‘Can You Really Be a Queer Muslim?’: Intersectionality and the Complexity of Identity
From Appropriation to Appreciation to Acknowledgement: How to Respectfully Engage with Other Cultures
Elements of my South Asian culture that I was teased for growing up have become a part of the mainstream. I see fashion, yoga practice, chai spices, meditation, mindfulness and hair oils all bandied around as new ideas and new trends as if they haven’t been passed down through the generations of my family. Often, those adopting these practices have no understanding or acknowledgement of the rich history from which such practices have come…
‘We Are Not Your Stereotypes’: Refusing Cultural Shame and Reclaiming My Narrative as a Balkan Woman
‘Balkan is the bridge where the wind blows’ is a phrase famously articulated by Marina Abramovic, a renowned ex-Yugoslavian performance artist now residing in NYC. This quote transcends mere words; it embodies a universal truth, particularly for women hailing from marginalised corners of Europe. As a woman from the Balkans, I grapple with conflicting emotions regarding my cultural identity…
La Herida Colonial: How Becoming an Immigrant Revealed My Ever-Open Colonial Wound
I’m happy about how the job interview is going. Of course, they don’t offer me a contract; it is a freelance thing, which is just fine. I’m ready to leave, but just before getting up the older white man looks at me and asks if I can write in Portuguese, and not in ‘Brazilian’. He even adds, ‘You Brazilians with these gerunds are killing the language.’ And laughs…
The Loneliness of a New City is Bittersweet: A Love Letter from London to Mumbai
London felt lonelier. To invoke Laing once again, ‘Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost’. Without a lover to call this city mine I was alone in a visible manner. On days I felt I wore it on my coats…
‘I Didn’t Know I was Black Until Fourth Grade’: Growing Into My Blackness After a Blurred Sense of Racial Identity
I learned that I was black during recess. Kids told me that ‘I was the whitest black person they’d ever met’ and that ‘I talked so white’. This was extremely confusing at first. Where I grew up was the hub of any and every race that you could think of, and everybody was friends. So, when I became labelled as a white-black person, it didn’t make sense to me…
‘I Celebrate the Tapestry of Places that have Made Me Who I Am’: The Highs and Lows of Being a Third Culture Kid
I had spent my childhood learning how to mould myself into the most acceptable, most unassuming version of myself. Underneath the people-pleasing and the desire to fit in, I had no idea who I was. So much of my Indian identity had been buried away under shame and resentment, and I looked at any American tendency I had with contempt. Meanwhile, every influence from China felt like something that I didn’t have the right to claim…