By Natasha Burge @ TSS.com, Feb. 28

[....] The most antagonistic questioning occurred during my time attending university in the United States when I was what in the cross-cultural community is termed a “hidden immigrant” — someone who superficially appears to be the same as the surrounding culture but internally is profoundly different. Because of my white skin I had significant privileges not available to many immigrants, including the ability to try to blend in and avoid these questions altogether. I soon learned, however, that even doing that didn’t alleviate the dissonance I experienced being continually assumed to be something that in many ways I simply wasn’t. The relentless questioning and occasional instances of outright aggression served as reminders to me that transcultural individuals can be perceived as unwelcome challenges to essentialist approaches to identity formation.

But in the Manama souq, even when I’m speaking Arabic, these questions rarely arise because in transcultural spaces “individuals are assumed all to be different from each other to some degree; they are as various and diverse as they can be, want to be.” The souq is a space built on centuries of diversity and the threads of connection are so densely interwoven that notions of cultural or linguistic purity seem laughably absurd. “Some speak several languages fluently; some speak a couple, some many. Some speak smatterings of various languages. Everyone knows words, phrases, expressions, from various languages, people naturally blend them into the language they’re speaking. Hybrid languages proliferate.” In the souq, cultures funnel through individuals to be reshaped into any number of different expressions, which is evident in the medley of customs, languages, and styles of dress that can belong to a given person in any manner of combinations. Here, complex notions of home aren’t an academic exercise, they are the foundational truths around which people premise their lives [....]