The Little Girl From Ashgabat
By: Ayna Meredova
Tags: Immigrants, Türkmen, Mwc Space, Immigrant Stories, Turkmenistan

The Little Girl From Ashgabat

I come from a lineage of pastoral Turkmen nomads that lived throughout much of Central Asia, spanning to the west as far as the Balkans and as far east as Xinjiang. In constant movement and flow with the seasons and the needs of their livestock, my ancestors lived in this way until the late 19th century when they were conquered by the Russian Empire. It took over a hundred years for us Turkmens to regain independence after that. And when we did, in 1991, the country grappled with its newfound freedom and its identity in a world that no longer felt equipped for the old nomadic traditions and tribal ways of its people.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the country struggled with birthing itself anew — alphabets were changed, as were holidays, approaches to theater and art, and education. Everything old was dying, and the new was not yet fully formed, and there wasn’t much of any guidance or skill or support for it. We were, effectively, untethered from the old, drifting off in space, in a sort of purgatory, waiting for a new assignment, not knowing which way or when or how.

What grounded us and got us through is the deeply rooted nature of our culture and traditions. Even with the standardization and homogenization that came with the Soviets, Turkmen traditions remained very much a part of daily life, although they were certainly a lot more muted, and with a lot less fanfare in their expression. And so, as we moved through the uncharted territories of our period of transition, we emphatically returned to even more of our old ways.

Note: Turkmen culture is very tribal. And largely paternal. Everyone has a role they play for community life to function in congruency. Even our language makes clear the bonds of the familial structures. The words for paternal uncle and aunt are synonymous with father {kaka} and mother {eje}, for example. It’s an implied cultural agreement that says: If you follow the rules of the tribe, you will always belong. You will always be taken care of. As a result, even through much social upheaval in the last thirty years, you seldom find people who are homeless, or elderly that are not living with their children, cared for till their last breath. The young and the old, everyone is accounted for, in one way or another.

Looking back, I am glad I was too young to feel the effects that my parents must have felt: Suddenly at a loss, not knowing who they were anymore, how to care for their nine children, how to survive the shift. Thirty years later, we are still at odds with who we are, and continue to discover what it means to be a Turkmen in this globalized world. And for every Turkmen, no matter where in the world we find ourselves today, the question of identity and the struggle with feeling like impostors is a common thread.

As with all experiences of chaos and disruption, there exists, hand-in-hand, a well of opportunities for change and growth and redirection. And so, with the newfound independence also arrived a slew of new connections with the international world. Suddenly, after being silenced for a century, we Turkmens had a voice at the global table. A space to call our own. My mother, who was at the time a Professor of English at the State University suddenly became widely sought out thanks to her language skills. Our small second floor walk-up apartment, which had — thanks to my dad’s persistence fueled by his fear that we were becoming too “Russianized” — previously strictly been a space for us to speak Turkmen, suddenly was filled with the sounds of my mother translating into many foreign languages. For foreign dignitaries, adventurous travelers, scholars, anthropologists, activists, and many more.

In the midst of this period of transition, many of my generation chose to fly the coop and explore the world that had suddenly opened up to us. Most often, our choice to leave stemmed from our desire for better educational opportunities as the infrastructure in our country was unstable and unable to support our budding and curious minds. I too was a part of that academic exodus.

I first came to the United States as a fourteen-year-old, in the summer of 2000, thanks to a State Department cultural exchange scholarship. At first, it felt like what I imagined Disney World to be. I had never before witnessed so much abundance. So many choices. So much freedom. And yet, in spite of this, or maybe because of it, within a few months, I started breaking out in hives, first all over my face, and then, over my entire body. It was an unexplainable illness. The official diagnosis: My body was reacting to something in my new environment.

It’s taken me almost twenty years of living in the United States to deeply understand that my mysterious illness was a reflection of the underlying emotional and mental stress my system was enduring in a land of new. In choosing to leave my home and my tribe, I had exchanged security and a sense of safety for adventure and growth. I had left the only place in the world where I inherently belonged to discover a new land where there was in fact no predetermined space for someone like me. From a psychosomatic perspective, the newness and strangeness of it all was too much, too soon, too fast — the very definition of our bodies’ experience of trauma.

Along with the too-much-newness, the sense that I was different from the Americans I was meeting coupled with a strong desire to belong, added another layer of tension to my struggles. Hello impostor syndrome. What made it even more difficult is the fact that every person I met had never met a Turkmen before. I was the first. That weighed heavily on every action I took. I wanted to do us right, to not show Turkmens in a bad light, to honor my heritage. But that is one tall order, even if you have it all figured out. Which I didn’t.

In my eager attempt to fit in and belong, I lost pieces of myself. I became things that I was not. I didn’t speak up when I should have. I chose to keep the peace when the ignorance of others left me feeling unseen and misunderstood. I laughed at culturally insensitive jokes, hoping that no one noticed that they were actually damaging to me as an immigrant. I continued to work on my English and beat myself up when I would mispronounce a word and others would finally notice that I wasn’t from around here. I found myself highlighting only the Instagram-worthy aspects of being a Turkmen and staying quiet about the pieces that were hard. I tried on various identities to make it easier for my Western friends to ‘get’ me as it was often easier for them to just believe I was Russian because I was born in the Soviet Union, or Turkish because my roots were Turkic and my native tongue very similar to Turkish. In fact, when I officially became a U.S permanent resident, to my dismay, the U.S. government listed Turkey as my place of birth on my official documents even though Turkey is nowhere geographically close to Turkmenistan (we border with Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan). It was another reminder that there was no place for a Turkmen like me, that the world hadn’t yet quite caught up to our existence.

To put it shortly, I pretzeled myself, desperate to fit into the only space I thought I was allowed to occupy on this land amongst these people. It wasn’t enough that my English was great, or that my son was born here, or that I voted in the election. I had to become an American for me to earn my spot at the table, for me to finally belong. I found myself following a well-memorized script, meant to educate but also keep at bay those Americans that feigned interest in my Turkmen roots. Just enough to feed their curiosity without going overboard and overwhelming them with my Turkmen-ness. And in this process of making myself into what I thought I needed to be to fit in, I lost touch with the process of becoming a Turkmen living in the West. In my enthusiasm to fit into my new home, to create a space for me, I lost touch with my own truth, my own voice, my own identity.

What made things even more complicated was that upon my many visits to Turkmenistan, I found that I no longer belonged there either. I was too American for my family and friends. I was chastised and shamed for the clothes I wore, the ideologies I carried, and my apparent inability to be a true Turkmen like the rest of them. While I had gotten used to feeling like an impostor in the United States, I did not expect the exacerbation of this experience in my own homeland. I no longer had the same ‘back-up’ and reinforcement from my family. I was no longer a part of the tribe. I was an outsider to them as well.

These repeated experiences of not belonging helped me recognize that the sense of belonging I was so desperate to find outside in the great big world was an illusion. That as long as I felt like I didn’t belong, the harder I tried to fit in, the more I molded myself into what I thought I needed to be, the further I went from my center, from my truth, from my voice. These realizations invited me to finally go inward on a journey of discovering a sense of belonging within myself, of creating space for me in my heart, and of feeling at home in my bones, no matter the outer environment.

Next year will mark twenty years of living in the United States as a first-generation Turkmen immigrant. And even now, after having spent more than half of my life here, I am still discovering what it means for me to have a space of my own in this country. What it means to speak louder, to not be afraid of being heard, and to intentionally amplify my voice and my story and my thoughts. Having been a writer at heart my entire life, I feel I am finally ready to share my stories with the world, to express my truth, to raise my unheard voice, and to make a little space just for me, the little girl from Ashgabat.