What Is the Meaning of Identity When You’re Always the Minority? | Lahib Jaddo | TEDxTexas Tech

Key Concepts:

• Identity: Defined as a multifaceted concept influenced by place, language, culture, birthright, and personal choice.
• Displacement: The experience of leaving one's homeland due to political turmoil or war and the subsequent challenges of adapting to a new environment.
• Cultural Memory: The act of preserving and cherishing memories, traditions, and cultural artifacts from one's past.
• Adaptation: The process of adjusting to a new environment, culture, or way of life while maintaining a connection to one's roots.
• Rebirth: A symbolic transformation or renewal of identity through embracing a new environment and experiences.
• Kismmet: Fate or destiny, questioning whether it is predetermined or self-made.
• Sense of Self: A dynamic and evolving understanding of oneself, shaped by past experiences, present circumstances, and future aspirations.

Early Life and Displacement:

• The speaker's earliest memories are of backyard parties in Baghdad and family outings to the desert in Iraq during the spring and mountains during the summer.
• She recalls her mother using a Leica camera to take pictures and her grandmother smoking cigarettes.
• Political turmoil in Iraq in the mid-1960s forced her family to flee to Beirut, Lebanon.
• In Beirut, they lived by the Mediterranean Sea, learned English and French in schools, spoke Turkish at home (due to Turkman parents), and Arabic on the streets.
• The Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s forced them to leave again, this time to the United States.

Life in the United States and Identity Crisis:

• In the United States, she acquired new identities: immigrant, architecture student, wife, and mother.
• She describes feeling isolated and missing her home, language, food, and family.
• She felt a lack of language to express her feelings of isolation and longing.
• She bought a Pentax camera to document her life and the emotions she was experiencing.
• She learned to draw and paint, creating images that reflected her feelings of displacement and uncertainty about her identity.
• One painting depicts a mother holding her two children amidst a storm, symbolizing her internal turmoil.
• Another painting shows a female figure in a space where half of it was erased, representing her sense of loss and displacement.

Reconnecting with Roots and Finding Identity:

• She began collecting memories, textiles, landscapes, amulets, costumes, and images of her childhood.
• She painted the streets where she played and the songs and lyrics of her Turkman relatives.
• She started recognizing the details of her new environment, such as the prairie grasses, long horizons, and summer rains.
• She connected to the land by planting figs, pistachios, almonds, and peaches in her yard.
• She joined a community that loved the landscape and participated in their activities.

Transformation and Rebirth:

• She questioned whether she would remain stuck in the past, longing for her old culture.
• She created a video of a model wrapped in a white shroud, floating on a flying carpet into the landscape of Big Bend, symbolizing rebirth.
• She embraced the hills around her, which reminded her of her childhood home, and incorporated them into her work.
• She comforted her old self and placed her in the new landscape.
• She unfurled her grandmother's veil and connected it to the sky, gathering energy.

Sculptures and Family:

• She created sculptures inspired by the women in her family, using textiles, beads, quilts, satin, and velvets.
• She learned from their movement, language, and culture.
• She gathered memories from the past with dreams of the future to create a sense of self anchored in the present moment.

Conclusion:

• Identity is a forever-changing concept shaped by past experiences, present circumstances, and future aspirations.
• The speaker's journey involved displacement, adaptation, reconnecting with her roots, and embracing her new environment.
• Through art, she was able to express her feelings, preserve her cultural memory, and create a sense of self that is both rooted in her past and open to the future.