I Am History - A Personal Essay by Lia Bonver

I am the child of two immigrant parents from different countries, who are also the children of immigrants, and that has caused some confusion. The teen years are supposed to be the ones to find yourself, embrace your identity and proclaim it to the world, but that ended up being harder for me than I could have imagined. I went through my childhood not really questioning who I was, my racial or ethnic background. So much so, I lived in ignorance of it. I didn’t feel the need to question anything, I had my family, cousins, siblings, parents, aunts and uncles, and they were who I was. And as significant as they were to my childhood, I never got the chance to ask about my identity other than “big sister” or “cousin”. So when the time came to figure out who I was, I did not know where to start. 

​I learned that my mom’s parents were originally from Iraq, and had moved to Israel in its early years to escape the oppression of Jewish people. I learned that the term I had used describing myself as part “Russian” was actually me giving in to my father’s parents oppressors, a level of indoctrination that led me to believe that Latvia, the county my dad was born in, but not his parents, did not even exist. In middle school I finally decided I was biracial, and I was able to embrace a term I thought was who I was. And then, when I thought I had it all figured out it all came crashing again as I took a standardized test and was forced to put “white” as the whole of my mixed Middle Eastern and European heritage. It put me in a further state of confusion as I looked more and more into my ethnic and national identity. 

In 11th grade, my program had a unit about race, to help all of us figure out our identities, but the more I learned, the more confused I was. Was I allowed to call myself biracial even though I was white passing, even thought there was no place for me on the census? How was I supposed to find my ethnic heritage when my predecessors had moved from place to place? Was I Ashkenazi or Sephardic, Israeli or Iraqi, Russian, Latvian, or Ukrainian? How could I be so many of these things, how could I choose just one? I felt so detached from my identity, not having a country, skin, or language to really call home, a mix of races, ethnicities, nationalities, languages. There are so many questions I want to ask, yet every person I speak to gives me a different answer. It has put me in a bubble of confusion and chaos for far too long.

Despite all this, I feel such a strong connection with my family’s past and my identity, even if I can’t find a word to really describe my it. What I learned through all this, is that I have a special chance, to embrace all these terms, to create something new that doesn’t fit into a bubble-in option on a form. I have the chance to expand my identity, lean about many different cultures and pasts, I have the chance to make myself something new and unique, a chance to break down the barriers that have kept me and so many others in a box for far too long. Even though there are so many questions about myself and how I fit into this world in my own skin, I don’t need them to be answered, all I need to know is that I am me. I am the culmination of all this history that allowed me to be a single person, and that is me.