Adoptee Daniel Ibn Zayd chose to answer 30 questions...
The follow question originally appeared on
Yahoo!Answers1:
Why would someone think that Adoption erases a child's identity and replaces it with a fake one?
Answer: First, we need to define our terms:
what do we mean by "identity"? Adoption laws, courts, agencies, and most
any and all other agents involved in adoption have a clear interest in
rupturing all ties of a child with its progenitors and community, and
replacing them with others, as defined by the legal system that they
control on all levels. To do this, myths have been built up concerning
adoption that, when challenged, place those in power, those in control
of the situation—including parents—in a moral dilemma: Even if they
agree with what is being said—theoretically, morally, ethically—the
circumstances of their lives, the weight of their laws, the
preponderance of notions of property in their legal system, as well as
the sheer desire to make it so, all result in questions such as this one
being asked, as well as in the way the question is framed. In purely
legal terms, due to the fact that for the majority of states in the U.S.
a child's birth certificate is sealed by the courts, or that for most
of us adopted overseas our birth documentation is completely
falsified—an avalanche of bogus paperwork in order to shuttle us out of
the country—then yes, I think it is fair to say that an adopted child's
identity, as defined in this legalistic manner, is not his or her real
or true identity.
Second, what strikes me particularly strange about having growing
up in the United States is the attention given to all aspects of, say,
the immigrant experience, and genealogy, and "roots", and ethnicity,
such that everyone gets a "hyphen" attached to their country of
origin—Polish-American, Italian-American, and in my case,
Lebanese-American—except for the true-blue Americans, who are simply
"all-American". Given this pride taken in ethnicity, and the obvious
hierarchy it establishes in terms of racism, xenophobia, and the like,
how is it possible to claim some kind of ethnicity—or other marker of
identity—for any child who has not grown up in his or her culture?
Eating falafel does not make me "Lebanese", and I still do not claim to
be Lebanese now that I'm living here. Why allow such pretension in the
States? So in this case as well, I think that my American identity was
not "true"—it was instead a series of masks, of affectations—both in
terms of my adoptive family, and in terms of my birth country.
Third, and as an elaboration of this, I would admit to having an
identity, that is made aware to me when I am around people from where I
grew up—our speech patterns, our cultural references, our way of seeing
things—all are reflective of a time in U.S. history when individual and
local areas all had their own manners and mores, quirks, and culture.
This of course has now been paved over, suburbanized, and WalMartized.
This truly local culture has been replaced by a strange globalized and
globalizing hodgepodge of references to superficial trappings of ethnic
"style", such that a child's identity is not formed in a local town,
say, but from a Mountain Dew commercial instead. Perhaps this is what is
meant by "identity" in this question?
Fourth and finally, I think there is a hypocrisy within the
American view of itself in terms of adoption, in the sense that society
and culture in general make reference to blood lines, ancestry, familial
ties, and the "nurture" aspect of family relationships, such that we
have no problem saying, "he's a chip off the old block" or else, "she
takes after her grandmother on her mother's side", or "he's the spitting
image of his father." Why should it be, then, that all of a sudden the
adopted child is supposed to believe that in his or her case, this
doesn't matter? That there is no nature, only nurture? How is it not
possible to understand that each and every one of these references might
seem slight in and of their own selves, but in the aggregate, they are
like being bled to death from a million tiny cuts?
The problem here is much deeper than portrayed, because it isn't a
bunch of so-called anti-adoption activists that have made suicide the
number one cause of death for adopted Korean males in certain adoptive
countries, for example. It isn't "bad answers" on this bulletin board
that have driven hundreds if not thousands of adopted children from
Korea, Taiwan, Lebanon, etc., in progressive waves of generations of
dispossessed children who vainly attempt to reverse their exodus and
return to their lands of birth, in a useless but necessary attempt to
re-establish some vague sense of what we currently refer to as
"identity". In 10, 15, and 20 years, it will be the turn of Ukraine, and
Russia, and Guatemala, and Ethiopia, and Kenya, and Kazakhstan, and and
and...., until such a day, God willing, that the injustice of adoption,
and thus this destruction of identity, can be definitively stopped,
once and for all.
And so you can challenge this "revolt", with a kind of
haughtiness that I'm sure is not normally of you, and thereby risk
alienating your adopted child, or you can make the huge leap necessary
in your worldview in order to attempt to finally understand, instead of
simply imposing on him or her, and by extension, on all of us, these
myths that we simply wish to point out as being such; in an effort to
clear the air; to breathe. To start a process of healing. To know who we
are.
References:
Cold War Orientalism2, by Christina Klein.
Race, Nation, Class3, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein.
The Karma of Brown Folk4, by Vijay Prashad.
National Identity5, by Anthony D. Smith.
More books6 on the subject...
Debate Tactic: There are two sides to this
debate. The first is about "claiming" identity; the second is about
"assigning" identity. Both are fraught with peril, because the proud
claiming of the first maps too well onto the pejorative assigning of the
second. By this I mean to say that my "pride" is someone else's
"epithet", or tool of destruction. Like much that is currently taken for
granted within an acculturation of individualization, the fact is that
"identity" is not a function of an individual, but of a community and a
society. The first step to break out of this debate is to drive it away
from its usual reductiveness. To do so, we need to consider what the
prevailing formative norms of language and culture are, and where they
come from. So even when I claim to be a "Jersey boy", I need to really
say "North Jersey", and then "suburban" (as opposed to rural or urban),
etc. To resist along these lines requires us to question any effort to
define and delimit us. Checkboxes on government forms, placement in
certain lines at the border screening within an airport, replacing an
entire culture with a discussion of certain foodstuffs: We must
challenge a reductive idea of what identity is.
Adoption, in and of
itself, is designed to destroy identity. But too often the stunted and
crippled shoot that comes from such a pile of rubble is, itself, a
Frankensteinian construct. Ironically, it is perhaps in
not claiming an identity that we find ourselves.
1 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApRgTyl6Xek.VS0AyBJJX5vty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20090831231050AANGvaW
2 http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520232303
3 http://www.versobooks.com/books/510-race-nation-class
4 http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-karma-of-brown-folk
5 http://www.unpress.nevada.edu/Search/Title/national/Titles/National%20Identity;1545?1
6 http://www.inquisitor.com/pcgi-bin/media.cgi?NA=Media&AC=List&SC=All&DI=Books&SU=culture&SO=sort_date
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