Fragment No. 64

I imagine my life as one of those fragments of carpet: sometimes isolated, sometimes intertwined with others, always carrying the memory of a larger tapestry that precedes and transcends me. Places and people have shaped its figures, connected by threads—interwoven with their differences, wounds, beauty, shadows, and incompleteness.

I have woven many fragments into the carpet of my life. Now, with a certain maturity, I feel I am finally assembling the pieces.

A Colombian semitic alike.

I have always felt a deep affinity with Semitic cultures. In Colombia, all Arabs are called “Turks,” though most were Lebanese Catholics. With fair skin and hybrid traditions, they owned the businesses that fed and comforted the town. I attended secondary school in a city that was a major port on the Magdalena River, which crosses Colombia from north to south. Its strategic position made it a vital channel for merchants—Syrian-Lebanese and Paisas, mostly. Surrounded by lush vegetation and extreme humidity, this land was enriched by oil, plagued by corrupt politicians, and inhabited by warrior people. The perfect recipe for a cruel and endless war.

In ninth grade, I met someone who became one of my best friends: the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant. I think her father was the first foreigner I ever met, but for some reason, his presence felt familiar. Perhaps we were united by the complicity of knowing I was also a foreigner in my own land. In her home, I always felt a sense of family, and my friendship with her and her three brothers was nourished by midnight chats in their kitchen, accompanied by binges on pita, hummus, and tabbouleh imported from the Lebanese community in Barranquilla.

Crossing Oceans

Later, life led me to cross paths with Western Asia again, and I moved to Israel, drawn by love and adventure. Throughout my life, I seemed to attract Semitic people—friends, colleagues, lovers. In Israel, my eyes were dazzled by the ochre of the Negev Desert and the Sinai mountains; my heart resonated with rituals and customs. My Semitic features and my ability to blend in created a familiarity that was often confusing. Yet, the soul is never confused. One may travel to other lands, but the soul knows where it was born. I was an Andean condor flying over a war that was not mine: the war of a nation’s survival, rooted in religion, that destroys the evolution of ancestral bonds with unquestionable traditions and demands.

The carpet of my life shifted from a figurative tapestry to an abstract one I did not recognize as my own. It subtly demanded that I dissolve, to be colonized in my personal territory: my codes, my habits, the language my grandmother taught me to pray.

I wove part of my tapestry with caña flecha—a resilient, versatile grass that can become a hat to shield you from the sun, a bag to hold your memories, or an accessory to adorn your beauty—and part with sheep’s wool from the high Andean lands. I was already half grass, half wool; now, linen was being woven in.

Pieces of Identity

Seeing myself from the outside was confusing. I looked like a young Moroccan woman who stopped to pray in every holy church, participated in shamanic rituals, and joined Shabbat dinners. The sense of depersonalization peaked when someone played salsa at a party, but the real crisis came when I tried to return home and realized it had become foreign territory.

Some of us have the privilege to choose when and how to migrate. I was the artist of my life, able to design new patterns as I wished. Sometimes we insist on weaving with new fabrics inspired by new territories, but sometimes these new techniques and materials are incompatible, creating a forced depersonalization of the design. You see it in the final work: a patch woven so tightly it leaves wounds on your hands, pricks on your fingers, and looks like a clumsy, forced rug.

The promised land I expected, in the name of love, to be home to my dreams, was asking me to transform into something I wasn’t ready to become. The promised land of my dreams was one where we can all grow as the seeds we were meant to be, becoming better versions of ourselves, enriched by new threads. Once your hands have learned to weave new patterns, it is almost impossible to return to the original one.

Migration as Resistance

Yet, there is something else about migration. Migration, even when not consciously forced, creates a deep wound in one’s life and in those who love you. But it is also an act of resistance, survival, and the creation of new universes—when you are truly included. Verna Myers’ words echo in my mind: “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” I wanted to keep weaving the tapestry of my life by including fibers from new raw materials offered by others. Creating new designs—sometimes incoherent or apparently discordant, but honest and rich in their uniqueness, and above all, in their original identity.

The limits of Inclusion

My utopia had gaps. Inclusion does not depend solely on you. There are limits. You are included as much as you blend in. You cannot look too different, think too radically, or pray to a different god. You may attend the party, but you share tables with those who fear their harmonious design will be tainted. No one tells you directly what they expect, but you sense it—you read their fear, the fear of birthing non-Jewish sons, of being diluted into Christian roots. Love wasn’t enough. At some point, I felt subjugated by a triple glass ceiling: for being a woman, for being Latina, and for being a shiksa.

The day I made the South my North

One day, looking at the Andean map, I had a revelation. Something external showed me that the South was my North. I decided to migrate again, this time for the love of my freedom, to a land that promised nothing but tango, wine, and rock’n’roll: Argentina.

Reweaving Identity

Virginia Higa, in her exploration of migrant identity, reminds us that every word, every gesture, is a negotiation between what we were and what we are becoming. At one point, I decided I didn’t want to weave a rug to be trampled on. I wanted to weave a blanket to warm your shoulders, tired from work—a blanket to gently protect you from the Patagonian wind during those periods of immersion in your vast inner world, but also to decorate your figure flirtatiously. I wanted to discover my own material, undo what was woven by force, and create a new, softer pattern—one that tells the story I want to tell myself. But more than that, I wanted to weave words with the hope that they would mean something to someone else.

Questions about Cultural Weaving

As I walk through this process, I ask myself: Can we weave a common piece without erasing nuances, without domesticating differences or colonizing others? Can miscegenation be considered a type of cultural shatnez? What determines which traditions and legacies prevail? Who decides the patterns of a tapestry? Shouldn’t it be a collaborative work?

Fragments in Motion

We are fragments in motion, bearers of stories that only make sense when shared and intertwined. Our identity is a work in progress: made up of encounters, losses, migrations, and collaborations. It cannot be bombarded—neither physically nor symbolically, under any mandate, pretext, law, or value judgment. And if, for more noble and humane reasons, it becomes fragmented, it has the right and duty to be rewoven, redesigned, rebuilt with gold, as the Japanese do with kintsugi.

Perhaps, as Ágota Kristóf suggests, writing—and migrating—is learning to inhabit foreignness, to make uprooting a source of beauty and meaning, not chaos and destruction.