This draft explores my personal experience with language, identity, and belonging, particularly during my travels to Sudan. It highlights moments when I felt like a foreigner in a place I was supposed to call home.

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Nothing prepares you for the moment you feel like a foreigner in the place you’re supposed to call home. You can say that you belong somewhere –that this place is home– but is it really?

My parents both migrated here from Sudan before I was born. I grew up in New York hearing about how it is there – the culture, the food, the people, etc. My parent’s familiarity and connection to the country fostered some sort of belonging within me. It was odd, I’d never seen the motherland, I didn’t fully practice their culture nor knew their language (Arabic).

Despite these contradictions, I tried to hold onto this fragile sense of belonging when I traveled to Sudan for the second time. From the moment I arrived I was surrounded by a tongue that was both familiar and foreign. It was the same language that I would hear my parents speak a lot of the time but it was different from the language that me, my siblings and almost everybody I knew back in New York would speak. At that point of time Arabic characters were just floating arrangements of distinct shapes that seemed to take no true form. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel disoriented and like a foreigner.

I have this memory of this moment I had back then. It’s hard to remember some details because it’s been so long and I was young but I’ll never fully forget it. For context my sister and I were allowed to bring some of our possessions on the visit, and of course I couldn’t not bring my Avengers themed coloring book along with me. However I guess that I wasn’t the only one who thought it was a collector’s item. For one random afternoon I came to the conclusion that it was missing –someone had taken it. The house was full of people, yet my mind was full of conviction. I knew who had taken it: my oldest cousin.

It’s been so very long now I even forget his voice, his face. I’ll never forget what he did. Up until then I didn’t know I could be so angry with a person, so frustrated. I wanted to lash out and use all the bad words I knew, to ask him why he stuffed my coloring book in the back of his closet, to talk to his mom and tell her of his crimes, to say this and that. But then I realized … I couldn’t. He would barely understand what I said, and I barely understood him. 

Not only was I missing my coloring book, I was missing the tools and capacities to express my thoughts, emotions, and desire. In my head, I knew exactly what I wanted to say in plain English — but what good is a Phillips screwdriver when you’re faced with a flathead screw? My limited Arabic wasn’t just a gap in vocabulary; it was a barrier to belonging –or confrontation in this scenario– to being fully understood and to understanding others. In Sudan, I was expected to be “from there,” but my language skills told a different story.

Now I’m not going to make something up and say something like “in that moment I had some deep epiphany about how language shapes identity and bridges cultures.” No, I just wanted my coloring book back. But I did figure out that not being able to tell someone off properly is really frustrating. And that frustration lingered with me long after I returned to New York. It wasn’t just about the coloring book anymore—it was about realizing how complicated belonging really is. How sometimes, even if your roots are planted in a certain soil, you can still feel like a foreign plant.

Yes I got my coloring book back.