Hi. I'm from nowhere.

Originally published on Latterly

I’m at a language exchange in Milan, Italy. The way it works is I pair up with an Italian native speaker. We talk in Italian for a few minutes and then we switch to English. I’m introduced to a new person every few minutes and the topics of conversation repeat.

The guy in front of me now is from Naples. He’s boisterous and affable. He’s also patient and helpful in correcting my fractured Italian. “You speak well,” he says. “Where are you from?”

I normally avoid answering this question, but he’s kind and engaged in the conversation. Also, I’m here to practice speaking, so fuck it. I tell him my dad’s family is Lebanese but I grew up in the U.S. We run over the allotted time, but my story isn’t finished and he has more questions. No, I wasn’t born in the U.S. Yeah, I know, I don’t look like most Arabs.

By the end of our conversation he’s in stitches. “I’ve never heard a story like that,” he says. “Where I’m from everyone is just one thing: Italian.” His laugh is infectious and there’s no malice in it, so I’m smiling along. “One more question,” he asks me. “Where do you feel most at home?”

Sometime in the late 19th century, my great, great grandfather Solomon Berman had grown tired of his tyrannical stepmother. To avoid disturbing his parents and drawing their ire, he climbed out his window in Ploiesti, Romania, and walked to Constantinople, 420 miles away.

I don’t know much about his Ottoman days. I know Solomon married and had a daughter, my great grandmother Sonia. Sonia married a Polish man named Isidor Rogalski. Their daughter was my paternal grandmother, Edith Rogalska, and she would only live in Constantinople for a year before the family went to Cairo.

As the family history goes, Isidor put Sonia and Edith on a boat so he could finish up business in town. He didn’t know where the boat was going. But he took the next available boat and ended up in Alexandria. When he inquired at the Red Cross to see if his wife and daughter were among the refugees, he discovered they were in the next room.

My grandmother Edith grew up with a Polish father, Romanian mother and a Greek nanny — in Egypt. Their lingua franca was French.

While this side of my father’s heritage is relatively well defined, my father’s father is more of a mystery. He was never a part of my life and was only briefly part of my father’s before leaving the family with no money. All I know about him is that he met my grandmother in Egypt and died in Canada. His mother was from Aleppo, Syria, and the lone detail our family has about his father is that he died fighting with the British in Palestine. My aunt tells me my great grandfather was probably from the Levant, but his nationality is unclear: He was born before white men drew lines on a map. He might be from modern day Palestine, Lebanon or Syria.

The Salhani family likely migrated to Lebanon from Syria. I was born in Belgium. My parents called me Justin so I could navigate Francophone and Anglophone cultures. My father holds a French passport (he has since naturalized as an American) and my mother was born in Washington, D.C., and both her parents are from West Virginia. So I was born with two privileged passports. I never lived in France and my French is very rudimentary, but I was raised to believe I was French and American, nonetheless.

We lived between Brussels and London for the first five years of my life. But I was neither Belgian nor British in any real sense. At age 5, we moved to the United States. My parents told me I was French and American.

Growing up, I always felt a sense of shame about my identity. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my family history — quite the opposite. Rather, I’ve always liked to please people. And my answers to the question “where are you from” don’t satisfy others’ need to categorize me and place me in a box.

In the U.S., I was always slightly different from the “real” American kids. Some of the expressions I used (I still say “queue” instead of “line”) and some of the food we ate at home were strange — rice wrapped in grape leaves (waraq anab); hollow, football-shaped meatballs filled with minced meat (kibbeh), and a pureed lentil dish that I have to admit looks like mud (mujadarra). At the time, I credited my “exoticism” to being part French. Even though now I realize much of the weird food was Lebanese or Egyptian, the patchwork inheritance of an eclectic ancestry, I had never been to either country. I didn’t understand more than a few words of Arabic (I could say, “how are you,” “cheese” and “thyme”) and hadn’t lived immersed in those cultures. The Arab world was more exotic to me than I was to any kid in the D.C. suburbs.

In high school, I didn’t know any French people or French speakers. In college, I met a French kid of Moroccan origin. He laughed when I explained in broken French that I had never lived there. In 2006, when I was 19, I went to watch France play South Korea in Leipzig, Germany. I met a few Frenchmen after the match. Some were welcoming. Others were explicit: “You’re not really French.” That’s when I learned a passport doesn’t define your identity, that the progeny of the men who drew lines on a map don’t play by the rules they set themselves.

I stopped calling myself French after that.

At 20, I transferred to George Mason University. I made friends with people from Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Cote d’Ivoire, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Honduras, Turkey and a dozen other countries. They’d often ask me where I’m from, but they wouldn’t ask with the same demanding tone. This was not an interrogation but a way to connect. The Arabs I met taught me to embrace my identity and culture. It didn’t matter that I had only been to Lebanon for 10 days at 18. It didn’t matter I had only added a couple of swear words to my barebones vocabulary. Still, I never claimed to be Lebanese. I’d been burned in the past. I was categorical about my identity: I have American and French passports. I was born in Belgium. My last name is of Lebanese origin. I grew up near Washington, D.C. These are facts. They also helped me avoid questions like “Where do you feel a connection to?” to which the answer is: nowhere.

One afternoon, I was in the student center when a few Lebanese and other Arab kids saw me sitting and joined. One of them was a guy I didn’t know that well. He was half Lebanese, half Palestinian and grew up in Saudi Arabia. Looking back now, we must have shared similar struggles of identity confusion and belonging.

I tend not to speak too much in big groups. I like to listen. But at one point in the conversation, which was sprinkled with Arabic and English, he looked me in the eyes. “You don’t speak Arabic?” he asked me. A couple of the guys came to my defense: He’s half Lebanese but grew up here. “So you’re not really Lebanese?”

These questions are small jabs when your identity is fractured. When you’re never quite A and never quite B.

In the past I’d been sheepish in such situations. This time though, I wasn’t having it. “I never stake claim to Lebanon,” I told him. “When you asked where my name is from, I told you. I never said I’m Lebanese.” I stood up and left. He apologized later and we became friends.

In 2010, I moved to Beirut. I was 23, college had finished and 18 years in the D.C. area was enough. I never felt a connection to the people, to the area or to the United States in particular, and the first opportunity that arose was teaching English in Lebanon.

A problem many immigrants’ children face is that they feel very connected to the country of their parent’s birth and strangers in their own, only to return to their parent’s home and realize it is not theirs.

I was never under any illusion that Lebanon would embrace me. Still, I vowed to learn Arabic and I eventually grew to a competent level of speaking. But I still didn’t speak with the same flow or fluency of a native. And I carried anxiety — of being discovered as a fraud — everywhere I went.

Once, in a taxi, a driver asked me where I was from — this is common in Beirut, even for Lebanese. I told him my mother is American and my father is Lebanese. “Your father’s Lebanese?” he said. “So you are Lebanese.”

It wasn’t a question. He was telling me. But other people wouldn’t let me forget I wasn’t really Lebanese. I started dating a Lebanese girl in 2011. We’re now married, but even now her family sees me as “the American.” I speak to her cousins mostly in English and her aunts and uncles in Arabic, but that doesn’t change anything. They’re the in group and I’m in the out group.

The thing the in group often doesn’t understand, though, is the out group might be an out group everywhere. This is particularly relevant considering the rising tide of right-wing nationalism in Europe and the United States. Politicians like Donald Trump, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen want to build ethnocentric nations of homogeneity for “true citizens.” And 12 years later, I still remember the rule I learned in Leipzig: A passport doesn’t make you the in group.

I’m now 31, but I still don’t have a convenient answer to “Where are you from?” I cater my answer to whoever’s asking, where I am in the world or whatever will stop the questions. Or if I’m not in the mood, which is most of the time, I just say nowhere. I’m not ashamed anymore.

I haven’t called myself French in a long time, other than for legal purposes. Last year, my wife and I moved to Milan, Italy. As the holder of a French passport, my Lebanese wife and I can live here with the rights and privileges afforded to citizens of European Union member states. I’m well aware of these privileges. I’m even more aware there are many who would like to strip these privileges from us.

My classmates and friends in the U.S. let me know that I was not the typical American. While I experienced IHOP, high school lockers, and raging house parties (all things my foreign-born wife never did), one thing I didn’t experience was a sense of unquestioned belonging. The U.S. was never unquestionably home.

People often mistakenly consider their own lives as a fair reflection of the universal experience. I never did. I knew growing up that my experience was not the widely accepted American experience. That’s a big part of what led me to leave the U.S. for Beirut.

It was in Beirut that I learned that a quintessential national experience only exists in our minds. And, of course, in politics.

When politicians lean on this shared national experience, I have nowhere to stand. After all, as I tell people now, I am from nowhere.

“There are half a million irregular migrants in Italy,” Salvini recently told a crowd. “All of them need to be sent home.”

This is what many of these nativists don’t understand. I am not a refugee. I also don’t think I’m someone Salvini would classify as a migrant. I haven’t fled for my life, but I have come to Italy looking for a better one. For a lot of us, we can’t just “go home.” For some of us, this is home. And for others, we’re still figuring out where home is.