- Name: Farzana Zubair
- Age: 21
- Parents’ Birth Country: Bangladesh
- Age when they moved: Dad, 23, Mom, 18
- Major: Human Development and Family Studies, minors in Human Rights/Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Q: What brought your parents to the USA?
FZ: My dad got his PhD in structural engineering in England and travelled all around the world, staying with various family members while he searched for a stable job. My dad’s family (parents and siblings) already moved to Canada, so they stayed there for a few years until my dad moved to Rhode Island where my uncle (mom’s brother) lived. There, he found a long-term engineering job that he has kept until today—about 22 years.
My parent’s motivation for uprooting their lives in such a way, moving away from the place they called home, is pretty much the same as it is for most immigrants coming here—the search for opportunity. My dad, with his skillset, grades, and occupation, had the ability to move to the Global North relatively easy—he got a full scholarship for his PhD and so it was no question for him to go where the opportunities called him. I am not my parents nor am I an immigrant, so I don’t know the full extent or complexity of the experience of migration, but my understanding and my experiences as a child of immigrants has been that their sacrifice has been not only for them, but for the ease and success of future generations.
Q: What has been your favorite or the most exciting part of living in this country?
FZ: My most favorite part is the relationships I’ve made. Especially in college, I’ve met some of the most beautifully rich and nuanced people, with a plethora of backgrounds and perspectives. I’ve become a better person because of the people I’ve met in this country, and, due to the many privileges that I have, I am able gain knowledge and an education that not only informs who I am as a person, but also of the world around me.
Q: What has been the hardest or most discouraging part about living in this country for you?
FZ: Where do I start? When you live in a country that is considered a “superpower,” which has influence throughout the world, has partaken in rampant colonialism and the dehumanization and denigration of black and brown bodies, and you are brown, you are a woman, and you are Muslim, it takes a toll on you. You often have to prove that you’re human, that you’re not an object, and that you are complex and multifaceted. It’s tiring, having to constantly fight systems that are built to marginalize the most vulnerable groups while also having an identity that is marginalized. It’s a feeling I wish I never had to feel—I wish no one had to feel it. The most discouraging thing is that I know it will never be fixed in my lifetime, or in my children’s lifetime, or the lifetimes after that. Because of that, more people will feel helpless, more people will be caught in intergenerational cycles of poverty, and more people will die at the hands of this country’s legacy. And it’s the most devastating feeling.
Q: Do you remember the first time you realized that you and your family were a marginalized group? When was that and could you describe that experience?
FZ: My whole life was a culmination of racist, sexist, and Islamaphobic moments. There was not one point in my life where that was absent, yet I viewed all these moments as simply individual; not something structural or interconnected. When I was in 11th grade, my best friend, who happened to be atheist, placed a lawsuit against my school due to a prayer banner in our auditorium. The abuse that she faced, online and in-person, caused me to abandon Facebook and other social media outlets for a long while. It was in that moment that I discovered Tumblr and was indoctrinated by the conversations on that social justice platform. I was young and overzealous, and I know now that my education regarding social justice should not have started there. Yet, in exploring the internet in such a fashion, I was able to align my experiences on a social reality of inequality—of not simply individual or familial slights, but as a part of a larger system of marginalization. I was very angry for a while. Yet, as I got older, understood advocacy better, and understood that we are all products of historically established social hierarchy, my anger became more productive, in a sense.
Q: What are some of the positive aspects of the culture of your parents’ birth country- be they political, religious, or otherwise- that have helped make you who you are?
FZ: There’s a lot, really, that I’m very grateful for having in my life due to my culture. I think the main thing is not being entrenched in Western ideals and norms. I am exposed to alternate ways of thinking, to different methods of knowledge production, and to alternative ways of relating to others (like, collectivistic understandings of family, respect for elders, marriage ideals, etc.). It’s my way of fighting Western hegemony—knowing that there are different ways to be as an individual and family, and they are not any less valid or any less “civilized.” Being raised in my culture heightened my ability to empathize and understand various ways of being human and to subsequently connect on the basis of that humanity. I experience a very distinct hybridity in my identity; not only as a citizen of the United States, but also as someone who hails from a country that’s been colonized three times over. Bangladesh itself is the embodiment of hybridity, and navigating that aspect of my identity has made me come to appreciate my own hybridity. My process of decolonization is complex, but also something that reifies my commitment to acknowledging the multiplicity of humanity. But beyond that, I have a lot of love for Bangladesh and for Islam.
Q: How do you contribute to the community at UConn or in the United States?
FZ: I do a lot of work to combat established narratives of immigrants, of people of color, of women, of the queer community, especially in student organizing. I’m currently working with Connecticut Students for a Dream, specifically with immigration rights for the undocumented immigrant community. My education thus far has the goal of improving the status of those in the most marginalized positions; and I’m learning how to best harness my individual power to fight within a collective.
Q: What are your goals for the future and how have those goals been shaped by your experience being a Bangladeshi Muslim of immigrant parents?
FZ: I’m not going to lie and say that the fact that I have immigrant parents doesn’t contribute to the type of goals and career paths I have in mind. It’s a lot of pressure to really justify the sacrifice that your parents made. That’s why I was trying to be a veterinarian at first and it’s a constant battle now trying to justify my current major to my parents. I often say that I’m going to pursue a law degree not only because I think it might be the best path for me, but also because it eases a lot of my parents’ worry. In Bangladesh, parents are always cared for by their children (multigenerational households are very common) and nursing homes have a really bad reputation within the Bangladeshi community. They want to make sure that I have a comfortable life, but also that they have some reassurance for their future as elderly people.
Beyond that though, being a child of immigrants, being Bangladeshi Muslim, and the subsequent oppressions I’ve faced based on those aspects of myself—it only makes me want to fight more. My goal for the rest of my life is to keep fighting as much as I can, in whatever way I can.
Q: As a Muslim, what do you wish people would understand about you and your culture?
FZ: Islam is not monolithic. Muslims are not monolithic. Whatever sort of ideas you have about Islam or Muslims—even if they’re supposedly “good”—please just keep educating yourself, reexamine your current perceptions, and never forget that humans are humans. We are all still learning.
Q: Do you hope to continue living in this country after college? Why or why not?
FZ: Yes, because with my major and what I want to do with my life, it’s pretty established within the politics and social fabric of the USA. Unless anything particularly bad happens to me, especially in regards to politics (I’m thinking of the future of Muslims in the U.S.), I don’t think I’ll leave anytime soon. It’s been pretty much the same throughout my life, aside from romantic ideas of escaping elsewhere, or even moving to Canada where most of my family is. This is home for me.
The following is a poem Farzana wrote as she was coming of age and began to realize what her ethnic and religious identity meant for her, and people like her, in a social context:
My Future Child, by Farzana Zubair
I want to write to you
A letter to list how I have condemned you.
By passing on my skin color
By reciting “Allahu akbar” in your ear as you
scream into this new, untarnished world
I’ve condemned you.
When you are in kindergarten, you will stand with your classmates
In a moment of silence for
two buildings you’ve never heard of
When you are in the second grade
A boy on the bus will ask you
Whether a children’s hospital is in danger from
the bombs you hide under your bed
You will be asked that question in various forms
multiple times
For the next ten years
When you are six,
the first time you have mehndi on your hands
a girl will tell you that you are dirty; that you
Need to wash your hands
And you will scrub at your fingers for days
You will erase that flower
Until your small, soft hands are raw
And clean
Years later
That same girl is wearing mehndi on her hands, curved lines
Of a flower on her white skin
And she will ask you
“Have you heard of this henna stuff?”
And one day you will see how every story
you’ve ever written as a child
Is lead by a girl with the bluest eyes and
the palest skin
And she falls in love with a man with pale hair
Pale eyes
And pale skin
Your aunt will tell you
To speak only English to her daughter because
She wants her to sound educated
And her daughter will refuse to play in the sun
For she wants to keep her skin as white as possible
In the eighth grade, you will befriend a boy
And you will hold this boy dear
You’ll never call him your best friend but you will refer
To him as such in your head
Yet, when you ask why he never hugs you
(You notice how he hugs everyone but you)
He responds
“I’ve been raised to believe that brown people
Are impure and that if I touch you, I will
Be tainted”
But, as a thirteen year old, his words were more like
“I don’t hug you because you’re brown.”
And you will be so confused
And so angry
But you’ve been taught to bury this white hot anger
And he will eventually
Learn to see that the blue that lines your
wrist lines his too
And the first insult anyone will ever throw your way
Will be “rag headed bitch”
And your best friends will ask you if the Quran
Orders you to kill all Americans
And that somehow, you must be different from most Muslims
There is violence
In your skin color
There is violence
In your faith
There is violence
In the smile your Sunday School teacher greets you with as she
Fixes your hijab
And when you are seventeen years old
You will be flooded with realization
You will see how your face is erased from the television
How you don’t exist within this colorless world until
you throw a bomb at a building
You will see how you are compartmentalized into
“exotic”, into “foreign”
And your citizenship, your birthright will always be questioned
“Where are you from?” they will ask you
“Are you a citizen?” they will ask you
And they will be so relieved to hear that you actually
Won’t have an arranged marriage
My future child, this is what I have condemned
You to
And there will be so much more
A colorless wave will drown you and
You will suffocate like you did
In the silence that began it all
And you see the golden brown of your skin
There is something beneath that surface
Something they will never understand because
the brightness is too blinding
You are not done, my dear.
You will never be done.
And the silence rings; this silence will be your
Battle.
–
All photos courtesy of Farzana Zubair.