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Dina Baslan
Common ground found
on unfamiliar soil
By: Dina Baslan
Posted: 5/5/08
Sitting on her lap, locking her gray hair strands around my little fingers, I remember counting with "si nana," my grandmother.
One, two, three.
"Ze, 'tu, sh'e," and the anxious 6-year-old kid I was couldn't wait to learn how to count to 10 - to count in Circassian like si nana did. Her shiny, little eyes would smile back at me behind the yellow-shaded glasses that rested on her nose.
"Mumtaz," she would say in Arabic, the official language of Jordan. "Excellent."
My mother also used to recount other Circassian phrases in the day, some of which I still use frequently. But mostly, I was surrounded by the Arabic language at home and English at school.
Despite the fact that every childhood memory I possess resides back in Amman, the capital of Jordan, my childhood wasn't of any typical upbringing of a Jordanian family; the rituals weren't quite the same.
I was so overtaken by my connection to the Caucasus that, at one point, I felt lost sitting with a Jordanian group of kids.
I came back home to my mother and asked her: "Mom, what's the difference between Jordanians, Palestinians and Arabs? Two of my friends had an argument about it at school today."
Si nana was my window to the Northwest Caucasus when I was a kid; in her, I saw a world that fascinated me. She led a simple, giving life based on respect and honesty.
She was born in Jordan to a father who migrated from the Northwest Caucasus, a mountainous region situated between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, which made her one of the first generation of Circassian-Jordanians.
The first Circassians arrived to Jordan in 1878. After the end of the Russian-Circassian war, which lasted more than 100 years, a mass deportation by Russia carried more than 1 million Circassians out of their homeland - a number of whom died of the raging epidemic of typhus and smallpox, according to A.P. Berge, a Russian researcher of the Caucasian War.
However, being born in Amman with an Arabic mother-tongue never made me feel less of a Circassian. I was, and am still today, surrounding myself with a "Circassian world" that acts as my comfort zone and feeds my passion - a world I call Neverland for its unlikely existence except for in my mind.
As I was trying to create a more Circassian association in my life, I enrolled in a Circassian folkloric dancing troupe when I was 14.
I danced with the troupe until the day I left Jordan to attend college in California.
Being a part of that community allowed me to meet more Circassian friends, meet Circassians from the Caucasus who either trained us, or play the Circassian music for us or just visited.
At 16, I joined a group of young Circassian girls and boys on a trip to the Caucasus for three weeks. It was a boot camp, and after the three weeks had passed, we felt we weren't ready to go back to Amman.
"I do miss my mom terribly," I thought. "But perhaps she could come and visit me here?"
Later I moved here to San Jose and started looking for Circassians living in the area.
I met a Jordanian-Circassian guy living in Monterey whom a friend of mine referred me to.
I was there almost every weekend, and California did not seem too bad after all.
After I felt more comfortable with the "Circassian world" I had created around myself, I started mingling with students of different ethnicities on campus only to realize there were many people going through the same experience I've gone through. I felt, now, I could find a common ground between myself and others. I could learn about other communities who have gone through the same history my people went through.
In the past month, I have met five Circassian guys. One came from Rihannia, an Israeli village with an estimated population of 3,000 Circassians, and the other four came straight from Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria Republic.
The six of us asked each other curiously what our life experiences were like, and we searched for those commonalities between us. For every one of my new Circassian friends, it felt like I have known them my whole life.
They are teaching me more of the Circassian language, but now I am only a little step ahead of counting. Now, I can put a couple of sentences together.
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