.
My American family is a melting pot of backgrounds; my mother, whose family came to the United States in 1609; my father, born and raised in apartheid South Africa; and my brother, a refugee from Rwanda. Despite our wildly different backgrounds, we are united by our love for each other and for the liberty and tolerance brought forth and protected by the American Constitution. Growing up in a family of migrants and refugees has made me acutely aware of the trials and tribulations of becoming an American, and just how important that title is to those whose birth countries did not allow them the basic freedoms and immense privileges we are blessed with everyday in the United States. The following stories demonstrate the exceptional experiences and immense contributions that immigrants and refugees bring to the United States, and how people like my father and my brother make America the strong, beautiful, and diverse nation it is.
Photo: The Asmal Family
Irené’s Story
“What good would hatred do?”
That was Irené’s response when I asked him if he hated the men who killed his parents. “The only way to move forward is to forgive,” he resolved.
My brother Irené is an extraordinary person. He is overwhelmingly kind, exceptionally grateful and immensely thoughtful. He demonstrates these qualities in every aspect of his life, perhaps in an unassuming attempt to right all the many wrongs he experienced as a young boy.
Irené grew up in Kigali, Rwanda, a place he describes as where God probably began the process of creation, laying the land with a thousand rolling hills, His finest fertile red clay, and deep green forests for His people to enjoy. In Kinyarwanda, they say “Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha mu Rwanda,” that “God roams the world, but always comes to rest in Rwanda.”
Irené’s home in Kigali was within walking distance of his school, and around the corner from the library where his mother worked. After school, Irené would visit the library, helping his mother organize the shelves and picking books to take home with him. On special occasions his father, a surgeon, would bring Irené to the hospital to help stage the operating room, carefully shining instruments and delicately placing them back on the metal tray.
“Life before the genocide was simple,” Irené explained, “life was normal.”
In the summer of 1994, Irené’s masterpiece of God’s creation was ripped apart by 100 days of genocide. In just over three months, more than one million men, women and children were brutally killed. The genocide, which began when Irené was just 10 years old, was the manifestation of years of simmering tensions between Rwanda’s two prominent ethnic groups, the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus.
Prior to European colonization, the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was based on economic status, with those owning the most cattle being called Tutsis, and the rest considered Hutus. As the title was based on ownership, Rwandese could easily change status through marriage or cattle acquisition.
When the German colonists arrived in Rwanda in 1894, they distinguished the Hutus and Tutsis not by economic status, but by race. They decided that the Tutsis had more “Western” characteristics, like thin noses and light skin, and thus decided to put Tutsis in roles of responsibility in the colonial government.
When the Germans lost their colonies following World War I, the Belgians took control of Rwanda and in the 1930s, solidified the categories of Hutu and Tutsi by mandating identification cards that stated the carrier’s category. Although 90 percent of the Rwandan population was Hutu, the Belgians continued to allocate leadership positions to Tutsis, sustaining strife between the two groups. When the Rwandans began to push for independence, the Belgians switched the status of the two groups – putting Hutus in leadership positions and demoting Tutsis – in an attempt to maintain power. Power shifted back and forth between the two groups for decades, and animosity continued until tensions came to head in 1994.
On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, was killed in a plane crash. Hutu extremists that opposed Habyarimana’s plans to loosen the Hutu stronghold on leadership and allow Tutsis to participate in government allegedly shot down his plane. Within hours of the assassination, Hutu extremists took over the government, blamed the Tutsis for the murder, and began the genocide.
Irené recalls the genocide violence as beginning in the blink of an eye; neighbors who had once played soccer together were suddenly killing one another. During the first week of the genocide, militia fighters entered Irené’s home, and as Irené hid under the kitchen sink, murdered his parents.
After months of shattering violence, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front – made up predominately of exiled Tutsis – took military control of Rwanda. They arrived to find nearly a million Rwandans murdered and half a million raped. Another million government officials, soldiers and militia who had participated in the genocide fled to neighboring countries, fearing retribution from the new Tutsi government.
Eventually though, life regained a sense of normalcy. Irené moved in with his aunt and returned to school until 1999. That year, when Irené was 15, he and his male classmates were shanghaied into the Rwandan military to pursue perpetrators of the genocide who had absconded to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They fought, on foot, across thousands of miles of jungle, battling disparate warlords and génocidaires who exploited and hid amongst an increasingly embattled civilian population.
While the taking of young soldiers was a common tactic of the military, the stories of these boys and girls are rarely discussed. Irené does not elaborate on his time as a child soldier in the DRC. But he does say that he saw more pain and death there than in his own country, and that as the years go by he remembers more and more of the suffering he has tried to avoid for so long.
In 2000, Irené fled from his battalion and walked over 1,000 miles back to Kigali. There, he was reunited with his extended family, which had not seen or heard from him since the day he was taken from school. Days after he arrived though, members of the Rwandan Military Police arrived to arrest him for desertion. As he fled, they shot him multiple times and left him for dead in the street. Knowing he faced certain death if he sought treatment in a Rwandan hospital, Irené fled back into the DRC, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. He was treated in an NGO hospital tent but doctors were unable to save his wounded leg, amputating it above the knee.
After being bedridden for six months and knowing that imprisonment or worse awaited him in Rwanda, he convinced a Ugandan truck driver to take him across the border into Kenya. When Irené arrived in Kenya, he slept outside the UN office in Nairobi for five weeks trying to apply for refugee status. Almost 18 by this time, this was when my family first met Irené. He approached our car at a gas station in Nairobi, begging for money.
My mom always says that as soon as she met Irené, she knew there was something special about him. Over a few weeks of communicating in a mixture of broken English and French, Irené told us his story, and soon enough he became part of my family. It took years, but with the assistance of the Joint Voluntary Agency, Irené finally received refugee placement in Denver, Colorado.
When I asked Irené about his first days in Denver, he described feeling like a small boat in a large sea, with no sense of where home was. A volunteer from the placement agency met with him once a week to check on his progress in getting a driver’s license, looking for a job, and learning English. But he longed to return to his land of a thousand hills, to rest in the sun of his grandparents’ farm, and to watch soccer matches at his neighborhood field. Nonetheless, he recognized that for the first time in many years, he did not have to fear for his life. Finally, he was safe.
As Irené’s English improved, he worked his way through various jobs, selling tickets at the local movie theatre, icing cakes and sweeping the floors at a Safeway bakery, sorting mail at the post office, and checking passports at the Denver airport. Throughout, he volunteered at the organization that sponsored his arrival in the U.S., helping other refugees navigate America’s complicated bureaucracy and society.
Now, Irené works as a prosthetician, building robotic arms and legs for one of the most prominent and cutting edge prosthetics companies in the United States. He attends nursing school at night, and is due to take the Certified Nursing Assistant exam later this year. While he plans to finish his studies in Colorado, he never fails to remember the country that raised him, and one day hopes to open a low-cost prosthetics company in Kigali to help the hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans who also lost limbs during the genocide.
In 2008 Irené officially received his American citizenship, allowing him to vote just in time for President Obama’s first bid for office. Irené describes 2008 as the year he became an American, not because of his official papers, but because he finally felt like he could contribute to his community. He signed up to volunteer with the Obama campaign, assisting with events and helping people in his community understand the importance of voting – a right that at 24, he now held for the first time. For Irené, America is a land of opportunity. It is the country that allows him a free political voice, an education in safety, and the ability to reach his potential in all walks of life.
Thanksgiving is Irené’s favorite holiday, I think because he connects with the idea that the British colonists – refugees in their own right – were given a new life in America, just as he was. As part of our family traditions on Thanksgiving, we go around the table from youngest to eldest and say what we are thankful for. Every year, Irené says the same thing. That he is thankful for the nation that gave him hope when his was lost, and for the community that took him in when he had no one. When Irené introduces himself as an American, as a Coloradan, he beams with pride. My brother Irené is an extraordinary person, and a beautiful American.
Ismail’s Story
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God - Ruth 1:16.”
When my parents married in apartheid South Africa in 1986, my Indian-South African, Muslim father and my white, Presbyterian, American mother had this Old Testament verse on their wedding invitations.
The Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – the two apartheid laws that prevented interracial dating and marriage – had both just been repealed. However, laws still existed preventing them from legally living together as a family, and any children they produced would still be considered “colored,” forced to attend second rate schools, to choose jobs defined by “the color bar,” and allowed to vote only on limited rolls.
Like many immigrants, my father’s decision to come to the United States was initially one of necessity, knowing that loving my mother freely and publicly would not be possible in his home country. When he arrived in the United States though, he was presented with opportunities and privileges that had never before been afforded to him as a second-class citizen. In return for the opportunities he received in America, my father served his new country with 25 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, representing the United States and working in American embassies around the world.
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that was enforced by the South African National Party from 1948 to 1994. Under apartheid, South Africans were broadly categorized as “white” or “non-white,” with a complex hierarchy of subgroups within the non-white category. My dad’s parents emigrated from India in the 1930s and settled, along with more than one million other Indians, in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban. As an Indian-South African, my dad and his family had fewer rights than whites, but more privileges than blacks.
When my dad was little, he describes living in a small corner of South Africa; sitting in the over-crowded non-white section of the stadium at the circus, watching soccer matches from the run-down non-white bleachers at the soccer field, and being denied access to whites-only bathrooms, lines, buses, and beaches.
In addition to the racism and discrimination non-whites felt everyday, their lives and livelihoods were defined by a series of laws that restricted them from living in certain color-designated areas and holding certain jobs. Non-whites were not eligible for positions of leadership, or those that required high levels of skill. They were relegated to working at businesses in non-white areas or, with special permission, to work low-level jobs in white organizations.
And so, my dad lived in his corner of South Africa, attending his designated non-white university, playing on his designated non-white tennis team, and preparing himself for his future career as an accountant in a non-white business. There was a cap on how successful non-whites could be, whether implemented by laws designating that bosses had to be white, or just that non-white opportunities – like schools, sports teams, and living areas – were starkly under-resourced.
When my dad met my mom though, everything changed. They sat next to each other on a plane ride between Johannesburg and Durban, exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and courted long-distance for months. During the year they were dating, 160 mixed-race couples were convicted under South Africa’s Immorality Act, forcing my parents to tiptoe around being seen together in public. My dad even worried that the women working at the local post office would soon catch on to the white name of his new pen pal. Despite fearing arrest, they became engaged, and resolved to leave the country in order to legally marry.
During their engagement though, South Africa’s apartheid government began easing up on certain racial regulations, and lifted the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act that prevented my parents from marrying.
My parents married on the first of January in 1986, in one of the first biracial wedding ceremonies in the country. The ceremony fused American and South African cultures with Christian and Muslim traditions. My mom’s hennaed hands peeked out of the sleeves of her white wedding dress, as their vows crafted from Bible verses were spoken in the compound of a mosque. The reception served a mixture of Indian biryani and layered vanilla wedding cake. The ceremony was big news in Durban, a hopeful foreshadowing of improved race relations in the country.
My dad says an uneasiness was lifted from him when he began his life in Virginia. Suddenly, he was just like everyone else. He could apply for any job he wanted, play on any tennis court he passed by, and shop in any store he pleased. He could walk around holding my mom’s hand without worrying to look behind him to see if anyone was watching them.
“Life was how I imagined it should be, it was just normal,” my dad described.
During my parents’ first year in Virginia, they went to the Eid al-Fitr ceremony on D.C.’s National Mall to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the world attended, donning their finest traditional dress and celebrating the end of a long summer month of fasting. My mom remembers seeing young boys dressed in full shalwar kameez, the traditional long tunic worn by Muslim men in Pakistan, while saying things like “hey dude, that’s gross.” She was struck by how American they were, remembering that despite our apparent differences, we are all very similar.
That same year, my dad was “expeditiously naturalized” so that he could travel with my mother, who had just joined the U.S. Foreign Service. After passing a series of exams, interviews and background checks, he – and fifty some other new Americans – took an oath to the U.S. government. To celebrate, my grandparents took him and my mother to an Alexandria tavern that had been frequented by George Washington, and a server dressed in revolutionary garb sang a song welcoming “General Washington’s newest recruit.”
My dad says he was filled with a sense of gratitude that day, gratitude that a country that hadn’t raised him would take him in and provide him with rights and privileges that his own country had never allowed him. After taking the oath, the group received small American flags to take home. To my dad, the South African flag had always represented oppression. But this new American flag represented opportunity, rights, and a country he could really be proud of.
After working as an accountant in the countries of my mother’s postings for five years, my dad took the Foreign Service exam and became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer himself. For the next 20 years, my parents were posted in eight different American embassies across Asia and Africa. In his current position, he travels to different countries – often ones in the middle of war or conflict – to review budgets, investigate corruption, and conduct trainings at embassies.
In addition to his responsibilities at the office, my dad also plays an important role in the American community in each country he’s posted. At last year’s American Embassy chili cook-off, my dad took home the gold with his signature “Bunny Chow,” an Indian bean curry popular as a quick lunch meal in Durban. For me, an Indian-South African Bunny Chow winning an American chili cook-off embodies the America I know and love, one that embraces differences and sees immigrants as contributors of various spices to the melting pot of American culture.
Being a diplomat is a career made for a patriot. Every day, in and out of work, your duty is to represent the United States. My dad represents some of the best parts of our ideal America; that we are a nation built by immigrants, that we are tolerant and respectful of all religions, and that we value the perspectives and advances that different traditions, backgrounds, and cultures provide.
My father hopes that the horrible events around the world, and the increasingly heated political rhetoric at home, will not shake these values. It pains him to see so many people becoming all too eager to paint Muslims with a single negative brush, discounting the contributions Muslims have made to America’s military, law enforcement, commerce, and diplomacy since the nation’s founding. I wish those who fear Muslims could meet my dad, and the other millions like him in America and around the world. I’m sure they would see why he is loved and respected by those around him. I’m also sure they would see that, just as he is proud to be an American, other Americans should be proud of those like him.
Photo: The Asmal Family
Irené’s Story
“What good would hatred do?”
That was Irené’s response when I asked him if he hated the men who killed his parents. “The only way to move forward is to forgive,” he resolved.
My brother Irené is an extraordinary person. He is overwhelmingly kind, exceptionally grateful and immensely thoughtful. He demonstrates these qualities in every aspect of his life, perhaps in an unassuming attempt to right all the many wrongs he experienced as a young boy.
Irené grew up in Kigali, Rwanda, a place he describes as where God probably began the process of creation, laying the land with a thousand rolling hills, His finest fertile red clay, and deep green forests for His people to enjoy. In Kinyarwanda, they say “Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha mu Rwanda,” that “God roams the world, but always comes to rest in Rwanda.”
Irené’s home in Kigali was within walking distance of his school, and around the corner from the library where his mother worked. After school, Irené would visit the library, helping his mother organize the shelves and picking books to take home with him. On special occasions his father, a surgeon, would bring Irené to the hospital to help stage the operating room, carefully shining instruments and delicately placing them back on the metal tray.
“Life before the genocide was simple,” Irené explained, “life was normal.”
In the summer of 1994, Irené’s masterpiece of God’s creation was ripped apart by 100 days of genocide. In just over three months, more than one million men, women and children were brutally killed. The genocide, which began when Irené was just 10 years old, was the manifestation of years of simmering tensions between Rwanda’s two prominent ethnic groups, the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus.
Prior to European colonization, the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was based on economic status, with those owning the most cattle being called Tutsis, and the rest considered Hutus. As the title was based on ownership, Rwandese could easily change status through marriage or cattle acquisition.
When the German colonists arrived in Rwanda in 1894, they distinguished the Hutus and Tutsis not by economic status, but by race. They decided that the Tutsis had more “Western” characteristics, like thin noses and light skin, and thus decided to put Tutsis in roles of responsibility in the colonial government.
When the Germans lost their colonies following World War I, the Belgians took control of Rwanda and in the 1930s, solidified the categories of Hutu and Tutsi by mandating identification cards that stated the carrier’s category. Although 90 percent of the Rwandan population was Hutu, the Belgians continued to allocate leadership positions to Tutsis, sustaining strife between the two groups. When the Rwandans began to push for independence, the Belgians switched the status of the two groups – putting Hutus in leadership positions and demoting Tutsis – in an attempt to maintain power. Power shifted back and forth between the two groups for decades, and animosity continued until tensions came to head in 1994.
On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, was killed in a plane crash. Hutu extremists that opposed Habyarimana’s plans to loosen the Hutu stronghold on leadership and allow Tutsis to participate in government allegedly shot down his plane. Within hours of the assassination, Hutu extremists took over the government, blamed the Tutsis for the murder, and began the genocide.
Irené recalls the genocide violence as beginning in the blink of an eye; neighbors who had once played soccer together were suddenly killing one another. During the first week of the genocide, militia fighters entered Irené’s home, and as Irené hid under the kitchen sink, murdered his parents.
After months of shattering violence, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front – made up predominately of exiled Tutsis – took military control of Rwanda. They arrived to find nearly a million Rwandans murdered and half a million raped. Another million government officials, soldiers and militia who had participated in the genocide fled to neighboring countries, fearing retribution from the new Tutsi government.
Eventually though, life regained a sense of normalcy. Irené moved in with his aunt and returned to school until 1999. That year, when Irené was 15, he and his male classmates were shanghaied into the Rwandan military to pursue perpetrators of the genocide who had absconded to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They fought, on foot, across thousands of miles of jungle, battling disparate warlords and génocidaires who exploited and hid amongst an increasingly embattled civilian population.
While the taking of young soldiers was a common tactic of the military, the stories of these boys and girls are rarely discussed. Irené does not elaborate on his time as a child soldier in the DRC. But he does say that he saw more pain and death there than in his own country, and that as the years go by he remembers more and more of the suffering he has tried to avoid for so long.
In 2000, Irené fled from his battalion and walked over 1,000 miles back to Kigali. There, he was reunited with his extended family, which had not seen or heard from him since the day he was taken from school. Days after he arrived though, members of the Rwandan Military Police arrived to arrest him for desertion. As he fled, they shot him multiple times and left him for dead in the street. Knowing he faced certain death if he sought treatment in a Rwandan hospital, Irené fled back into the DRC, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. He was treated in an NGO hospital tent but doctors were unable to save his wounded leg, amputating it above the knee.
After being bedridden for six months and knowing that imprisonment or worse awaited him in Rwanda, he convinced a Ugandan truck driver to take him across the border into Kenya. When Irené arrived in Kenya, he slept outside the UN office in Nairobi for five weeks trying to apply for refugee status. Almost 18 by this time, this was when my family first met Irené. He approached our car at a gas station in Nairobi, begging for money.
My mom always says that as soon as she met Irené, she knew there was something special about him. Over a few weeks of communicating in a mixture of broken English and French, Irené told us his story, and soon enough he became part of my family. It took years, but with the assistance of the Joint Voluntary Agency, Irené finally received refugee placement in Denver, Colorado.
When I asked Irené about his first days in Denver, he described feeling like a small boat in a large sea, with no sense of where home was. A volunteer from the placement agency met with him once a week to check on his progress in getting a driver’s license, looking for a job, and learning English. But he longed to return to his land of a thousand hills, to rest in the sun of his grandparents’ farm, and to watch soccer matches at his neighborhood field. Nonetheless, he recognized that for the first time in many years, he did not have to fear for his life. Finally, he was safe.
As Irené’s English improved, he worked his way through various jobs, selling tickets at the local movie theatre, icing cakes and sweeping the floors at a Safeway bakery, sorting mail at the post office, and checking passports at the Denver airport. Throughout, he volunteered at the organization that sponsored his arrival in the U.S., helping other refugees navigate America’s complicated bureaucracy and society.
Now, Irené works as a prosthetician, building robotic arms and legs for one of the most prominent and cutting edge prosthetics companies in the United States. He attends nursing school at night, and is due to take the Certified Nursing Assistant exam later this year. While he plans to finish his studies in Colorado, he never fails to remember the country that raised him, and one day hopes to open a low-cost prosthetics company in Kigali to help the hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans who also lost limbs during the genocide.
In 2008 Irené officially received his American citizenship, allowing him to vote just in time for President Obama’s first bid for office. Irené describes 2008 as the year he became an American, not because of his official papers, but because he finally felt like he could contribute to his community. He signed up to volunteer with the Obama campaign, assisting with events and helping people in his community understand the importance of voting – a right that at 24, he now held for the first time. For Irené, America is a land of opportunity. It is the country that allows him a free political voice, an education in safety, and the ability to reach his potential in all walks of life.
Thanksgiving is Irené’s favorite holiday, I think because he connects with the idea that the British colonists – refugees in their own right – were given a new life in America, just as he was. As part of our family traditions on Thanksgiving, we go around the table from youngest to eldest and say what we are thankful for. Every year, Irené says the same thing. That he is thankful for the nation that gave him hope when his was lost, and for the community that took him in when he had no one. When Irené introduces himself as an American, as a Coloradan, he beams with pride. My brother Irené is an extraordinary person, and a beautiful American.
Ismail’s Story
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God - Ruth 1:16.”
When my parents married in apartheid South Africa in 1986, my Indian-South African, Muslim father and my white, Presbyterian, American mother had this Old Testament verse on their wedding invitations.
The Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – the two apartheid laws that prevented interracial dating and marriage – had both just been repealed. However, laws still existed preventing them from legally living together as a family, and any children they produced would still be considered “colored,” forced to attend second rate schools, to choose jobs defined by “the color bar,” and allowed to vote only on limited rolls.
Like many immigrants, my father’s decision to come to the United States was initially one of necessity, knowing that loving my mother freely and publicly would not be possible in his home country. When he arrived in the United States though, he was presented with opportunities and privileges that had never before been afforded to him as a second-class citizen. In return for the opportunities he received in America, my father served his new country with 25 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, representing the United States and working in American embassies around the world.
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that was enforced by the South African National Party from 1948 to 1994. Under apartheid, South Africans were broadly categorized as “white” or “non-white,” with a complex hierarchy of subgroups within the non-white category. My dad’s parents emigrated from India in the 1930s and settled, along with more than one million other Indians, in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban. As an Indian-South African, my dad and his family had fewer rights than whites, but more privileges than blacks.
When my dad was little, he describes living in a small corner of South Africa; sitting in the over-crowded non-white section of the stadium at the circus, watching soccer matches from the run-down non-white bleachers at the soccer field, and being denied access to whites-only bathrooms, lines, buses, and beaches.
In addition to the racism and discrimination non-whites felt everyday, their lives and livelihoods were defined by a series of laws that restricted them from living in certain color-designated areas and holding certain jobs. Non-whites were not eligible for positions of leadership, or those that required high levels of skill. They were relegated to working at businesses in non-white areas or, with special permission, to work low-level jobs in white organizations.
And so, my dad lived in his corner of South Africa, attending his designated non-white university, playing on his designated non-white tennis team, and preparing himself for his future career as an accountant in a non-white business. There was a cap on how successful non-whites could be, whether implemented by laws designating that bosses had to be white, or just that non-white opportunities – like schools, sports teams, and living areas – were starkly under-resourced.
When my dad met my mom though, everything changed. They sat next to each other on a plane ride between Johannesburg and Durban, exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and courted long-distance for months. During the year they were dating, 160 mixed-race couples were convicted under South Africa’s Immorality Act, forcing my parents to tiptoe around being seen together in public. My dad even worried that the women working at the local post office would soon catch on to the white name of his new pen pal. Despite fearing arrest, they became engaged, and resolved to leave the country in order to legally marry.
During their engagement though, South Africa’s apartheid government began easing up on certain racial regulations, and lifted the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act that prevented my parents from marrying.
My parents married on the first of January in 1986, in one of the first biracial wedding ceremonies in the country. The ceremony fused American and South African cultures with Christian and Muslim traditions. My mom’s hennaed hands peeked out of the sleeves of her white wedding dress, as their vows crafted from Bible verses were spoken in the compound of a mosque. The reception served a mixture of Indian biryani and layered vanilla wedding cake. The ceremony was big news in Durban, a hopeful foreshadowing of improved race relations in the country.
My dad says an uneasiness was lifted from him when he began his life in Virginia. Suddenly, he was just like everyone else. He could apply for any job he wanted, play on any tennis court he passed by, and shop in any store he pleased. He could walk around holding my mom’s hand without worrying to look behind him to see if anyone was watching them.
“Life was how I imagined it should be, it was just normal,” my dad described.
During my parents’ first year in Virginia, they went to the Eid al-Fitr ceremony on D.C.’s National Mall to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the world attended, donning their finest traditional dress and celebrating the end of a long summer month of fasting. My mom remembers seeing young boys dressed in full shalwar kameez, the traditional long tunic worn by Muslim men in Pakistan, while saying things like “hey dude, that’s gross.” She was struck by how American they were, remembering that despite our apparent differences, we are all very similar.
That same year, my dad was “expeditiously naturalized” so that he could travel with my mother, who had just joined the U.S. Foreign Service. After passing a series of exams, interviews and background checks, he – and fifty some other new Americans – took an oath to the U.S. government. To celebrate, my grandparents took him and my mother to an Alexandria tavern that had been frequented by George Washington, and a server dressed in revolutionary garb sang a song welcoming “General Washington’s newest recruit.”
My dad says he was filled with a sense of gratitude that day, gratitude that a country that hadn’t raised him would take him in and provide him with rights and privileges that his own country had never allowed him. After taking the oath, the group received small American flags to take home. To my dad, the South African flag had always represented oppression. But this new American flag represented opportunity, rights, and a country he could really be proud of.
After working as an accountant in the countries of my mother’s postings for five years, my dad took the Foreign Service exam and became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer himself. For the next 20 years, my parents were posted in eight different American embassies across Asia and Africa. In his current position, he travels to different countries – often ones in the middle of war or conflict – to review budgets, investigate corruption, and conduct trainings at embassies.
In addition to his responsibilities at the office, my dad also plays an important role in the American community in each country he’s posted. At last year’s American Embassy chili cook-off, my dad took home the gold with his signature “Bunny Chow,” an Indian bean curry popular as a quick lunch meal in Durban. For me, an Indian-South African Bunny Chow winning an American chili cook-off embodies the America I know and love, one that embraces differences and sees immigrants as contributors of various spices to the melting pot of American culture.
Being a diplomat is a career made for a patriot. Every day, in and out of work, your duty is to represent the United States. My dad represents some of the best parts of our ideal America; that we are a nation built by immigrants, that we are tolerant and respectful of all religions, and that we value the perspectives and advances that different traditions, backgrounds, and cultures provide.
My father hopes that the horrible events around the world, and the increasingly heated political rhetoric at home, will not shake these values. It pains him to see so many people becoming all too eager to paint Muslims with a single negative brush, discounting the contributions Muslims have made to America’s military, law enforcement, commerce, and diplomacy since the nation’s founding. I wish those who fear Muslims could meet my dad, and the other millions like him in America and around the world. I’m sure they would see why he is loved and respected by those around him. I’m also sure they would see that, just as he is proud to be an American, other Americans should be proud of those like him.The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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To Be An American: My Melting Pot Family
An officer onboard a Greek coastguard boat talks to Syrian refugees on a dinghy drifting in the Aegean after its motor broke down off Kos. Yannis Behrakis/Reuters
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February 19, 2016
My American family is a melting pot of backgrounds; my mother, whose family came to the United States in 1609; my father, born and raised in apartheid South Africa; and my brother, a refugee from Rwanda. Despite our wildly different backgrounds, we are united by our love for each other and for the liberty and tolerance brought forth and protected by the American Constitution. Growing up in a family of migrants and refugees has made me acutely aware of the trials and tribulations of becoming an American, and just how important that title is to those whose birth countries did not allow them the basic freedoms and immense privileges we are blessed with everyday in the United States. The following stories demonstrate the exceptional experiences and immense contributions that immigrants and refugees bring to the United States, and how people like my father and my brother make America the strong, beautiful, and diverse nation it is.
Photo: The Asmal Family
Irené’s Story
“What good would hatred do?”
That was Irené’s response when I asked him if he hated the men who killed his parents. “The only way to move forward is to forgive,” he resolved.
My brother Irené is an extraordinary person. He is overwhelmingly kind, exceptionally grateful and immensely thoughtful. He demonstrates these qualities in every aspect of his life, perhaps in an unassuming attempt to right all the many wrongs he experienced as a young boy.
Irené grew up in Kigali, Rwanda, a place he describes as where God probably began the process of creation, laying the land with a thousand rolling hills, His finest fertile red clay, and deep green forests for His people to enjoy. In Kinyarwanda, they say “Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha mu Rwanda,” that “God roams the world, but always comes to rest in Rwanda.”
Irené’s home in Kigali was within walking distance of his school, and around the corner from the library where his mother worked. After school, Irené would visit the library, helping his mother organize the shelves and picking books to take home with him. On special occasions his father, a surgeon, would bring Irené to the hospital to help stage the operating room, carefully shining instruments and delicately placing them back on the metal tray.
“Life before the genocide was simple,” Irené explained, “life was normal.”
In the summer of 1994, Irené’s masterpiece of God’s creation was ripped apart by 100 days of genocide. In just over three months, more than one million men, women and children were brutally killed. The genocide, which began when Irené was just 10 years old, was the manifestation of years of simmering tensions between Rwanda’s two prominent ethnic groups, the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus.
Prior to European colonization, the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was based on economic status, with those owning the most cattle being called Tutsis, and the rest considered Hutus. As the title was based on ownership, Rwandese could easily change status through marriage or cattle acquisition.
When the German colonists arrived in Rwanda in 1894, they distinguished the Hutus and Tutsis not by economic status, but by race. They decided that the Tutsis had more “Western” characteristics, like thin noses and light skin, and thus decided to put Tutsis in roles of responsibility in the colonial government.
When the Germans lost their colonies following World War I, the Belgians took control of Rwanda and in the 1930s, solidified the categories of Hutu and Tutsi by mandating identification cards that stated the carrier’s category. Although 90 percent of the Rwandan population was Hutu, the Belgians continued to allocate leadership positions to Tutsis, sustaining strife between the two groups. When the Rwandans began to push for independence, the Belgians switched the status of the two groups – putting Hutus in leadership positions and demoting Tutsis – in an attempt to maintain power. Power shifted back and forth between the two groups for decades, and animosity continued until tensions came to head in 1994.
On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, was killed in a plane crash. Hutu extremists that opposed Habyarimana’s plans to loosen the Hutu stronghold on leadership and allow Tutsis to participate in government allegedly shot down his plane. Within hours of the assassination, Hutu extremists took over the government, blamed the Tutsis for the murder, and began the genocide.
Irené recalls the genocide violence as beginning in the blink of an eye; neighbors who had once played soccer together were suddenly killing one another. During the first week of the genocide, militia fighters entered Irené’s home, and as Irené hid under the kitchen sink, murdered his parents.
After months of shattering violence, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front – made up predominately of exiled Tutsis – took military control of Rwanda. They arrived to find nearly a million Rwandans murdered and half a million raped. Another million government officials, soldiers and militia who had participated in the genocide fled to neighboring countries, fearing retribution from the new Tutsi government.
Eventually though, life regained a sense of normalcy. Irené moved in with his aunt and returned to school until 1999. That year, when Irené was 15, he and his male classmates were shanghaied into the Rwandan military to pursue perpetrators of the genocide who had absconded to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They fought, on foot, across thousands of miles of jungle, battling disparate warlords and génocidaires who exploited and hid amongst an increasingly embattled civilian population.
While the taking of young soldiers was a common tactic of the military, the stories of these boys and girls are rarely discussed. Irené does not elaborate on his time as a child soldier in the DRC. But he does say that he saw more pain and death there than in his own country, and that as the years go by he remembers more and more of the suffering he has tried to avoid for so long.
In 2000, Irené fled from his battalion and walked over 1,000 miles back to Kigali. There, he was reunited with his extended family, which had not seen or heard from him since the day he was taken from school. Days after he arrived though, members of the Rwandan Military Police arrived to arrest him for desertion. As he fled, they shot him multiple times and left him for dead in the street. Knowing he faced certain death if he sought treatment in a Rwandan hospital, Irené fled back into the DRC, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. He was treated in an NGO hospital tent but doctors were unable to save his wounded leg, amputating it above the knee.
After being bedridden for six months and knowing that imprisonment or worse awaited him in Rwanda, he convinced a Ugandan truck driver to take him across the border into Kenya. When Irené arrived in Kenya, he slept outside the UN office in Nairobi for five weeks trying to apply for refugee status. Almost 18 by this time, this was when my family first met Irené. He approached our car at a gas station in Nairobi, begging for money.
My mom always says that as soon as she met Irené, she knew there was something special about him. Over a few weeks of communicating in a mixture of broken English and French, Irené told us his story, and soon enough he became part of my family. It took years, but with the assistance of the Joint Voluntary Agency, Irené finally received refugee placement in Denver, Colorado.
When I asked Irené about his first days in Denver, he described feeling like a small boat in a large sea, with no sense of where home was. A volunteer from the placement agency met with him once a week to check on his progress in getting a driver’s license, looking for a job, and learning English. But he longed to return to his land of a thousand hills, to rest in the sun of his grandparents’ farm, and to watch soccer matches at his neighborhood field. Nonetheless, he recognized that for the first time in many years, he did not have to fear for his life. Finally, he was safe.
As Irené’s English improved, he worked his way through various jobs, selling tickets at the local movie theatre, icing cakes and sweeping the floors at a Safeway bakery, sorting mail at the post office, and checking passports at the Denver airport. Throughout, he volunteered at the organization that sponsored his arrival in the U.S., helping other refugees navigate America’s complicated bureaucracy and society.
Now, Irené works as a prosthetician, building robotic arms and legs for one of the most prominent and cutting edge prosthetics companies in the United States. He attends nursing school at night, and is due to take the Certified Nursing Assistant exam later this year. While he plans to finish his studies in Colorado, he never fails to remember the country that raised him, and one day hopes to open a low-cost prosthetics company in Kigali to help the hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans who also lost limbs during the genocide.
In 2008 Irené officially received his American citizenship, allowing him to vote just in time for President Obama’s first bid for office. Irené describes 2008 as the year he became an American, not because of his official papers, but because he finally felt like he could contribute to his community. He signed up to volunteer with the Obama campaign, assisting with events and helping people in his community understand the importance of voting – a right that at 24, he now held for the first time. For Irené, America is a land of opportunity. It is the country that allows him a free political voice, an education in safety, and the ability to reach his potential in all walks of life.
Thanksgiving is Irené’s favorite holiday, I think because he connects with the idea that the British colonists – refugees in their own right – were given a new life in America, just as he was. As part of our family traditions on Thanksgiving, we go around the table from youngest to eldest and say what we are thankful for. Every year, Irené says the same thing. That he is thankful for the nation that gave him hope when his was lost, and for the community that took him in when he had no one. When Irené introduces himself as an American, as a Coloradan, he beams with pride. My brother Irené is an extraordinary person, and a beautiful American.
Ismail’s Story
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God - Ruth 1:16.”
When my parents married in apartheid South Africa in 1986, my Indian-South African, Muslim father and my white, Presbyterian, American mother had this Old Testament verse on their wedding invitations.
The Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – the two apartheid laws that prevented interracial dating and marriage – had both just been repealed. However, laws still existed preventing them from legally living together as a family, and any children they produced would still be considered “colored,” forced to attend second rate schools, to choose jobs defined by “the color bar,” and allowed to vote only on limited rolls.
Like many immigrants, my father’s decision to come to the United States was initially one of necessity, knowing that loving my mother freely and publicly would not be possible in his home country. When he arrived in the United States though, he was presented with opportunities and privileges that had never before been afforded to him as a second-class citizen. In return for the opportunities he received in America, my father served his new country with 25 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, representing the United States and working in American embassies around the world.
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that was enforced by the South African National Party from 1948 to 1994. Under apartheid, South Africans were broadly categorized as “white” or “non-white,” with a complex hierarchy of subgroups within the non-white category. My dad’s parents emigrated from India in the 1930s and settled, along with more than one million other Indians, in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban. As an Indian-South African, my dad and his family had fewer rights than whites, but more privileges than blacks.
When my dad was little, he describes living in a small corner of South Africa; sitting in the over-crowded non-white section of the stadium at the circus, watching soccer matches from the run-down non-white bleachers at the soccer field, and being denied access to whites-only bathrooms, lines, buses, and beaches.
In addition to the racism and discrimination non-whites felt everyday, their lives and livelihoods were defined by a series of laws that restricted them from living in certain color-designated areas and holding certain jobs. Non-whites were not eligible for positions of leadership, or those that required high levels of skill. They were relegated to working at businesses in non-white areas or, with special permission, to work low-level jobs in white organizations.
And so, my dad lived in his corner of South Africa, attending his designated non-white university, playing on his designated non-white tennis team, and preparing himself for his future career as an accountant in a non-white business. There was a cap on how successful non-whites could be, whether implemented by laws designating that bosses had to be white, or just that non-white opportunities – like schools, sports teams, and living areas – were starkly under-resourced.
When my dad met my mom though, everything changed. They sat next to each other on a plane ride between Johannesburg and Durban, exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and courted long-distance for months. During the year they were dating, 160 mixed-race couples were convicted under South Africa’s Immorality Act, forcing my parents to tiptoe around being seen together in public. My dad even worried that the women working at the local post office would soon catch on to the white name of his new pen pal. Despite fearing arrest, they became engaged, and resolved to leave the country in order to legally marry.
During their engagement though, South Africa’s apartheid government began easing up on certain racial regulations, and lifted the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act that prevented my parents from marrying.
My parents married on the first of January in 1986, in one of the first biracial wedding ceremonies in the country. The ceremony fused American and South African cultures with Christian and Muslim traditions. My mom’s hennaed hands peeked out of the sleeves of her white wedding dress, as their vows crafted from Bible verses were spoken in the compound of a mosque. The reception served a mixture of Indian biryani and layered vanilla wedding cake. The ceremony was big news in Durban, a hopeful foreshadowing of improved race relations in the country.
My dad says an uneasiness was lifted from him when he began his life in Virginia. Suddenly, he was just like everyone else. He could apply for any job he wanted, play on any tennis court he passed by, and shop in any store he pleased. He could walk around holding my mom’s hand without worrying to look behind him to see if anyone was watching them.
“Life was how I imagined it should be, it was just normal,” my dad described.
During my parents’ first year in Virginia, they went to the Eid al-Fitr ceremony on D.C.’s National Mall to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the world attended, donning their finest traditional dress and celebrating the end of a long summer month of fasting. My mom remembers seeing young boys dressed in full shalwar kameez, the traditional long tunic worn by Muslim men in Pakistan, while saying things like “hey dude, that’s gross.” She was struck by how American they were, remembering that despite our apparent differences, we are all very similar.
That same year, my dad was “expeditiously naturalized” so that he could travel with my mother, who had just joined the U.S. Foreign Service. After passing a series of exams, interviews and background checks, he – and fifty some other new Americans – took an oath to the U.S. government. To celebrate, my grandparents took him and my mother to an Alexandria tavern that had been frequented by George Washington, and a server dressed in revolutionary garb sang a song welcoming “General Washington’s newest recruit.”
My dad says he was filled with a sense of gratitude that day, gratitude that a country that hadn’t raised him would take him in and provide him with rights and privileges that his own country had never allowed him. After taking the oath, the group received small American flags to take home. To my dad, the South African flag had always represented oppression. But this new American flag represented opportunity, rights, and a country he could really be proud of.
After working as an accountant in the countries of my mother’s postings for five years, my dad took the Foreign Service exam and became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer himself. For the next 20 years, my parents were posted in eight different American embassies across Asia and Africa. In his current position, he travels to different countries – often ones in the middle of war or conflict – to review budgets, investigate corruption, and conduct trainings at embassies.
In addition to his responsibilities at the office, my dad also plays an important role in the American community in each country he’s posted. At last year’s American Embassy chili cook-off, my dad took home the gold with his signature “Bunny Chow,” an Indian bean curry popular as a quick lunch meal in Durban. For me, an Indian-South African Bunny Chow winning an American chili cook-off embodies the America I know and love, one that embraces differences and sees immigrants as contributors of various spices to the melting pot of American culture.
Being a diplomat is a career made for a patriot. Every day, in and out of work, your duty is to represent the United States. My dad represents some of the best parts of our ideal America; that we are a nation built by immigrants, that we are tolerant and respectful of all religions, and that we value the perspectives and advances that different traditions, backgrounds, and cultures provide.
My father hopes that the horrible events around the world, and the increasingly heated political rhetoric at home, will not shake these values. It pains him to see so many people becoming all too eager to paint Muslims with a single negative brush, discounting the contributions Muslims have made to America’s military, law enforcement, commerce, and diplomacy since the nation’s founding. I wish those who fear Muslims could meet my dad, and the other millions like him in America and around the world. I’m sure they would see why he is loved and respected by those around him. I’m also sure they would see that, just as he is proud to be an American, other Americans should be proud of those like him.
Photo: The Asmal Family
Irené’s Story
“What good would hatred do?”
That was Irené’s response when I asked him if he hated the men who killed his parents. “The only way to move forward is to forgive,” he resolved.
My brother Irené is an extraordinary person. He is overwhelmingly kind, exceptionally grateful and immensely thoughtful. He demonstrates these qualities in every aspect of his life, perhaps in an unassuming attempt to right all the many wrongs he experienced as a young boy.
Irené grew up in Kigali, Rwanda, a place he describes as where God probably began the process of creation, laying the land with a thousand rolling hills, His finest fertile red clay, and deep green forests for His people to enjoy. In Kinyarwanda, they say “Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha mu Rwanda,” that “God roams the world, but always comes to rest in Rwanda.”
Irené’s home in Kigali was within walking distance of his school, and around the corner from the library where his mother worked. After school, Irené would visit the library, helping his mother organize the shelves and picking books to take home with him. On special occasions his father, a surgeon, would bring Irené to the hospital to help stage the operating room, carefully shining instruments and delicately placing them back on the metal tray.
“Life before the genocide was simple,” Irené explained, “life was normal.”
In the summer of 1994, Irené’s masterpiece of God’s creation was ripped apart by 100 days of genocide. In just over three months, more than one million men, women and children were brutally killed. The genocide, which began when Irené was just 10 years old, was the manifestation of years of simmering tensions between Rwanda’s two prominent ethnic groups, the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus.
Prior to European colonization, the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was based on economic status, with those owning the most cattle being called Tutsis, and the rest considered Hutus. As the title was based on ownership, Rwandese could easily change status through marriage or cattle acquisition.
When the German colonists arrived in Rwanda in 1894, they distinguished the Hutus and Tutsis not by economic status, but by race. They decided that the Tutsis had more “Western” characteristics, like thin noses and light skin, and thus decided to put Tutsis in roles of responsibility in the colonial government.
When the Germans lost their colonies following World War I, the Belgians took control of Rwanda and in the 1930s, solidified the categories of Hutu and Tutsi by mandating identification cards that stated the carrier’s category. Although 90 percent of the Rwandan population was Hutu, the Belgians continued to allocate leadership positions to Tutsis, sustaining strife between the two groups. When the Rwandans began to push for independence, the Belgians switched the status of the two groups – putting Hutus in leadership positions and demoting Tutsis – in an attempt to maintain power. Power shifted back and forth between the two groups for decades, and animosity continued until tensions came to head in 1994.
On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, was killed in a plane crash. Hutu extremists that opposed Habyarimana’s plans to loosen the Hutu stronghold on leadership and allow Tutsis to participate in government allegedly shot down his plane. Within hours of the assassination, Hutu extremists took over the government, blamed the Tutsis for the murder, and began the genocide.
Irené recalls the genocide violence as beginning in the blink of an eye; neighbors who had once played soccer together were suddenly killing one another. During the first week of the genocide, militia fighters entered Irené’s home, and as Irené hid under the kitchen sink, murdered his parents.
After months of shattering violence, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front – made up predominately of exiled Tutsis – took military control of Rwanda. They arrived to find nearly a million Rwandans murdered and half a million raped. Another million government officials, soldiers and militia who had participated in the genocide fled to neighboring countries, fearing retribution from the new Tutsi government.
Eventually though, life regained a sense of normalcy. Irené moved in with his aunt and returned to school until 1999. That year, when Irené was 15, he and his male classmates were shanghaied into the Rwandan military to pursue perpetrators of the genocide who had absconded to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They fought, on foot, across thousands of miles of jungle, battling disparate warlords and génocidaires who exploited and hid amongst an increasingly embattled civilian population.
While the taking of young soldiers was a common tactic of the military, the stories of these boys and girls are rarely discussed. Irené does not elaborate on his time as a child soldier in the DRC. But he does say that he saw more pain and death there than in his own country, and that as the years go by he remembers more and more of the suffering he has tried to avoid for so long.
In 2000, Irené fled from his battalion and walked over 1,000 miles back to Kigali. There, he was reunited with his extended family, which had not seen or heard from him since the day he was taken from school. Days after he arrived though, members of the Rwandan Military Police arrived to arrest him for desertion. As he fled, they shot him multiple times and left him for dead in the street. Knowing he faced certain death if he sought treatment in a Rwandan hospital, Irené fled back into the DRC, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. He was treated in an NGO hospital tent but doctors were unable to save his wounded leg, amputating it above the knee.
After being bedridden for six months and knowing that imprisonment or worse awaited him in Rwanda, he convinced a Ugandan truck driver to take him across the border into Kenya. When Irené arrived in Kenya, he slept outside the UN office in Nairobi for five weeks trying to apply for refugee status. Almost 18 by this time, this was when my family first met Irené. He approached our car at a gas station in Nairobi, begging for money.
My mom always says that as soon as she met Irené, she knew there was something special about him. Over a few weeks of communicating in a mixture of broken English and French, Irené told us his story, and soon enough he became part of my family. It took years, but with the assistance of the Joint Voluntary Agency, Irené finally received refugee placement in Denver, Colorado.
When I asked Irené about his first days in Denver, he described feeling like a small boat in a large sea, with no sense of where home was. A volunteer from the placement agency met with him once a week to check on his progress in getting a driver’s license, looking for a job, and learning English. But he longed to return to his land of a thousand hills, to rest in the sun of his grandparents’ farm, and to watch soccer matches at his neighborhood field. Nonetheless, he recognized that for the first time in many years, he did not have to fear for his life. Finally, he was safe.
As Irené’s English improved, he worked his way through various jobs, selling tickets at the local movie theatre, icing cakes and sweeping the floors at a Safeway bakery, sorting mail at the post office, and checking passports at the Denver airport. Throughout, he volunteered at the organization that sponsored his arrival in the U.S., helping other refugees navigate America’s complicated bureaucracy and society.
Now, Irené works as a prosthetician, building robotic arms and legs for one of the most prominent and cutting edge prosthetics companies in the United States. He attends nursing school at night, and is due to take the Certified Nursing Assistant exam later this year. While he plans to finish his studies in Colorado, he never fails to remember the country that raised him, and one day hopes to open a low-cost prosthetics company in Kigali to help the hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans who also lost limbs during the genocide.
In 2008 Irené officially received his American citizenship, allowing him to vote just in time for President Obama’s first bid for office. Irené describes 2008 as the year he became an American, not because of his official papers, but because he finally felt like he could contribute to his community. He signed up to volunteer with the Obama campaign, assisting with events and helping people in his community understand the importance of voting – a right that at 24, he now held for the first time. For Irené, America is a land of opportunity. It is the country that allows him a free political voice, an education in safety, and the ability to reach his potential in all walks of life.
Thanksgiving is Irené’s favorite holiday, I think because he connects with the idea that the British colonists – refugees in their own right – were given a new life in America, just as he was. As part of our family traditions on Thanksgiving, we go around the table from youngest to eldest and say what we are thankful for. Every year, Irené says the same thing. That he is thankful for the nation that gave him hope when his was lost, and for the community that took him in when he had no one. When Irené introduces himself as an American, as a Coloradan, he beams with pride. My brother Irené is an extraordinary person, and a beautiful American.
Ismail’s Story
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God - Ruth 1:16.”
When my parents married in apartheid South Africa in 1986, my Indian-South African, Muslim father and my white, Presbyterian, American mother had this Old Testament verse on their wedding invitations.
The Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – the two apartheid laws that prevented interracial dating and marriage – had both just been repealed. However, laws still existed preventing them from legally living together as a family, and any children they produced would still be considered “colored,” forced to attend second rate schools, to choose jobs defined by “the color bar,” and allowed to vote only on limited rolls.
Like many immigrants, my father’s decision to come to the United States was initially one of necessity, knowing that loving my mother freely and publicly would not be possible in his home country. When he arrived in the United States though, he was presented with opportunities and privileges that had never before been afforded to him as a second-class citizen. In return for the opportunities he received in America, my father served his new country with 25 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, representing the United States and working in American embassies around the world.
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that was enforced by the South African National Party from 1948 to 1994. Under apartheid, South Africans were broadly categorized as “white” or “non-white,” with a complex hierarchy of subgroups within the non-white category. My dad’s parents emigrated from India in the 1930s and settled, along with more than one million other Indians, in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban. As an Indian-South African, my dad and his family had fewer rights than whites, but more privileges than blacks.
When my dad was little, he describes living in a small corner of South Africa; sitting in the over-crowded non-white section of the stadium at the circus, watching soccer matches from the run-down non-white bleachers at the soccer field, and being denied access to whites-only bathrooms, lines, buses, and beaches.
In addition to the racism and discrimination non-whites felt everyday, their lives and livelihoods were defined by a series of laws that restricted them from living in certain color-designated areas and holding certain jobs. Non-whites were not eligible for positions of leadership, or those that required high levels of skill. They were relegated to working at businesses in non-white areas or, with special permission, to work low-level jobs in white organizations.
And so, my dad lived in his corner of South Africa, attending his designated non-white university, playing on his designated non-white tennis team, and preparing himself for his future career as an accountant in a non-white business. There was a cap on how successful non-whites could be, whether implemented by laws designating that bosses had to be white, or just that non-white opportunities – like schools, sports teams, and living areas – were starkly under-resourced.
When my dad met my mom though, everything changed. They sat next to each other on a plane ride between Johannesburg and Durban, exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and courted long-distance for months. During the year they were dating, 160 mixed-race couples were convicted under South Africa’s Immorality Act, forcing my parents to tiptoe around being seen together in public. My dad even worried that the women working at the local post office would soon catch on to the white name of his new pen pal. Despite fearing arrest, they became engaged, and resolved to leave the country in order to legally marry.
During their engagement though, South Africa’s apartheid government began easing up on certain racial regulations, and lifted the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act that prevented my parents from marrying.
My parents married on the first of January in 1986, in one of the first biracial wedding ceremonies in the country. The ceremony fused American and South African cultures with Christian and Muslim traditions. My mom’s hennaed hands peeked out of the sleeves of her white wedding dress, as their vows crafted from Bible verses were spoken in the compound of a mosque. The reception served a mixture of Indian biryani and layered vanilla wedding cake. The ceremony was big news in Durban, a hopeful foreshadowing of improved race relations in the country.
My dad says an uneasiness was lifted from him when he began his life in Virginia. Suddenly, he was just like everyone else. He could apply for any job he wanted, play on any tennis court he passed by, and shop in any store he pleased. He could walk around holding my mom’s hand without worrying to look behind him to see if anyone was watching them.
“Life was how I imagined it should be, it was just normal,” my dad described.
During my parents’ first year in Virginia, they went to the Eid al-Fitr ceremony on D.C.’s National Mall to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the world attended, donning their finest traditional dress and celebrating the end of a long summer month of fasting. My mom remembers seeing young boys dressed in full shalwar kameez, the traditional long tunic worn by Muslim men in Pakistan, while saying things like “hey dude, that’s gross.” She was struck by how American they were, remembering that despite our apparent differences, we are all very similar.
That same year, my dad was “expeditiously naturalized” so that he could travel with my mother, who had just joined the U.S. Foreign Service. After passing a series of exams, interviews and background checks, he – and fifty some other new Americans – took an oath to the U.S. government. To celebrate, my grandparents took him and my mother to an Alexandria tavern that had been frequented by George Washington, and a server dressed in revolutionary garb sang a song welcoming “General Washington’s newest recruit.”
My dad says he was filled with a sense of gratitude that day, gratitude that a country that hadn’t raised him would take him in and provide him with rights and privileges that his own country had never allowed him. After taking the oath, the group received small American flags to take home. To my dad, the South African flag had always represented oppression. But this new American flag represented opportunity, rights, and a country he could really be proud of.
After working as an accountant in the countries of my mother’s postings for five years, my dad took the Foreign Service exam and became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer himself. For the next 20 years, my parents were posted in eight different American embassies across Asia and Africa. In his current position, he travels to different countries – often ones in the middle of war or conflict – to review budgets, investigate corruption, and conduct trainings at embassies.
In addition to his responsibilities at the office, my dad also plays an important role in the American community in each country he’s posted. At last year’s American Embassy chili cook-off, my dad took home the gold with his signature “Bunny Chow,” an Indian bean curry popular as a quick lunch meal in Durban. For me, an Indian-South African Bunny Chow winning an American chili cook-off embodies the America I know and love, one that embraces differences and sees immigrants as contributors of various spices to the melting pot of American culture.
Being a diplomat is a career made for a patriot. Every day, in and out of work, your duty is to represent the United States. My dad represents some of the best parts of our ideal America; that we are a nation built by immigrants, that we are tolerant and respectful of all religions, and that we value the perspectives and advances that different traditions, backgrounds, and cultures provide.
My father hopes that the horrible events around the world, and the increasingly heated political rhetoric at home, will not shake these values. It pains him to see so many people becoming all too eager to paint Muslims with a single negative brush, discounting the contributions Muslims have made to America’s military, law enforcement, commerce, and diplomacy since the nation’s founding. I wish those who fear Muslims could meet my dad, and the other millions like him in America and around the world. I’m sure they would see why he is loved and respected by those around him. I’m also sure they would see that, just as he is proud to be an American, other Americans should be proud of those like him.The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
