Anjan Sundaram in “No Direction Home”: blue | Aneesh Aneesh in “Citizenship is a Myth”: red
“‘Who am I becoming?’ An immigrant inevitably asks this question.”
“To explain what citizenship means today, there is a
widespread tendency to reach for the
language of membership.”
“I arrived at Yale a week before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Over the months that followed, I felt the growing pressure on
foreigners to prove they were benign. I changed how I looked,
dressed, ate, and spoke.”
“Membership, let’s admit, is a deeply seductive idea.
It promises several things: inclusion, community, solidarity,
and common enemies who lurk in the vast and
unfamiliar outside world.”
“My new home demanded subtle new allegiances.”
“The model of membership cannot handle
overlapping allegiances, divided loyalties and mobile
populations creating an unhelpful situation of ‘us’ versus
‘them’ in a world where ‘us’ and ‘them’ are becoming inexorably
more integrated by transportation and communication.”
“India does not allow dual-national citizens, so that meant
I had to give up my Indian passport. The French consul
who processed my citizenship application asked if I wanted
to change my name, to make it easier to pronounce for
French people.”
“…we shouldn’t really call them dual citizenships because
they do not necessarily mean equal memberships in
two countries; an individual may have varying packages of
rights in numerous nations.”
“Migration had indeed granted my father worldly
success. But I wondered if either of us realized
what we had given up.”
“We live in a world where being born within a country does
not guarantee all citizenship rights, and being born in a
foreign country may not necessarily restrict them.”
“To be on the move is to be willing to leave behind
what we have built and start over again. In the places
I have lived I have felt like no one in particular, just
someone from far away.”
“There are two problems with the language of membership:
It no longer works, and it is far less inclusive than it seems.”
“But my itinerant life has led me to belong nowhere…
I make myself anew.”