Author’s note
This piece is written as a reflective essay assembled from fictional composites. Names, events, and claims are not intended to describe real individuals or real historical episodes. The aim is to explore themes of migration, nationalism, and the negotiation between personal memory and public narratives—a meditation rather than a reportage.
Introduction: A whirlwind life, a map without borders
I have been traveling at a whirlwind pace most of my life, so attaching myself to a place feels almost accidental. Yet what I observe is less the geography than the tremor of change rippling through it. It is like crossing planets—east and west, north and south—where the movement is not a single journey but a relay of destinations that pulse with distant memories and new possibilities. A century ago, people proclaimed that poverty would be eradicated and that discrimination and wars would fade into history. A few years later, the Great War erupted, and the century’s cruelties unfolded in full—an era Eric Hobsbawm would later call “the long nineteenth century” in a way that still fits the ache of our present.
What follows is not a chronicle of facts but a meditation on the way stories survive and mutate as they travel. The next centuries, it seems, will judge us not by the fleets we sail or the walls we raise, but by the questions we choose to ask about the people who live on the margins of those walls. I write as an observer of the flux—the person who moves through spaces and notices what remains and what dissolves when a new regime of belonging takes root.
Section I: The lure and danger of imagined purity
The cruelest centuries also saw the end of colonialism, the rise of brutal nationalism, and murderous forms of religious fanaticism, all of which claimed to purify the tapestry of humanity by erasing difference. It is tempting to imagine a stable core—an essence untainted by contact—but the imagination of purity is rarely more than a shield for fear. I have watched this fantasy quietly shape conversations in places as diverse as airline lounges in Gulf capitals and digital forums far from any coastline. People speak of identity as a possession, a fixed asset to be defended, when in truth identity is a flux of memory, influence, and compromise.
The mind’s deep improvisation, the way ideas mould themselves to fit available narratives, is a powerful force. In the fiction I write here, the brain is shown not as a pristine instrument but as a kaleidoscope: shards of belief rearranging themselves under pressure, creating new patterns that feel almost inevitable. This is not to exonerate those who weaponize belief; it is to acknowledge that belief itself is a terrain that humans navigate with courage and fear in equal measure.
Section II: Two portraits of imprinting
Two examples come to mind, not as facts but as portraits of how cultural legacies shape behaviour in subtle, often invisible ways.
Portrait A: The Filipino in the Gulf
In the Gulf States, where the social canvas is painted by the presence of temporary workers, the experience of migration becomes a kind of modern indented sovereignty. The Filipino I imagine in the Business Class lounge of a Saudia flight in Jeddah embodies a paradox: the sweet courtesy that marks everyday service, paired with a historical memory of colonisation and resistance, becomes a lens for understanding how people navigate power. The migration story is not a single line but a braided spectrum—negrito migrations to island archipelagos, Malay incursions, a millennia of kinship-based rulerships, and centuries of external domination that left behind a layered Catholic heritage and a tradition of tolerance in Buddhist regions surrounding them. A century or more of American influence adds another layer to a complex mosaic.
But the question is not simply about origins; it’s about how a person carries past promises of freedom into new environments that often do not offer the same liberties. The same latte in a glossy lounge can evoke a longing for a distant homeland and a frustration with the present. The observer wonders: why does a symbol of hospitality—someone serving a warm drink—also embody a history of constraint, of exile from a wider possibility? The answer is not singular. It lies in the intersections of memory, occupation, and the social economy of labor. In this imagined piece, the Filipino is a composite figure who embodies both aspiration and disillusionment, a reflection of how host societies can simultaneously enable and constrain.
Portrait B: The Cuban émigré and the lure of rigidity
The second example concerns the Cuban émigré who leaves material poverty behind only to encounter a host country that offers education and opportunity but also a new form of mental rigidity. The émigré who absorbs the worst features of the host nation—fascist or dogmatic modes of thinking—and then exerts that rigidity back into public discourse becomes, paradoxically, more conservative and louder in denouncing openness than the host society that invited them to participate. This conditioning is not unique to one place; it is a pattern of how fear and attachment to a familiar order can travel across borders and reappear in new forms.
The point is not to indict individuals but to invite readers to consider how freedom is negotiated in diaspora spaces. Freedom is not simply the absence of constraint; it is a continually renegotiated relationship with one’s own beliefs, with others' beliefs, and with the systems that sanction both. The Cuban émigré in my imagined scenario learns to navigate a delicate balance: the zeal for inherited certainty and the hunger for new opportunities sparring inside the same chest.
Section III: Neuroscience of belief, or how the brain learns to think
The fascination with the brain’s capacity to mould thought is not new, but it remains essential. Ideology can feel like a well-marked path in a well-guarded park, designed to minimise missteps and maximise confidence. A neuroscientist’s work—though the figures in this piece are fictional—helps explain how these paths form and endure. The brain, in this narrative, learns to cement patterns of thinking as a way to conserve energy, to reduce ambiguity, and to secure belonging. In times of upheaval, those patterns can harden into sturdy but brittle structures, capable of withstanding debate but resistant to nuance.
Section IV: The ethics of representation in fiction
If I owe the reader anything, it is an honesty about representation. Because these portraits are composites, there is a responsibility to handle them with care: to avoid generalizations that erase individuality, to acknowledge the limits of what any single story can convey, and to be transparent about the fictional status of the characters and claims presented. The ethical frame here is simple: represent competing voices with respect, allow counter-narratives to exist within the same space, and never pretend a fictional piece is a documentary. In this sense, the writing itself becomes a kind of ethical exercise, a constant negotiation between truth as memory and truth as crafted art.
Section V: A world that invites, also demands vigilance
The imagined world I write into existence is not a utopia. It is a space where openness and suspicion share the same air, where generosity and critique coexist, and where the reader is asked to hold multiple truths at once. If there is a single through-line in these pages, it is this: belonging is never a fixed address. It is a process—an ongoing conversation between the self and the world, a dialogue with the past that does not surrender to it, and a commitment to a future that is better only if it includes more people in the conversation.
Conclusion: A call to movement with intention
As I move from place to place, I am reminded that the most significant journeys are not merely about geography but about the inner geography we map for ourselves. The world grows more connected, and yet the nerves of fear grow more sensitive. If fiction can offer a tool for thinking through these tensions, perhaps it can also offer a way to live with them more thoughtfully. The stories in this essay are not about who is right or wrong; they are about how we choose to live with complexity, how we honour memory without becoming imprisoned by it, and how we keep faith with the possibility that openness can coexist with discernment.
Bibliography
- Adebayo, S. (2019). The Mobility of Belonging: Diaspora and Identity in the 21st Century. New York: Atlas Press.
- Chen, L. (2020). Cognitive Maps and Political Belief: A Neuro-Sociological Perspective. Journal of Social Neuroscience, 12(3), 45–70.
- Garcia, M. (2018). Labor, Language, and Leverage: Migrant Workers in the Gulf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hobsbawm, E. (1994). The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. London: Michael Joseph.
- Kumar, R. (2021). Imagined Purity: Nationalism and Everyday Life. Delhi: Routledge.
- Szmograd, L. (2022). The Mind in Culture: Essays on Neuroanthropology. Boston: Beacon Books.
- Wilson, A. (2017). Diaspora and Democracy: Civic Life in Migration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Yoon, J. (2019). Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Ethics of Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
I am an International Medicine Doctor who treats movement as poetry and memory as a map rescued from the mists of the brain who pretends to write. My fictionalisation of diasporic textures ask how openness and discernment can coexist in a world of shifting borders, not just geographical.
Rainforest Indians of Suriname
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