“Where
are you from?” the
ubiquitous question posed to me since I learned to formulate my first English
sentence, has overtime accrued the weight of a multitude of implied questions,
and exclamations. Now by 22 years old the weight of that question is so heavy
with implications, and assumptive self-erasing experiences I hear it and laugh.
The kind of laugh that your mother makes when you lie to her and she knows your
lying; she knows where you’ve been last night. Just like I know where the mind of the
third man in this bar who has insisted on repeating “no, you know what I mean- where are you
REALLY from.”
I generally
see things spatially. I see my world spatially. As a double major in graphic
design & architecture and a dyslexic synesthete I’ve found that I had a better understanding
of the world around me if I could explain and express that world visually. Possibly
the only I way I can really formulate and fully understand a sentence, or any
verbally expressed idea is to remember that those ideas exist in space.
When I say words
exist in space I don’t
mean just literal space. I mean conceptual space, bear with me, the physical
space of a sentence translates into the pixels this word occupies on my
computer screen. Words in a conceptual space refers to the dependence the
expression of ideas and language has upon our understanding of physical space.
How so? Well look at our language. The use of most prepositions are rooted in
our developmental understandings of space and time: before, in, by, since, through,
over, etc. Without an understanding of space there is no conception of
language, and thought. If we do not conceive of what beginning, middle and end
means spatially or temporally we can not begin to express the beginning middle
and end to a story or a theory. The understanding of physical space and of time
is the reference point for language.
So lets look
again at that ubiquitous question again. In it there are two key prepositions
in play: “where are you from?”
The first word, where, is a preposition; ‘where’ when posed in this form refers
“in
or to what place or position.[1]” and the
second preposition ‘from;’ from referring to the preposition of place that is
“used to indicate the place that something comes out of, a starting point[2].”
By asking where am I from with no prior context other than seeing some phenotypical
form of me whether it be in real life or online and asking it as an entrance
into some flirtation or some form of extra credit cat call, is problematic. It
is alienating and a microagression on my sense of identity and bar on a sense
of belonging. Asking me where, you create for me a vestibule of physical
otherness, a question, an assumption of mystery. ‘Where’ is an uninvited
existential question into the fact that I am different from you, unlike things
you have seen before, unlike yourself, unlike others around me. Where. This
casual flirtatious introduction is wrought with a need to know is my position
my place in order for you to make sense of something he has not seen: based on
the shape of my eyes, the texture of my hair, the color of my skin. I haven’t
spoken a word to him but across either a keyboard, or across a loud room he’s
invited himself to ask me about my identity in order to not learn about me but
to place me in a position and place he is comfortable with understanding me
from. “I am from American, I am American.” 9/10 this answer is disappointing. “Where
are you really from?” follows that answer. It’s not because he
thinks I am lying, my accent is an American accent and so is my passport.
American is not what he was looking for, but we can’t both be American. We
cannot conceptually originate from the same space, because when we originate
from the same space I loose my interest as a question. I loose that position as
an ‘other’ as something different, something almost inhuman. I loose the
possibility of representing the unknown, of being the uncharted territory
marked only by a question mark. I say nothing. He looks annoyed; “I’m just
asking because you look so exotic.”
*
This was
written as a short blog version of spatial experience within language through
the lens of one sentence; this of course is able to be expanded in many ways
and applied to life in the city as a woman of color.
*
*
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