Having grown up in Poland, the author explores the ways that different identities interact with each other
BY ANIA CARD
Whilst writing Above Us The Sea I thought a lot about what queerness means to me as an immigrant, how these two identities intersect one another, simmering at the edges of me, always in flux.
Being an immigrant underpins all my writing, the words that I type are never mine, and when I turn to Polish, it offers little help now after living in the UK for almost fifteen years, my entire adulthood and forming of independent self, it is now a foreign language too, one I navigate with similar trepidation, as not to step on the wrong word, a clumsy syntax, as I borrow and steal and try to make mine.
For me, being an immigrant is being “the Other” in every sense, and our experience is rooted in being othered, not belonging, not fully, no matter how hard we work to be a part of where we are.
Not belonging can become an act of resistance, a freeing place of identity in itself, an opportunity for self-expression. We meet as immigrants and in this vast plain of past lives we understand one another through non-belonging, we can hold one another safe in mutual understanding.
Queerness to me has always been the place of “Otherness”, holding space for all our non-belonging to the heteronormative matrixes of the world, with all our complex narratives, for all of us who struggle to fit in otherwise, in our sexuality, gender and self-expression and the multitude of our stories, those who fleet between places and labels. Queerness has always been a space of welcome, of no questions asked and no questioning, of freedom of self, and understanding its elastic nature.
In this sense, queer and immigrant identities offer the home to their own longing, form communities transcending binary nationalities and heteronormative definitions of families that often come to exclude and alienate, dictating conditions of belonging, their acceptance intrinsically conditional. We see this across all anti-immigrant discourses; we are willing to accept you if you become like us, but we will also never let you forget that you are not us, this binary divisive line imprinted behind all borders.
When I moved to Cardiff, I was eighteen, stitching my English sentences in a cumbersome and heavy-accented way, full of not knowing, searching for my place. I looked for it in familiar spaces and remained on the outside, looking in. It was when I found the LGBTQIA society in Cardiff, I knew I found my people, and however much I grew and changed, whoever I dated, however, I expressed myself, a queer community has become home in the foreign landscape.
Ania Card’s new book Above Us The Sea is out now.
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