maxinsights

‘Where are you from’ can be one of the first things people ask, after ‘what’s your name’. Sometimes followed by ‘what do you do’. It is as if I must know immediately what to call you, your origins, and your professional status. In London this is also often followed by ‘where do you live’. It’s an odd sociometry I’ve become accustomed to on a first meeting with strangers.

I’d say my more meaningful encounters usually don’t start with this kind of anxious cross-examination. Although it is of course a very natural form of small talk, a ritual show of interest when meeting someone new. And I often start conversations in this way. But accepting this for what it is, it also strikes me how a person’s relationship to this customary interrogation can be far more complicated than the casual and polite superficiality to which the questions pretend.

I’ve met people for whom it can be the very first question, ‘what’s your name’. London is multicultural and multilingual, but the English language drags its feet at ‘foreign’ names. Arab, Urdu, Persian, Mandarin, Yoruba, Portuguese and a multitude of supposedly ‘complicated’ names have to be pixelated before they can be deciphered by the analogue English ear. But what does it mean if people can’t even say your name?

For others it can be ‘what do you do’. This question exposes your position in the crushing social hierarchy. A question dreaded by people who have ‘boring’ jobs, people who have ‘not a real’ job, people who have ‘hard to explain’ jobs, people who have no job.

Because of my peripatetic ‘third culture’ upbringing, ‘where are you from’ can trigger for me an irrational emotional reaction. I don’t have a simple answer to the question. And why should I. I can feel at once frustrated and strangely conceited, a psychological defence I think against my fears about fitting in, and some embarrassment at revealing my privileges.

Reflecting on this for myself has made me interested in the various shades of dissonance that people can experience who don’t have a straightforward answer to this question for their own reasons. Due to privilege or lack of. And people who do have a fairly simple answer but sometimes wish they could just be accepted as local and stop being cast as ‘not from here’.

Indeed, ‘where are you from’ is a duplicitous question in having the potential to be both an intimate and profound inquiry into someone’s origins, their family, their roots, their essence and their source, whilst also being a question that is steeped in violence and suspicion.

‘Where are you from’ is a question that draws and reaffirms boundaries. And it is a brutal reality. Where you’re from, globally or locally, determines your life expectancy and trajectory. And in London young people are killed for being in the wrong area. It is a question that brings together, and tears apart.

I also think that even in everyday conversation, the question ‘where are you from’ can betray a procrustean urge to fit the unfamiliar in to the familiar. It’s not always motivated by a desire to really know someone’s origins, but instead to put them in a known and simple category.

At its worst, trying to cobble together an ‘identity’ in this atmosphere can no longer feel like an opportunity to be seen and known. It is more like a suffocating pressure to explain yourself, to justify your existence.

I don’t think we should ban the ‘where are you from’ question. Quite the opposite. The world is increasingly global and interconnected, and yet dangerously divided. Surely we should all know more about each other’s origins and take an interest in places and people who are ‘different’ from ‘us’. But it depends how you ask, and why you ask.

It also depends on asking as a way to complexify, not tidy. And besides from any socio-political agenda, this is in itself enriching. Connecting across difference can allow your familiar to expand and be transformed. I fall short of this all the time. But when I am able, being open and opened to is life affirming, and gives space to breathe.