My cousins number roughly one hundred.
Include their children and their children’s children and the number quickly skyrockets. Start tallying up the children of every man that Baba introduced as “your uncle” growing up, big brown arms affectionately wrapped around each other’s shoulders, and getting an accurate number becomes futile.
It’s an ethnic affliction, something we grow up learning: the more cousins you have, the more protected you are from a society that employs the ongoing War on Terror to proudly despise your Islamic sounding names. Afghan refugees, my own kin and kith, have been fleeing Afghanistan since the Soviet Invasion in the early 80s first destabilised our political infrastructure, paving the way for a series of corrupted power contestations that continue to this day.
Among immigrant communities, the cousin is a porous language category far removed from the Western definition of the word.
Our extended family were some of the first Afghans to leave. A few of my uncles, grandparents in tow, drove to Pakistan and went on to settle in Germany, others left through Iran and ended up in the UK. My parents and sisters flew from Kabul to New Delhi and then on to Perth, starting one of the first Afghan communities in Australia, before eventually settling in the US to be closer to my mother’s side.
From that initial moment of departure, the fracturing of diaspora begun. Most of the older cousins were born in Afghanistan and fled as children with their parents. The rest of us arrived unceremoniously into housing flats and rental homes across the world, unaware of the sacrifices made to ensure our safety. We exist at a unique nexus of cultures, the idea of home forever clumsy in our mouths. Like every brown kid, September 11 was a defining moment of our childhood, rendering our concept of time a living history. We watched our starry-eyed refugee parents held responsible for the tightening of borders globally - abject signs of the sweeping tide of xenophobic and Islamaphobic backlash to humanitarian asylum.
And yet, the political vilification of refugees and Muslims brought my cousins and I closer together, whether we were in direct communication about it or not. Dispersed across the Americas, Europe and Australia, all sixty-eight of us were secretly begging Allah for Osama bin Laden to be found anywhere but in Afghanistan, weary from the school yard taunting, still too young to properly defend ourselves. Options to freely socialise with classmates after school were limited and sleepovers, that adolescent rite of passage where friendships are cemented, was out of the question. Whenever I’d protest, Mum would always snap back quickly, “Why do you need friends? You have family.” They were only protecting us from misunderstanding.
I say sixty-eight, but it’s a reductive way to measure cousins. The real number is much higher. It ceases to matter exactly how you’re related to them. The point is that you’re all Afghan, your parents know each other and you are responsible for one other. Among immigrant communities, the cousin is a porous language category far removed from the Western definition of the word. Cousins play as siblings, raise and counsel each other as aunties and uncles, and participate in networks of care like friends. The cousin is a marker of solidarity, but they are also symptomatic of a family's cultural logic and the country they settled in.
It was only years later that I learned our ever-observant mums had mistaken our connection for romance and were grooming us for marriage.
For example, I recently found myself doing the mental gymnastics of describing the step-daughter of my maternal uncle's brother-in-law to my white friends. In the end, the shorthand I used to describe Fouzia* was ‘cousin’. It seemed second nature to brush off the verbosity of her formal title. This is common among people of colour, especially those of us from the Middle East – cousin is a term of cultural endearment, and it’s used liberally to describe the children of just about anyone your parents knew from back home.
I was 13 when we left Australia for the US, my parents leaving burnt bridges and drama behind them. For me, it meant a drastic shift in the cousins around me. After a time, Fouzia and I grew close. We were both transplants to Northern Virginia, she had also arrived late into the pre-existing network of our cousins. It never occurred to me to think of her as any different, despite always knowing tangentially that our mothers weren’t biological sisters.
A young Bobuq with their paternal cousins Fereshta and Fariba at Perth's Cottesloe beach. Source: Supplied
Her mum and mine still cackled together over tea and she was always there, without fail, at a different uncle’s house, one weekend after the next. Unlike the Australian diaspora I was accustomed to, my American cousins were almost exclusively boys, which drew Fouzia and I together. Slowly, we got into a groove of breaking off at parties to gossip and angst, self-imposing exile upon ourselves while the zombie-eyed boy cousins played first-person shooter games religiously in the next room. It was only years later that I learned our ever-observant mums had mistaken our connection for romance and were grooming us for marriage.
As a middle ground between friends and siblings, cousins have an immense protective capacity.
Marrying a cousin is not so unusual among Afghans. In fact, it’s thought of as an effective way to preserve the kinship of our culture, especially in the heteronormative environments that undergird many immigrant families. When immigrant communities are under attack from society and the media, it is no surprise that they turn inwards.
It’s also not the first time my queer proximity to sympathetic female cousins has been mistaken for romantic love. Take my relationship with Fereshta, the daughter of my favourite uncle who I grew up with in Perth and who lives with me now in Melbourne’s inner north. Our extended family mistook our relentless inside jokes and affectionate physicality for romance for the better part of two decades.
Our respective births are only eleven days apart and we’ve been inseparable ever since, forever fighting and rebounding in minutes like twins. We kept in contact on Myspace and MSN Messenger after I moved to America. From opposite sides of the world, we planned to go visit our European cousins together during our gap year; a prodigal homecoming to places we’d never been before. Without the ‘not in my backyard’ attitude of my own biological sisters, Fereshta took my coming out, as first gay and then non-binary, better than anyone else, barely batting an eyelid, but holding space for the largeness of its implications.
As a middle ground between friends and siblings, cousins have an immense protective capacity. On my first day at the American West Springfield High School, I walked into the obnoxiously bright hallways, lined with red lockers on either side, beside my brutish older cousin Ali, whose school I was zoned into while we were staying at his parents’ house. The two of us had nothing in common. When he wasn’t lifting weights in the gym, his eyes and ears were glued to the Counterstrike gaming station in the corner of the room we shared. Meanwhile, I tried to pretend like I hadn’t left Australia at all, rereading my sister’s old copy of Looking for Alibrandi and loudly playing my Josh Pyke cd to mask the sound of Ali smashing his keyboard. American teenagers at the time wore Abercrombie and Fitch like a uniform and my thrift store emo aesthetic stuck out like a sore thumb.
Bobuq Sayed. Source: Supplied
All the same, Ali convinced me to direct anyone who had a problem with my effeminacy to him. Whenever vultures started sniffing me out, all it took was one mention that Ali was my cousin and they’d retreat from me immediately or, better yet, chummy up to me instead. Maybe he’d been warned to keep me safe by his parents, or maybe he wanted to maintain whatever shreds of honour a Muslim-sounding family name had left in the years following September 11. Either way, it was no coincidence that I remained impervious to bullying at that school.
In return, my sinewy fourteen-year-old self coached his nascent manhood. I taught him these things: to dress as though the world hadn’t already made its mind up, that women are human beings, not to be lured by the masculinist seductions of libertarianism and, finally, the fine art of heterosexual romance, a skill most queer people are ironically and involuntarily well trained in. Though he is painfully straight to this day, he’s been a loyal ally to me, uninterested in the two-faced politics that keep other cousins dancing with our homophobic uncles and aunts.
As much as I expect solidarity from my cousins, I also expect homophobia and transphobia from them.
Unfortunately, it’s too convenient to paint my generation of cousins as forward thinking and our parents as behind the times. My German cousins are far more conservative than the rest of us in the US and Australia. Driven by the frustrations of constantly being denied entry to venues and waiting to be served last at restaurants, they’ve resisted assimilation. Though they live in just about every corner of Germany, their proximity to one other and to one of the largest Afghan and Middle Eastern diasporas in the world has heightened the orthodoxy of their Islam. In this climate of dogmatic religious observance, word of my defection travelled fast. After my uncle saw an Instagram photo of me looking conspicuously gay on his son’s iPhone, my cover was blown and any hope for discretion expired. In a very ‘death-to-infidels-esque’ tirade, my cousin Shekeb in Germany threatened to kill me, hurling venom at me from behind the veil of a screen for bringing shame upon our family.
He shared this sentiment on the Facebook status of our mutual cousin. Shekeb tagged me and replied, “You f--king gaylord. Never ever comment or like anything which is related to me on Facebook. I will beat the shit out of you when I see you next time. I don't care if family is around. Don't think that you will be treated as a normal human being you f--king pussy.”
It was gut wrenching to read; a sort of betrayal from within ranks. The blow was unsurprising, though. As much as I expect solidarity from my cousins, I also expect homophobia and transphobia from them. My father and Shekeb’s father are the closest in age of eleven siblings and did everything together in Afghanistan. Now the child of one is a gender fluid literary homosexual and the other is an Islamic fundamentalist. If my father hadn’t abandoned Islam many years ago and been free to adopt more secular values away from the scrutiny of his parents and siblings in Germany my life would’ve turned out differently. I’m grateful that my decision to return to Islam as an adult was a choice that I had the privilege to make for myself.
In a world where bigotry is increasingly becoming the benchmark, your cousins can be a source of great strength and also great pain. Your cousins are your buffer of security from the racist outside world. They populate your subjectivity; the success of a cousin is a win for all. The idiosyncrasies inherent in the fluidity of cousin as a language category highlights the expansiveness of family for people of colour. Driven to the margins, we make a home for ourselves among one another. The love of a cousin doesn’t always make sense, and it rarely maps onto the support we expect from partners and friends, but it serves as an important reminder for the diasporic person of colour that no man is an island.
*Names have been changed.
Bobuq Sayed is a writer, editor, interdisciplinary artist and community organiser of the Afghan diaspora. Their work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Archer, Kill Your Darlings, Black Girl Dangerous, Overland, Peril and VICE.
The article is part of a collaborative series by SBS Life and : Western Sydney Literacy Movement which is devoted to empowering groups and individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds through training and employment in creative and critical writing initiatives.
