Finding a place to call home
Shamubeel Eaqub finds that home is where you want to make a difference.
I spoke at the Tauranga Arts Festival about what it means to be a New Zealander. I hadn’t thought deeply about what it means to be a citizen.
Perhaps first generation migrants all feel spread, as I do, across cultures and places.
But I came to the realisation that there is only one home.
In an UMR survey, New Zealanders thought of words like proud, privileged, clean, green, fair, small, and beautiful to describe their country
I am not so sure that describes what I feel.
Sure, some of those descriptions are right, but the decision to live here is something subtler.
It is a sense of having roots, a sense that is fleeting in the life of a migrant and in the modern day labour market. A lot of shallow roots in lots of places.
As a child, we moved from my birth country Bangladesh, to Samoa and then to New Zealand.
Once I started working, I moved to Wellington, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington and now back to Auckland. In all, I recall living in 14 different houses.
All this moving at different ages to different places, cultures and sometimes new languages never felt daunting per se.
But in each place, there was a sense of belonging, yet not fully belonging.
The belonging part was more about people, and the feeling of not belonging was because of differences in background, culture and experiences.
Even now, little things show the differences. My wife grew up in Auckland watching different cartoons and TV shows, and there is this mutual gap when we talk about our childhood.
It’s not a bad thing, it’s just that we have different histories.
I have vivid memories of Bangladesh from spending my first decade of life there, but also frequent visits to see family and friends.
With time, the familiarity has become more distant, and my preteen vocabulary frustrating.
Travelling to Samoa is enjoyable, and I still feel a sense of kinship, but it feels distant to my memories of living there for three years.
Spending my formative teenage years in Lincoln, outside Christchurch, it was about friends, school, soccer, and all those things.
I feel that sense of nostalgia when I visit my parents in Lincoln,
Being home doesn’t mean being like everyone else. I know I am a brown sheep.
more than those other places I also grew up in.
My epiphany was when I came back from working for a few years in Australia. There was something I can’t define – but it was that sense of being home.
It was like letting out a held breath that I didn’t know I had.
Being home doesn’t mean being like everyone else. I know I am a brown sheep.
I differ from most of my friends and the people I work with, because of the colour of my skin, my accent, my history, my name and my values.
But I don’t think I am so different, given our sense of individuality.
After the talk at the festival, we reached a conclusion. We can feel comfortable living in many places.
But you only have ownership in some places; places where you care enough to want to make things better. That is your place to stand.
Being a New Zealander for me is about being home.
It is about feeling a sense of responsibility and ownership to make my home even fairer, kinder and more beautiful.