A matter of identity

Blame the talking wallpaper. It is the ever-there background to my working day. News channels wall to wall, and over the years a set of familiar faces that one comes to be on first-name terms with — in this instance the BBC journalist Yalda Hakim. We have never met and are never likely to but she is a part of the pattern, comfortably recognisable. One feels that you ‘know’ the person on the other side of the screen except of course you do not. It was a 52-second clip featuring Ms Hakim that set me thinking this week because it was about identity and a heads-up as to just how little I knew or understood, hers.

Following her journalistic spoor was not difficult, a quick Google and there was her work, but it was her background as an Afghan refugee in her infancy, her early years in Pakistan and then life in Australia and the UK that intrigued — and got me thinking about my own identity after so many years here in Pakistan, almost a quarter of a century now — and my identity, what I see myself as, has shifted in profound and irrevocable ways.

For one thing I am not as English as I was. Englishness has in part seeped away. Not entirely, and it never will disappear completely as the legacy of birth is irreducible, but diminished. Language has changed, most noticeably when I am with native English speakers. I ‘identify’ both consciously and unconsciously with Pakistan as ‘home’ in the lower case but with ‘Home’ in the UK in upper-case — though fading as the years pass. There will come a time when Pakistan is the upper-case ‘Home’.

There is that little ‘lift’ in the chest as I touch down at Bahawalpur airport, a tiny uptick as I am greeted by airport staff I have had process me for years. Then there is the ‘bump’ of homecoming and the ganglia of life inside a busy and complicated family that seems to stagger from crisis to crisis but in reality is just tooling along much as millions of others are.

And then there is the realisation that I am a piece of the wallpaper for others. When one writes for publication as I do every day the words leave, fired down the wire and are forgotten. Without the help of the hard drive on my computer I would not have a clue what I wrote a week ago. I almost never re-read what I have written once it whizzes off — but others do. Thousands of others, it is after all them I am writing for! They know who I am. Well they recognise my face at least, and I now find myself not entirely comfortably publicly ‘owned’, my identity out there in a fragmentary kind of way.

With identity crossing over into public ownership however small, there comes the assumption on the part of some of those that have a piece of me that they ‘understand’ my identity. That they can see the me-ness through the blizzard of words. A very few of those closest to me might, but the majority will not. The assumptions follow me around like ducklings, with the ‘…oh you must love Pakistan’ being the one most frequently heard. I rarely answer.

The flip-side of the ‘belonging’ part of my evolving me is being the eternal outsider in a place where ‘the other’ is viewed with deep almost paranoid mistrust. A mistrust that goes from the grass roots upwards and is attached to most of the foreigners who for whatever reason call Pakistan home. I have learned to live with it but it is a niggling discomfort, an itch frequently scratched.

The identity I have is shaped by the choices I have made, the same as everybody else. Even the poorest of the poor make choices that are part of the superstructure of their day-to-day identity. They may be fewer and less diverse than those I am able to make but choices nonetheless. In a land where identity matters so much that it costs lives daily, it is salutary to remember that we are not what some others may think we are.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2016.

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