He was the son of Bangladeshi immigrants living in the UK. His parents did all they could to give him what they thought was a better deal — a decent home, nourishment, education, a sense of values and their way of life. But somewhere along the way, he was beset by the question that plagues most of us: Who am I? He found his answer -- all too soon it seems. It resulted in his heading out for Syria and, after a series of experiences including ensuring that he outwardly looked the part, he was killed. He was in his early 20s.
Identity. It drives us crazy. We will go to any lengths for our identity, whatever that may be; even though, and perhaps because, it is the cause of innumerable conflicts of the mind and the body. We’ve seen, in the last 20 years alone, crisis after crisis popping up in all corners of the world, with no resolution in sight, only death, destruction, and the end of days.
One day, as I leafed through some notes and quotes jotted down in copybooks and bits of paper, I chanced upon this poem by performance poet, Benjamin Zephaniah. “I don’t need an identity crisis to be creative,” he says.
I don’t need an identity crisis to be creative
I don’t need to be a tortured soul.
I know who I am
I look in the mirror every day and I see me.
I don’t have an identity crisis.
Who does he see when he looks in the mirror every day? Who do I see when I look in the mirror every day? My face, my eyes, my body… and I ask: Who the hell am I? That question again. It won’t leave me. It won’t let us be.
I went straight to the master of them all — the worldwide web. The first name it threw up was that of a book — Who Am I? (Naan Yar?) , the teachings of Ramana Maharishi. Of course, I didn’t get it, the “not-I” and the “quiescent mind”, not one bit. But it did set my mind abuzz with the idea at my mundane, down-to-earth, level. I am a human being (as opposed to fauna or flora, for instance), a female person, living in a city in India, speaking some Indian languages, not particularly god-minded, but ‘belonging’ to the majority faith in a vague and general kind of way…. and so on and so forth.
Too simple
Is this who I am, then? Is this my identity? And if this is my identity, what do I do with it? No, this can’t be it; it’s surely not this simple. Because, were it so simple, why would there be zillions of people all around the world tying themselves into knots over the question in ways horrendous, questionable and ridiculous?
Suddenly, I was reminded of an anecdote in Sheila Dhar’s delightful memoir, Raga’n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life . Sheila Dhar was a Hindustani musician and the wife of an Indian diplomat, so you can imagine the kind of stories she may have had to tell. That she writes felicitously makes this reading journey even more delightful. Anyway, I was reminded of the passage in which she records the time the royal couple of Samoa visited India, and the wives of the diplomatic core had been ordered by Indira Gandhi (she was Prime Minister then) to take care of the Queen and make sure she was comfortable. The women did their best, plying her with food and trying to keep the conversation going in the absence of a language in which to communicate. In the course of their efforts, one of the women asked the Queen, a round, soft, smooth-faced, gentle-looking, beatific personality, what she did… you know, what do you do, basically, how do you pass your time?
“I be’s,” the Queen of Samoa replied.
What a wonderfully philosophical and practical response, I thought when I read the book, and now, reflecting on it. So heartfelt and heart-warming. To just be. Not to worry about who I am but simply be. Today – and maybe always, think of how Jesus, for instance, was persecuted in his time — we seem to derive our identities from forces around exerting their pressure on us, influences such as community, caste, religion, language, habits, clothes, point of view… Is that who we are? Is that how the world decides who we are?
How am I?
I wonder, maybe the question itself is all wrong. For starters, the truth is that “Who am I?” is too much for mere mortals to contemplate, let alone begin to answer. Itis better left to philosophers and others better equipped, let’s be honest. For the here and now, and the business of living in this world, engaging with and in this world as a social being, perhaps the quest should be to find answers to the question: How am I?
This question is about the inside. What moves me, what makes me, what motivates me, what manner of person am I? Maybe that’s a closer, truer marker of my identity. What’s outside can stay outside, be discarded. What’s inside, lives, grows and reaches out. Yes, that’s who I am.
In that case, can I change who I am? I mean, how I am?