“Where are you from?” It was one of those questions she learned early, from language books, long before she understood that questions are not always innocent. It was supposed to mean: tell me something about yourself. Later, it sometimes meant something else entirely.
As she grew older, and found herself in places she had never imagined inhabiting, the question followed her with irritating persistence. At first, the answer was easy. One word. A country. A location. A fact, but facts become unstable when they are repeated too often. She began to notice that sometimes the person asking did not really want to know where she was from. They wanted to locate her. To draw a small border around her. To make the difference visible before anything else could begin.
She sometimes felt like a tropical fruit in a supermarket. Something people stopped in front of because it looked unfamiliar. Something to be inspected, perhaps tried once, perhaps described to someone later. Exotic is a polite word for distance. Curiosity is not the same as recognition. And being noticed is certainly not the same as being seen.
After a while, the answer itself became vague to her. Not because she had forgotten where she came from. She knew that perfectly well. What became unclear was what that knowledge was supposed to mean. A birthplace could not explain a person. Neither could an accent, a passport, a name, a face. Yet the world seemed endlessly interested in reducing people to coordinates. She had intelligence, character, experiences, triumphs. An entire interior life. But in certain rooms, none of this arrived with her. What arrived first was the hair, the skin, the accent, the name that had to be repeated. Sometimes she felt herself becoming hollow under the weight of other people’s curiosity.
There is a particular violence in being simplified. Slowly, the question changed. It was no longer only something other people asked her. It entered her own vocabulary. Where are you from? Then, with time, a more dangerous question appeared behind it.
Who are you?