In the in-between is where you will find me, my artistry, and my whole self.
-Nilo Amiri, Administrative Assistant, OBI
“The in-betweenness.” It’s a great concept to explain the feeling of not fully fitting into one part of your various identities and experiences. Sometimes a positive feeling, often a challenging one.
I knew it as “mellanförskapet” growing up, in relation to my upbringing in Sweden in an Iranian immigrant family. It was living in low-income immigrant communities in the suburbs of Gothenburg that had the most significance to me and how I see both myself and the world. There was a clear divide between our diverse migrant neighborhoods and the white, ethnic Swedish ones of varying class backgrounds, that extended to most facets of our lives. Many of my peers, including those of us who were born in Sweden, often used the phrase “we’re not Swedish enough for Sweden, and we’re not enough [insert ethnicity] in our home countries”.
Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo framed that experience beautifully and succinctly in her poem “Diaspora Blues”:
“so, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.”
That permanent state of being the “other” was often a source of frustration and conflict, reinforced by racist and anti-migrant rhetoric. But it also made us inventive, finding new ways to relate to the world as it made sense to us. We created our own ways of speaking, slang that was a mix of words we made up and borrowed words from English and our various heritage languages such as Arabic, Somali, Turkish, Spanish, Farsi, Bosnian and more. We had our own ways of dressing, of behaving, and it’s today a distinct subculture. Our riches were our creativity and community.
It’s also no wonder that Hip Hop had a huge influence on us and became one of the most dominant artistic expressions that fused our particular experiences. Aerosol art, DJing, breaking, and emceeing were all present in our environment and often became the mediums through which we told stories of our everyday lives (or escaped from them).
For myself, writing songs, poetry, and rap, was an outlet that helped me process the struggles around identity, my unstable home life, or the intergenerational traumas that many of us carried. I later stumbled into dancing, the west coast Black American dance style of Popping specifically. The Bay Area dance and Hip Hop communities were and have been the way I’ve built a sense of home in a place where financial and housing challenges were of no shortage when I migrated here in 2011, not to mention a new dimension of the in-betweenness. It has also helped me dive deeper into the historical issues of marginalization that exist here, and my responsibility towards my fellow community members.
It is art that helps me make sense of the world, both when it’s at its most unjust, and at its most beautiful state. It helps me find ways of bridging with others and within myself. Between my life in Sweden, and my life here. Art connects all the complicated and dynamic dots of our whole selves and illuminates the in-betweens as spaces to learn from and feel enriched by.
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