What Am I . . .
Yesterday my Uncle was buried. He passed away peacefully over the weekend on the other side of the world in my motherland, The Seychelles Islands. This photo of me and him was taken in The Seychelles during Christmas of 1991.
In recent months and years, the process of tracing and reconnecting with my roots has been increasingly emotionally challenging. I’ve been doing this work in order to better understand my family’s relationship to colonization. Most people read me exclusively as Arab / Middle Eastern. This is only half true with my Dad being from Iraq and this is also where I get my name. Since I was born, multiple Gulf War’s and insurgencies have made it impossible to visit and so naturally I’m extremely disconnected from that side of my family.
On my Mum’s side I am Seychellois Creole. This is where I get my skin colour. My maternal ancestors were East African and Malagasy slaves brought first to Mauritius and then to The Seychelles to work on the sugar cane and coffee plantations in the late 1700’s. Over generations, their descendants also mixed with people of Indian and Chinese descent brought to the islands as indentured servants and to work by French and British colonizers. This is what eventually made for such a beautiful and unique diaspora of Seychellois Creole people. My parents brought their two completely unique parts of the world together to create me and my twin sister.
There is a lot of migrant trauma in my family history. I needn’t explain all the disaster that affected my Dad’s side of the family in Iraq. My family over there are still living in general poverty and picking up the pieces after rocket missiles destroyed their home a few years back during the retaking of Mosul from ISIS. My Dad left Iraq in the 1970’s to study abroad in The UK and only just visited home again this past September for the first time in over 40 years, when it was finally somewhat safer for him to travel there. Both his parents and two of his brothers have passed away in the time that he’s been away. He never had the chance to see them alive in person again.
My Mum was born and raised in Uganda in East Africa as my Grandparents had moved there from The Seychelles for my Granddad to work in the Kilembe Mines. When my Mum was in her early teens they fled the country and lost many friends amidst a brutal genocide under the rule of Idi Amin, “The Butcher of Uganda”. They took refuge in Kenya for a short while before moving back to the Seychelles and it was there that my Mum spent the rest of her teenage years before meeting my Dad as pen pals.
I was raised mainly by my Seychellois family. My Mum & Dad, my maternal Grandparents, and some of my maternal Aunts immigrated to Canada in the early 1980’s prior to my sister and I being born in 1986. I understand and speak Seychellois Creole and have visited The Seychelles a handful of times. My Grandmother is buried there. She helped raise me and was my best friend. I owe so much of who I am to her.
This past weekend when my Uncle passed away we all grieved and wept. I haven’t seen him in over ten years but I miss him deeply. I miss them all deeply. Even the ones I’ve yet to meet in person. We’ve lost many family members over the years and each time it becomes more and more difficult while the physical distance between us only seems to get larger. I yearn to discover my roots in Iraq for the first time and I yearn to return home to my ancestral lands, our tropical island paradise in The Seychelles. I long to hear my Grandmother’s voice whisper to me through the wind in the coco palms.
I’m not completely sure the point to this story other than the fact that writing and sharing this is healing for me. It heals some of the trauma that has been passed down and allows me to connect further with my ancestry by publicly sharing parts of my identity that oftentimes feel erased. I also hope that by verbalizing this, it might bring me one step closer to manifesting my deep desire to discover and rediscover my home. I hope.
