You’re Alive, Mashallah

I cannot identify the first moment in which I realized I was Turkish, and what that subsequently meant. Maybe it was when I arrived at my Christian preschool around the holidays, barely knowing a lick of English, and to my mother’s horror, came back home singing “Happy Birthday Jesus.” My parents had only spoken Turkish to me when I was very young, and I was turned away from preschools because one of the only intelligible phrases I could muster out was “Hello Kitty.” A Christian preschool took a chance on me and was very helpful in reassuring me that my not-so-Christian background was going to work wonders for me in the afterlife.

Maybe it was when I passed out lokum (or “Turkish Delight”, as it’s known in the West) to my entire fifth-grade class for a cultural appreciation presentation, only to have a majority of them spit it out with egregious, incontestable force. I believe one kid may have actually thrown up. To be fair, I advertised the traditional dessert we eat on Bayram (Eid) as “gummy bear adjacent.” As I watched the aftermath of what I can only describe as my gustatory 9/11, it was clear that no part of my attempt at sharing my culture was a delight. Or maybe it was when our next-door neighbors sprayed me with yard chemicals, called the police on my “terrorist” family, and repeatedly told us to “go back to where we came from” (each of these being isolated, separate incidents when I was no older than five). When you’re a kid, you don’t know that you’re different—people have to tell you. And I was told over, and over, and over. Go back to where you came from!

I know how they—the proverbial, American “they”—say that line like the back of my hand. They say it with either an overwrought expression, their reddened face filled with so much xenophobia that one needle to the cheek would cause it all to spill out with a GUSH, or with a tantalizingly facetious demeanor. I am not sure which is worse, and my initial response is unwavering, regardless: I am where I come from. I was born in America, so that’s what I must be: an American. A first-generation American. Our first first-generation American. I must be lost, I must be out of place. I am a Turk...right? Such is the consequence of growing up in a Middle Eastern family in post-9/11 America. I often struggled with the seemingly opposing facets of my identity: in America, I am Turkish, but in Turkey, I am an American. But in reality, I am neither and both, all at once. I know this because receiving a text at five in the morning when you’re in a pair of Simpsons pajama shorts, a bra you bought in eighth grade (yes, they still fit me), and a crumb-filled bed would, to the average person, be an annoyance, a nuisance at most. But for someone like me, it means frantically googling some variations of “Turkey news”, “Syria news”, and “Middle East news”, calling as many relatives as you can, and hoping that the people you love are alive. This was my reality when I found out about the Turkey-Syria earthquake that has now killed over 40,000 people. It was my reality during Turkey’s particularly rampant femicides. It was my reality during every protest, every bombing, every revolt, every humanitarian crisis, every wave of Islamophobia. And it has been my reality every single day of my life.

It is very difficult to explain to people the guilt I feel for living in America. The best I can offer is to consider the way a flower looks when it is picked from a plant. Outwardly, it maintains its beauty, but in actuality, it has already begun to wither away. I love it here, and I am eternally grateful for the sacrifices my parents had to make in order to provide this life for me. But sometimes, I cannot help but feel like that flower. And it feels really, really lonely. This is only expounded by the internal dissonance I feel in relation to this guilt.

Turkey is more privileged in some ways than other countries in the Middle East, and I have always considered that something important to acknowledge. And yet, my reaction to the earthquake is one in hundreds of situations in which I have found myself in a WhatsApp conversation consisting of “Hey, it’s me, Selin. Are you alive?” No one prepares you for a perpetual desensitization to death, and it never feels better. There will always be another. While I have felt this way for as long as I can remember, this is the first time I have been so vocal about it. Perhaps it is the lack of resources my small liberal arts college has for Middle Eastern students, or because I have finally reached my limit on the number of films I can watch in class in which the Middle East is haphazardly distorted with yellow filters. Or perhaps it is the fact that I can count the Middle Eastern students I know on one hand, and I somehow feel completely alone in a city that once felt like the entire world to me. I cannot change how I feel about my identity overnight, and I definitely cannot change how people perceive it either. What I can do is offer a perspective that is often misconstrued, underrepresented, or entirely absent from our societal discourse.

Whenever I go back to Turkey, I cannot help but mourn my time spent away. That restaurant I liked is out of business. There are more wrinkles around my uncle’s eyes than I remember. My grandmother’s apartment is now rubble—I refuse to look at it whenever we drive by. The only constant is that my family is safe, alive, and well. Mashallah. To donate to Turkey-Syria earthquake relief efforts, visit https://ahbap.org/.

Your MagazineMarch 9, 2023