Where I am from

„Ahmed“

„Achhhh-med?“

„Yes, that should work…“

„Where are you from?“

„Why do you want to know?“

„Are you Turkish?“

„No. I am Swiss.“

„Come on, you’re not Swiss, where are you from?“

Where am I from? What am I?

Answers to these questions often come pretty straightforward: *I am from Germany; I am Spanish; I am a foreigner. *We have been hard-wired into resorting to identifications through nationalities, ethnicities or through affiliation to certain groups or communities. But growing up, I was grappling with this concept.

Saying where I was from was not only difficult to answer. It would always prompt further questions. Where is that country? Is everyone over there as dark as you are? Oh, I thought you were from ‘Arabia’? I recall an instance around the age of five where I was walking home from my kindergarten. An older girl asked me where I was from and I replied, trying to avert any attempt to interrogate me further: I am from here.

My entire childhood would then be based on exactly this belief, this idea that I am from nowhere else but here. And the paramount objective would then become to fit in as perfectly as possible, to become part of the here so nobody could tell me that I belonged anywhere else. Whether at school, in our neighbourhood, with friends or at the football or later triathlon club: I wanted to prove to everyone that I could be Swiss. And I did. So I thought.

By becoming Swiss, namely, I forced myself to forgot what else I was. I would be ashamed to speak Arabic with my mother in public and I would only speak German with my brothers; I would start pronouncing my name in a way that would make our ancestors turn in their graves in order to be compatible with the Swiss pronunciation apparatus; I would start to distance myself from Arabic culture, music and food and I would be annoyed by the fact that our spices were labelled with those weird and fuzzy signatures that no one in this country understood. By becoming Swiss I forgot that I was Arab. And by the time I came to realise that I could never really be Swiss, a lot inside me had been broken already.

Thankfully, around the same time there was another phenomenon unfolding and it opened up its arms to embrace that devastated boy who had failed to become Swiss and failed to be Arab. The phenomenon was a trend of Anti-Swissness created and promoted by an extremely multinational and versatile adolescent community: The children of parents who fled their countries in the late 20th century for a brighter future in the heart of Europe. In my class we would have people from all the Balkan countries, from Portugal, Spain, Italy, from Turkey and a handful of Arabs. Realising that we could never perfectly assimilate, we decided to make it cool and appealing to be anything but Swiss, which would result in our digging out whatever was left of our roots and celebrate it (which was where the term mesopaq originated). Being Swiss was out; being a foreigner was in. And when one day I noticed that Swiss people started speaking in a broken Swiss accent just to appear cool I knew that the tables had turned. A generation of randomly mingled secondos (children of immigrant parents) had managed to establish an environment where being different and foreign was not only fine; it became desirable.

Now, although this put me back on track towards living a peaceful life in multiculturalism where I could be both Swiss and Arab and whatever else I felt like being, the damage that my identity had incurred could not be restored that swiftly. I learned to speak five languages at a proficient level, yet my written and spoken Arabic would remain basic to intermediate. I would continue to believe that I was actually more Swiss than anything else and I would never be adamant about claiming my original identity, even when travelling and living abroad. I would say something along the lines of *I am Swiss and my parents are originally from Iraq *(What the heck does that even mean?). Then, during my MA in the UK I started dealing more intensively with the geopolitical situation in the Arab world, which fed into my desire to return closer to my roots. On August 3, 2014, I then landed Amman, Jordan to do community work in the realm of education. I did not expect that I was embarking on a journey that would change my life dramatically.

I had gotten so used to saying that I am Swiss and then adding a footnote about my origin that I intuitively went about identifying myself in the exact same manner in Jordan. I did not expect that people’s common reaction would be surprised, or almost offended or thinking that I was pulling their leg. *What do you mean you are from Switzerland? Where are you from? *Even though, funnily enough, this question is pretty much identical to the one a Swiss would ask me, the impact was an entirely different one. This question, namely, would not be directed at finding out how I was different from the asker but how I was *similar *to him or her.

It was then also to my greatest surprise when, a couple of seconds into one of those random conversations with taxi drivers, one of them asked me Are you Iraqi? Just by listening to me for a moment he knew where I was from. And then, when I met the first Iraqis I realised that we spoke the same language and that we felt connected just duet o the fact that we were from the same country. Never would I have expected such validation of my identity and never before had I felt this freedom of expressing myself and living my life without needing to fit in or assimilate. My name, my dark skin and hair, my way of being and simple things like the fact that I do not eat pork were finally not only accepted but part of the entire thing.

Finally, this brokenness inside me is restored. Finally, my personality can harbour two or more identities without creating insecurity but instead allowing me to thrive and grow on so many levels. So if you ask me now

Where I am from? or What I am?

I shall respond that I am that Arab-Swiss-Iraqi-European-Cosmopolitan-Citizen-of-Mother-Earth who will fail to fit into any of your conventional categories.

And he will fail proudly.

*Thank you, Jordan. *