I sometimes get asked "Where Are You From?"
This question is asked of me by people of many different backgrounds. Sometimes they are White/Anglo-Australian, sometimes they are European, sometimes they are Aboriginal Australian, sometimes they are other people of Asian descent.
Arlene Textaqueen, who describes themself as "brown... a non-Indigenous person of colour living on stolen Wurundjeri land in the area also known as Melbourne, Australia,"
has written a poem about being asked this question on their blog. The poem itself is understandably indignant, self-consciously defensive and naming of some of the potentially problematic assumptions that some people have in asking that question...
"Why do you ask?
Is it your curiosity in the ‘origin of my features’?
Is it your fascination for ‘other’ cultures and what they have to offer you?
Why do you desire to establish an exact definition of my difference?
Why do you assume I desire, and am able, to define this difference to you?
Do you show the same interest in determining the ‘ethnic make-up’ of every white face that you see?
Isn’t everyone from somewhere?
Do you not have a heritage?
Why does whiteness make yours invisible yet my brownness make mine subject to your anthropological investigation?
"
Textaqueen acknowledges that the poem is addressed to white people, and then goes on to articulate how they had performed this poem once at a
RISE book launch and poetry slam. RISE is the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, and is based here in Melbourne.
Textaqueen writes,
"My poem is addressed to white people, like most of my poetry, but it’s not for them. Judging from the laughter it received from many people of colour in the audience (POCS made up the majority of attendees), the people I had hoped would get it, really got it. I did see some uncomfortable white people and this was unfortunately acknowledged by the MC, Victor Victor, after I left the stage, when he apologised if anyone was offended, because that wasn’t ‘our’ intention as it was a night about ‘positivity’. Ramesh, CEO and co-founder of RISE, did ask him to take back the apology, which he did the next time he was on stage. Is there any person, especially any white person, who couldn’t do with being challenged on their less obvious (to them) racisms? And how, and why, should I do that without making some people uncomfortable? Especially considering, as a person of colour living in a white-centric world, I’m always adapting to ‘uncomfortable’ circumstances."
They then go on to give excellent critique and commentary about a culture of white "do-gooder"ness which is also predicated, though perhaps more subtly, on white supremacy and entitlement.
****
"Where I am From!"
While I acknowledge the anger and frustration that Textaqueen is articulating in their post around this question, I have a different experience around this.
First of all, recently, at a RISE Festival fundraiser gathering which I was volunteering at in Federation Square, I was asked "Where are you from?" all day long by African men and women, many of whom are from recently arrived migrant and refugee backgrounds. I would, in turn, ask them the same question, at which point I would hear their stories of migration from here to there, Somalia to Ethiopia, Eritrea to the UAE, and the eventuation of our bodies to being here together, in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (on stolen Wurundjeri Aboriginal land).
Our asking these questions of one another was, of course, contextualised by the fact that the whole daylong event was being run by people of colour, and while nominally intended for a broad audience, was disproportionately and visibly attended by other people of colour. That I was asked this question by African folks through the day did not strike me as coming from a place of entitled interrogation, but from a mutual urge to share of our personal history, to share in migrant solidarity, and, in my motivation anyway, in how we might build community together.
Of course, it is different when white people ask me this in white-dominant spaces, but there is a dynamic shift I want to help catalyse; in which this recourse to poetry, as Arlene has written, is less and less needed. Where I can measure the relative worth of a question not only by the extent to which it actively challenges white supremacist and white-normative ways of knowing, but also by the extent to which it is predicated on the shared commitments to learning and sharing of one another (and one another's histories), and to building connection and "country" with one another.
This also means that I am committed to exploring alternatives to addressing pieces on my racial anger toward white people in general. I am interested in building and nurturing a community of other people of colour who value our own subjectivity enough that we would write literature for one another, with one another as an intended audience, not simply in indictment of white people (as important as this may be in its own right), but in mutual inquiry as well.
I honour Textaqueen's anger; indeed, I share that feeling often, but the question "Where are you from"
does not belong to white people, and I am personally invested in reclaiming it
as a person of colour. "Where are you from" is also a way that people of colour become agents in anthropology (the study of human beings and comparative human cultures), of ourselves, of white people, and of the dominant (white hegemonic) cultures that we are a part of shaping and reshaping.
Personally, while contextually necessary, I am lethargic of a politics of ressentiment, of building personal and communal political identities and movements based primarily on outrage, indignation, and the introjection of our own Otherness. Let's build contexts together in which lethargy and righteous rage are not our modus operandi.
I believe being openly angry at white folks is one way that we "get over it".
(i.e. by naming and directing our anger at white people)
I would like to find some other ways as well, which include discourses, creative methodologies, and ways of being with one another, which go beyond looking for the most powerful ways to stare white people out of the room.