ever-changing wind.
