Globalization has connected us like never before.
The free flow of goods, people and ideas has made the world smaller and in the process created a whole new class of people not bound by national borders.
Whether that’s because of business, being in a foreign service or simply because of immigration, the question, “Where are you from?” can be a complicated one to answer when you’ve lived your life around the world.
Taiye Selasi, a photographer and writer on the complexity of identity, took on the question in a TED talk titled “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.”
Selasi, who was born in England, grew up in the United States with parents from England and the Gold Coast — raised in Nigeria and Ghana, respectively. She underscores how complex it would be to answer the question of where you come from.
Selasi, however, rightfully argues we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. The way we think of origin directly correlates with nationality — the country in which you were born.
Yet countries and states, as we know them today are inventions several hundred years old that can be born and can also die.
But as Selasi points out, certain intangibles associated with countries are in fact real and often transcend the lifetimes of states.
“History was real, cultures are real, but countries were invented,” Selasi said.
That’s why when it comes down to who we are and how we inform our sense of self, it’s all local.
Colum McCann puts it best: “All experience is local.” This sentence caused Selasi to think, “All identity is experience.”
An American raised in the South will be different from an American raised on the West Coast.
Someone born in Madrid and raised in New York has a completely different life experience than someone who has lived in Madrid all his or her life. Yet, when asked, “Where are you from?” their experience is reduced to the country that issued their birth certificate.
Selasi argues when we ask where you’re from, we’re privileging fiction, something as conceptual as a singular country, over true reality: human experience.
To truly understand someone, a better question might be, “Where are you a local?”
By asking this question rather than the other, we’re better and more accurately understanding of the places, rituals, relationships and limitations that have shaped the person in front of us.
Moreover, when we ask the right questions we’re able to relate more, feel more and understand more even if it challenges the neat little boxes we’ve been taught or have constructed in our heads.
Saying you’re multi-local might take more time to explain than saying you’re an American.
But ultimately for a lot of people, especially in a globalized society like ours, it allows their life experience to not be discounted. And that’s worth it.
edsalas@indiana.edu
