The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns

by Dohra Ahmad

Is home the place where we are born, where, as we say in Haiti, our umbilical cords are buried? Or is home the place we die, where we are buried? Or is home the place where we toil in between? The place to which we’ve sacrificed our youth, our strength, the place to which we have given the best years of our lives? Some of us are born speaking one language and will die speaking another. We are seeds in one soil and weeds in another.

He met dozens of other Abrahims, men who promised him that when they made it to London the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they had imagined. “It’s different there,” they always said. There had to be at least one place in this world where life could be lived in accordance with the plans and dreams they had concocted for themselves. For most, that place was London; for some it was Paris, and for a smaller but bolder few it was America. That faith had carried them this far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment (“Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better”), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London, eighteen months later, he had begun to think of all the men he met as variations of Abrahim, all of them crippled and deformed by their dreams.

I have a special ticket to another planet beyond this Earth. A comfortable world, and beautiful: a world without much smoke, not too hot and not too cold. The creatures are gentler there, and the governments have no secrets. The police are nonexistent: there are no problems and no fights. And the schools don’t exhaust their students with too much work for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r” behind and turned into love, so the weapons sleep beneath the dust, and the planes pass by without shelling the cities, and the boats look like smiles on the water. All things are peaceful and kind on the other planet beyond this Earth. But still I hesitate to go alone. (TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID)

Pravasi means foreigner, outsider. Immigrant, worker. Pravasi means you’ve left your native place. Pravasi means you’ll have regrets. You’ll want money, then more money. You’ll want one house with European shitters. And one car, one scooter. Pravasi means you’ve left your loved ones because you’re young, ambitious, filled with confidence that you’ll be back some day, and you probably will.

“Father—” I began in a questioning voice that made him groan. Already I was called the Australian one, the questioner. “Father,” I said, “why do peacocks have beautiful tails?” He tugged at his beard. “Their feet are ugly,” he said. “Allah has given them tails so that no one will look at their feet.”

Green is for the color I like most—yellow. Green is for a color I can’t stand—blue. Green is a mixture of blue and yellow. Green is for confusion.

America welcomes you into its land so you can mop its floors. I want to hold my head up high again, to breathe my name and have it heard.