A plant is forcefully uprooted from its earth, a place where it belongs and is taken to the unknown and along an uncertain journey. This journey may take many years, and seasons will no longer matter. Along this journey, part of it dies without the soul of its native soil, its roots left open and exposed. It also begins to lose itself; the life of its senses. It then reaches a somewhat semi-permanent unknown, with and without will. Its roots are once again planted into the ground, in an unfamiliar place. Here it has two choices: one to live, the other to die. This plant will never be what it once was nor will it ever again belong to one place alone. It will not grow into the shape it would have assumed in its native soil. Its flowers may assume an unnatural colour, the leaves may take altered shapes, and the branches a distinct body. Here it takes a new form, an unfamiliar face, it adapts, it changes, it blooms, it fades, it survives….

Having fled a war-torn country, with a childhood marked by division, hate, and anger, I have long wrestled with questions of identity. Born and raised in Sri Lanka until the age of twelve, I carry the weight of those fractured years. Over time, filled with disillusionment, I have asked myself: Am I a Tamil? Or am I a Sri Lankan? Or am I a Kiwi, having grown up in New Zealand? Or am I Australian now, after some years here? Or am I something else altogether?

If I claim only one of these titles, I feel I betray the others. Perhaps I am all of them, and indeed I am, perhaps I’m none of them. I hold allegiances to all these contradictory appellations. Yet I wonder: are they willing to accept me as I am? And do my family in the villages of Sri Lanka accept this Waikato-raised, tramping-loving aberration as a Tamil of their own? At the same time, will the nations I have grown within New Zealand and Australia accept this curry-eating, accented, social justice-committed resident as one of their own, or will I always be told to go back to where I came from?

Maybe identity is not about being, but about doing or feeling. Identity is fragile, open to doubt, taken as easily as it is given. It is temporary, evolving and shifting. Perhaps it is simply a portrait of oneself at a single moment in life, and nothing more.

We are told we cannot have several identities, only one. But I don’t believe identity can be simplified or reduced into ratios and fragments. I am not two-fifth this and one-thirds that. My identity is a composition unique to me, shaped by my history, my allegiances, and my contradictions. As a creature of environment, choices, and contradictions, perhaps my identity is what makes me distinct.

The global world displaces people, uprooting them from their homes and scattering them across borders. This displacement stifles the art of multiculturalism: “what makes one him or herself rather than anyone else is the very fact that he or she is poised between a number of languages, cultural traditions and countries” (Maalouf, 2000). Regardless of whether we see ourselves as Indigenous, settlers, migrants, or something else entirely, we each face the reality of a potentially unbounded identity.

But my identity becomes my destruction, turned into a debate, imposed upon by others, dictated by dominant narratives, media, police, institutions, and survey forms. Told what I am, forced to tick the box “Other” – a category that says I don’t belong. In Sri Lanka, I am sent to the foreigner’s queue, to pay the foreigner’s rate at places like Sigiriya. In Australia, I am sent to the migrant queue, expected to be judged and policed for all migrants, all people of colour, as though my being can be turned into a label, a bar code, my colours stripped, my contradictions erased.

Yet there is strength in reclaiming identity for myself. It is mine to name, not theirs to assign. I stand in my complexity, a mongrel, undomesticated, unapologetic, proud of my scars and uncommon spots. These contradictions, these fragments, these histories are, but my distinction.

I will not be reduced. I will be many things at once. Like the godwit, migrating between Aotearoa and Siberia, I carry many homes within me. My belonging is not tethered to a single place, but stitched across the journey itself. And in that movement, I am what I am, almost whole.