‘Where are you from?’

In a history of colonialism and displacement, author Janika Oza contemplates fraught nature of the question

I’ve always had a fraught relationship with the question: Where are you from? There’s been more conversation in recent years, that such a question is most often directed at racialized folks, and assumes a lack of belonging, implies that the person in question cannot possibly be “from here.” But even before I could articulate this discomfort, the question confounded me. I am often asked if I am from India, or if my family is, and while the answer isn’t no, it also isn’t cleanly yes.

My great-grandparents left British-ruled India for British-ruled East Africa in the early 1900s, where three generations of my family settled, first in Kenya and then in Uganda, until they were exiled in 1972 under the dictator Idi Amin’s decree to expel all Asians from the country.

The foods I grew up eating, the language we speak at home, rest somewhere between India and Uganda, a hybrid of plantain and cassava and chickpea, Gujarati and Swahili and English. As the only person in my family born in Canada, the question of where I’m from was always further complicated by the fact that I have always lived here.

Though for many that question may not seem political, the reason why I am “from” these places certainly is. After the abolition of slavery, the British implemented indentured labour, shipping millions of Indians across the Empire, including to labour on the East Africa Railway linking the interiors of Uganda and Kenya in order to transport British exports of tea, coffee, cotton and sugar. Among those who survived the abhorrent working conditions — labourers, artisans, engineers, and officers — many chose to remain, settling once the railway construction was over.

If this was the root of the South Asian community in East Africa, thousands more migrants followed, leaving behind the dire circumstances in British-ruled India in pursuit of better economic opportunities.

The diaspora grew, composed of manifold religions, regions and languages. But their settlement was always tied to their role as colonized subjects: under British rule, the South Asian and African communities were separated, with the British creating a social order that placed the Europeans at the top, Asians in the middle, and Africans at the bottom. This de facto apartheid manifested in separated schools, jobs, pay scales, infrastructure — in Kampala, where my family lived, Europeans primarily occupied large houses in the hills, Indians lived in the city centres, and Africans lived outside of the cities altogether.

Asians became the middlemen, the scapegoats, the in-between layer in the colonial sandwich. It’s an old trick: divide the racialized populations, pit them against one another, breed a false sense of competition between them as insurance. This scarcity mindset developed into a growing resentment toward the Asian population that eventually fuelled Idi Amin’s expulsion order — the reason why at least 80,000 South Asians were forced to leave their homes permanently, many of whom had lived there for generations, my family included.

I wrote a novel — “A History of Burning” — that moves from India to Kenya to Uganda to Canada and the United Kingdom, probing questions of belonging and survival in shifting lands and homes. My writing was propelled by a desire to understand that question of where I come from. But embedded in that question were more: what does it mean to be a migrant community settling in another colonized place? To seek refuge on stolen land? What does it mean to pursue safety and security in a system that is also causing harm to other communities? Who gets to feel belonging in that context? My family’s history is composed of both settlers and refugees — at once complicit in and harmed by the nations to which we tried, hoped, to belong.

The final chapter of that novel takes place in Toronto during the Yonge Street Uprising in 1992. A protest that began in solidarity with rage over the acquittal of the police officers caught on camera beating Rodney King grew to encompass the police brutality and racial violence in Toronto, motivated by the killing of Raymond Lawrence by a white police officer just days before. Our cities might not be legally segregated, but we do not all live and move freely, equally, within them. See above: who gets to feel safe? How do different communities experience these adopted homes, which we who have been forced to leave other countries are told are havens? The 1992 protest was started by several hundred activists from the Black Action Defence Committee, but it steadily grew into the thousands, joined by Indigenous youth, racialized folks and white allies calling for justice in the nation’s violent systems.

I’ve been expounding here on the narrative of complicity — how racialized settlers benefit from the dispossession of Indigenous lands and peoples, how the painting of Asians as a “good” minority perpetuates anti-Blackness through heavier policing and carceral oppression that target Black communities, how the belief that we must assimilate to whiteness as the ticket to stability in this country only perpetuates the divide between racialized groups. But there’s another side to this narrative: resistance.

Recently, in the midst of the ongoing global pandemic that has sparked anti-Asian racism while disproportionately impacting Black communities, the dialogue about cross-racial and cross-community solidarities has been growing. The spreading Black Lives Matter movement and escalating antiAsian violence have pushed many to widen their definition of community — to interrogate antiBlackness and prejudice in our own circles and to consider our complicities in the white supremacist systems that affect us all. When I wrote that final chapter of my novel, it was without the knowledge of what was to come in 2020 and beyond, of the growing urgency of anti-racist struggles here and elsewhere. But though I could not look forward, I could look back.

During my research for the novel, I encountered examples of AfroAsian coalition-building during the post-Independence student movements in Uganda in the 1960s and the Organization for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the U.K. in the 1970s — legacies of resistance that continue today. There is a long legacy of Black and Asian solidarities in movement work, rooted in shared histories of colonialism, racial and labour exploitation and empire. These movements were not detached from the messy realities of coming together as different communities with power dynamics between them. And yet, what struck me was how the conversations about collective liberation and solidarity are not new. They are the groundwork from which we can learn, knowing that just as our histories are tied together, so too are our struggles towards liberation.

In other words, we’re not safe until we’re all safe. We are stronger, louder when we come together. And it brings me back to that first question, of where I’m from. Our legacies of complicity and resistance tell us that the answer is not to erase our complicated histories, not to reduce them for the sake of ease, but to learn from them.

Perhaps the problem is in the question itself, not because it assumes a lack of belonging, but because there can be no belonging until it exists for us all.