A Quest for Identity

It should be known that the murder of any identity is our own murder, regardless of what our language, religion or identity might be. To me, my identity is what makes me unique. Well — at least this is the pride I nurtured deep inside me growing up in America. Being expelled from my own culture as a child was traumatic.  My family and I were forced to leave everything behind and head to a place where the culture, language, and people were so different from my own. As a teenager, I was already going through the turmoil of discovering my own personality. Now imagine the added complication upon changing continents, cultures, languages, etc. The difficult transition from a very strict, patriotic cultural background, where the practice of double standards is prevalent, where the superiority of men over women is a given, and where females are not encouraged to seek education, to a culture where females were routinely given opportunities and rights only made life more difficult for a young immigrant.

The Kurdistan I left before the collapse of the regime is completely different from the Kurdistan I see now. When we left,  the desire for disclosing identity was subtle, the core of family structure and value were defined, and people had a taste of what peace really meant. War and civil conflicts damage a nation and this is what Kurdistan went through in the period where I was away growing up in America. My people went through a lot and because of the crisis, people were forced to forget and miss the essence of what they were fighting for in the previous years.

Growing up in America, I tried as much as possible to blend into the American society. I can’t necessarily state that I did everything it took to blend in without forgetting my core values. I was trying to discover how my values were different from the American values. What are American values anyway? American values and American dreams are a collection of every immigrant’s dream, every immigrant’s struggle escaping his/her motherland to seek his/her religious freedom, racial acceptance, or a better living. By blending into the society, I mean that I kept what made me a true Kurd yet built a tolerance to what was different from my own. The sparkly/colorful Kurdish costume that I use to dress in with the Kurdish music that I would play in the background in the International’s days topped with the different flavors of Kurdish food with its tasty spices are the things that made the "Kurdishness" stand out in me. Was I different because of what I ate or how I dressed or the type of music I listened to? No! I learned that I was part of what formed America. The different sparkly colors that I use to put on, the different spices I would use in foods, and the different music I would listen to only added another beautiful layer to what America is. America is nothing but a garden of cultures where thousands of flowers grow and we all know that throughout history these cultures did nothing but feed and enrich one another. This is the secret behind America’s success and progress.

After finishing my education in America, the desire to come back to the Kurdistan I left in my beautiful childhood memories was still live deep inside me. After 17 years of living in America, I decided to come back and serve the motherland. Now that I have lived in the motherland for close to a year, I have been going through various episodes of cultural clashes and identity crisis. The Kurdistan I left at a very young age is not the same Kurdistan I observe now. In the 17 years I was away many changes have occurred that was the cause of some drastic shifts in people’s lives I witness just now. 

In “A Quest for Identity,” I plan to enrich my readers with various aspects of my life that will explain my assertion that I feel I don’t belong home anymore. I understand that this is every immigrant’s problem, including Americans, which being away for so many years makes them feel ill at ease when they are back to the motherland. 

So why the title, “A Quest for Identity,” you might be wondering? Well it really is a quest for what makes me who I am. What is my identity? Am I an American? Or a Kurd? Or a Middle Easterner even? I have traveled to every continent by now and every country I have been to, has made a huge impact on my personality. I have built the tolerance and the love to co-exist. Through my travels, I have gained the love of journalism. I am proud to disclose that I carry my little camera with me everywhere I go to. Anything that I find of interest, my camera is ready to capture it. Not only that, I find my fingers on my Macbook typing about what I just witnessed. And today, I decided to fill you in with this quest journey that I want to enrich you with. They say, wherever there is a Kurd, there is a story. My quest for identity is simply to fill you in with my story.