SINDHA AGHA
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

HOW DO YOU identify when you are mixed? This is a problem I have always dealt with.

When people first meet me, they normally assume that I’m Caucasian and not mixed — this is because of my pale skin and brown hair.

Occasionally people will remark that I have “very Indian features,” but I’ve also been more incorrectly mistaken for being Latina and also Greek.

Technically, I’m half Pakistani and half Caucasian. My father grew up in Pakistan until he moved here on his own when he was 16.

I grew up here and I have never been to Pakistan (due to the political situation), but I have visited India several times. I don’t speak my father’s native language fluently, but I’ve grown up with the culture in my home: eating the food, wearing the clothes, going to the conventions, etc.

When I was in grade school I used to identify with being Caucasian. In fact, I wasn’t OK with being different. I held a sort of vanity about my image, but it was one directed toward the notion of being “normal.”

This changed when I entered the fourth and fifth grades, when I made friends with several Indian girls. As far as I was concerned, at that age, India and Pakistan were basically the same culture. My family had always visited India, not Pakistan, and I didn’t understand the politics yet so I thought that they must have been the same thing.

I remember delving deeply into the Indian culture and merging my father’s own culture with the various Indian ones that I became more familiar with. I ate the food, I wore the clothes, I went to the conventions …

But, things weren’t quite as I thought they would be. I still had white skin. At the Indian Cultural Society events, I still noticed that I stuck out. What was the solution? I drifted from the Indian identity, and as I did so I reached a new identity crisis.

As I matured I began to understand my father’s culture better, and why he didn’t associate himself with Pakistan. If you asked my father what nationality he was, he would say “Sindhi.” Sindh, my namesake, is a province of Pakistan.

So, why doesn’t my father call himself Pakistani? Because the Pakistani government has put the Sindhi population through decades of linguistic and ethnic discrimination.

Henceforth, I adopted this identity, “Sindhi,” threatened by cultural extinction. Then one day, toward the end of fifth grade, I came home frustrated because my classmates had told me that there was no such place as Sindh. My parents sent me back with a map, which I showed them and proved the existence of my father’s homeland. The problem didn’t end there, though …

How could other people ever let me claim identity to a culture that, as far as they knew, didn’t exist? More importantly, how could I claim identity to a culture if other people couldn’t really recognize it?

Now I just morph. Around Indians and fellow Sindhis I talk about things pertaining to our culture (although I get the same “You don’t look South Asian” stares), and around everyone else I don’t make a point to mention that I’m not just Caucasian if that’s what I get labeled as. Identity still remains a problem, and I wonder if I’ll ever come to a conclusion on it.