Forgive me dear reader, but I am a bit of a hoax, which means my writing prospects are ultimately doomed, for one of the first rules that you hear is that you must be honest and genuine to be able to reach out to someone you may never meet, but has chosen to read your musings.

I am a coconut and stick out like a palm tree in Finland. Very much brown on the outside, but my insides feel very white.
Allow me to elaborate: It is always during Christmas time that I find myself becoming more relaxed and for the first time we got ourselves a Christmas tree. The girls and I had a wonderful time decorating the tree, and it felt wholesome. A part of me also felt that I had betrayed my own and jumped to the other side.

The outcome of the election has left me despondent as if lines had been drawn between them and us. Which is why, putting up a Christmas tree feels like a betrayal. For I know, the people in power do not particularly think highly of my ‘funny tinge’ and I do sometimes look like a letter-box, and the adoption of this ritual is like a capitulation to their desire to wipe me and my culture out of the history books.

But culture is a hybrid entity, never stagnant, always moving, always moulding, picking up things along the way and dropping some along the way too. Just like a giant breadcrumbs trail trespassing time. Our culture is not immune to that. I feel like I haven’t let go of anything, merely taken on a ritual which brings my family together and that is a sacred principle I live by.

At my daughters’ class assembly, they talked about Rosa Parks. How she refused to give her seat up to a white person. Rosa was also the wrong skin colour, but her stand, her refusal to back down sparked a movement of its own.
It gave me hope. There are principles that are capable of overcoming racial boundaries, and I want those to define my family and me.

So I might make my own culture, full of curries whose scents will forever linger, forged out of the greatness and richness of what I have been brought up with and mix it what I find here.
Wish me luck.

Aasiya I Versi