Disclaimer: Dear reader! This is a personal essay on self-discovery, written after years of living abroad. I have written this in order to shed light onto the inner musings and emotions of someone who comes from Central Asia. I kindly ask you to keep an open mind.
I never thought of my race until I started applying to colleges in the United States. The application form asked me to check one of the six boxes to define my race. None of the limited descriptions included Kazakh, so I ended up checking off “Other.”
This made me wonder why the US Census excluded not just my country, but an entire region of Central Asia out of its arbitrary categories, as if we did not exist at all.
While attending college in the United States I felt compelled to continuously contextualize my existence for the convenience and comfort of others. I tried my best to explain my background in simplified terms, but most of my peers failed to grasp the subtle nuances, distracted and confused by umbrella terms. Some listened purely out of academic interest, even documenting my words, as if I was being interviewed for a general survey on racial identity. A few exhibited a lacerated interest, fetishizing me and my incomprehensible, mystical otherness, as if I was an exotic specimen worthy to be picked apart and analyzed like an object.
I am Kazakh. I am a Russian-speaking, culturally Muslim Central Asian, born and raised in a Post-Soviet country.
However, none of these labels accurately define who I am. Russian is not my native language, I am not “Asian” according to the U.S. Census, and I do not strictly observe Islam.
I do not fit in a single box. All these words require an asterisk with expansive footnotes to further define my identity.
Despite the fact that I do not fully belong in these categories, I routinely deal with multiple microaggressions based on my looks, my faith, and the language I speak.
I am casually greeted with ni hao and konichiwa in Europe. When going to Asian restaurants, my request to swap chopsticks for a fork is often met with puzzled looks as servers and eavesdropping guests wonder how I failed to master this supposedly intuitive, native skill for me. When I attended graduate school in Oxford I was occasionally stopped by college Porters because they assumed that I was a trespassing tourist. Once after college formal dinner, while still wearing my subfusc gown, I went outside with my Kazakh friend to take a photo of the sunset in the quad. A guard singled us out amid a group of white students and asked me for my ID. It was a Porter who knew me, who had multiple conversations with me, but did not bother to remember my face. Even when fully dressed in my academic regalia, I was still not recognized as a scholar who belonged on campus.
I once tried to explore my racial identity in a college art project by drawing three self-portraits. I partially fit the portraits into square boxes, which was my way of refusing to confine myself into restrictive spaces, arguing that labels fail to show people in their entirety. It was already uncomfortable to deliver this highly sensitive and personal subject to a room full of white students, as no one seemed to understand or relate to my experiences. My art instructor was not impressed with the way I chose to visualize the concept and argued that I should have reproduced the college admission form in realistic detail instead. I did not understand how copying and perpetuating what made me feel invisible in the first place would help me speak up about my experiences and represent myself. My issue was profoundly misunderstood, so I quietly accepted a B as my course grade and threw away my self-portraits.
During conversations on faith and religion, a lot of foreigners express surprise at the fact that I identify as culturally Muslim. They expect more conspicuous signs of my “Muslimness,” such as wearing a headscarf or performing namaz five times a day. To them it looks like I am claiming and accessorizing a religion I know nothing about, when in reality they are the ones who have no idea about my cultural context. Kazakhstan, like other Central Asian countries, adopted and freely adapted Islam within its existing shamanic belief system in the 7th century, which resulted in the development of an eclectic set of practices. The shamanic and the islamic elements are tightly interwoven together in the patchwork of Kazakh culture, which is incomprehensible to people who are used to thinking in strictly binary terms.
My relationship with Russian is better defined by a complex identity crisis of a national scale. Russian was the lingua franca that was imposed on all cultures under Soviet Union’s Russification policy. It remained a language of commerce and business long after the USSR’s dissolution in the 1990s, pushing Kazakh to the side as a less practical alternative for some people. I may speak Russian, but I do not feel connected to it.
Russian-Speaking, Culturally Muslim, Central Asian. These labels provide a false sense of belonging. But in the end, they are just labels, created and imposed by others. They do not define or identify me in any way, because I am made of many things. I do not need to conform to someone else’s definitions, because I know exactly who I am and I define myself.
