Before Us, After Us: A Pakistani Diaspora Visual-Poetic Archive (Text Only Version)
To The Next Generation
You won’t be fully connected
to yourself
until you learn
all of it.
Even the ugly parts.
They’ll haunt you
if you don’t.
Understanding
how we got here
is how we decide
who we want
to become.
That’s your responsibility.
And your gift.
Zainab, 29, second-generation Pakistani-Iranian immigrant
Introduction to the project
Land is memory, kin and archive. For Pakistani diasporic communities, displacement is a layered condition shaped by partition of South Asia, racialization in the united states, and the ongoing work of (re)making belonging in new places. In colonial and imperial mandates, land has been a target for conquest because separating people from their land removes their lifeline to sustenance and belonging. For me, this wound is not abstract. After 9/11, I learned how difficult it is to maintain connections with family in a time of growing state surveillance. Yet I also saw resilience in how communities build networks of care and nourish one another through joy. After a fifteen-year struggle for green cards and family reunification, my aunt and cousins obtained their visas last summer. Meeting them forged renewed, deep connections to my heritage. In March 2026, I returned to Pakistan for the first time since I was two years old. This return forms the core of this hybrid visual-poetic project on Pakistani diaspora migration stories and ways connection endures across generations.
This project insists on dignity not as an act of endurance, but as an act of love and liberation. A visual-poetic archive,[1] this work brings together original artwork that incorporates photographs from visits to Pakistan alongside “found poetry.”[2] Poems are constructed from interviews with Pakistani diasporic community members in the united states, shared with participant consent. Using found poetry allows the contradictions of im/migration stories to remain intact, resisting the pressure to translate diasporic experience into linear or resolved narratives. Presented here are just some themes of what is a diverse experience of Pakistani diasporic identity. Guided by a question posed by a friend and fellow Ph.D. candidate who asked me:“What would your ancestors say about your research?”the project centers land as archive, with a grounding in accountability to community stories.
Community
Chai poured too full
laughter interrupting itself
before the punchline lands
names travel easily here
slipping between
آنٹی and بیٹا
like there were
never borders
Aaliya, 40, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
Borrowed Shoes
A little girl wants
to wear hijab
like her mom.
People panic.
As if parents aren’t meant
to teach their children
anything at all.
Did you never walk around
in your mom’s high heels?
Kids imitate love.
That’s not indoctrination.
That’s devotion.
It’s wild
how demonized it is
to want to look
like your Muslim mother.
Noor, 22, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
Braided Ritual
Why should my daily life
be western
and my heritage
be ceremonial?
Islam is my inheritance
and my strength.
Zakat taught me
freedom
is collective
like hands lifted in du‘a
that names
every occupied body
as kin.
in
halaqa
& solidarity
my body
remembers
safety
the reality of this dunia
and the promise of
the Akhirah
in communion
and in compulsion,
refusing
to dry.
Yusuf, 26, first-generation Pakistani immigrant
a poem for دادا
They left because land can be divided
the way grief is divided
soil parceled into narrow ribs of earth
My dada was still a boy then,
learning strength
the way some people learn prayer
slowly,
in places that did not make space for it.
His brother studied the arithmetic of survival:
how to gather scattered plots
into a single breath,
how to draft agreements
so the soil might remember
its wholeness.
Because of this gift,
they moved to Jhang
a town carried in folklore,
where the lovers of legend
Layla and Majnun
are said to have once shared
the same dust.
My dada would sit by Layla’s grave
with his schoolbooks open on his knees.
of all places,
he chose the cemetery
to study.
Perhaps he understood, even then,
that knowledge ripens best
among the dead.
I imagine him there
a thin boy among headstones,
the wind threading over wild grass
his pen moving steadily
while history pressed its palm
against his back.
I think of inheritance now
as the quiet compulsion
to return to graves,
to sit among stories
others were too weary to tell.
We are children of partitioned soil,
of borders drawn across maps
and furrows.
Children of land
made small and
made sacred.
Even displaced,
the earth remembers its rivers.
The dead remember their names.
And a boy in a graveyard
leans over his book
as if listening
for both.
Isabella, 30, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
Survival, Practiced
Solidarity
My closest friends when I came to the u.s.
were from Ghana,
Nigeria,
India.
Former colonies
finding each other
by instinct.
We spoke of empire
without needing footnotes.
That felt like home.
Rafia, 40, first-generation Pakistani immigrant
white Enough
You call it professionalism.
You call it fitting in.
But what you mean is:
how close can I get
to whiteness
without disappearing completely?
My cohort medical residents
who are loved most
are not just white
they are confident in a way
that is never punished.
They make a mistake
and it is an exception.
I make a mistake
and it is a pattern.
Growing up,
after 9/11 and
chants about walls and raids
I self-surveiled.
Did not give them a reason.
So at school,
I chose white friends.
No MSA. No cultural groups.
Swimming. Cello.
I thought proximity to whiteness
was armor.
And even now,
when something terrible happens in the news
a headline
a flash of dread:
Please don’t let it be a Muslim name.
Because when you are Muslim in the u.s.,
you are always already
on trial.
But the goal
was never to become white.
It was always
to feel safe.
To build rooms
where we do not have to disappear
to survive.
Ayesha, 30, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
Post-Imperial Hangover
The first time someone said Taliban to me
he was Indian.
The first time someone joked about a bomb
he was brown.
It feels like
post-imperial hangover.
They wanted to pit us against each other.
judging queerness, disability
worth determined by maximizing shareholder value
Earn your place.
Prove it.
Again.
Dunking on other minorities
feels like begging
the ruling class
to call you good.
If a racist looked at me and him
they wouldn’t be able to
tell the difference.
But somehow
he thought he’d be spared.
Bro.
You’re never going to be the chosen.
They’re coming for you next.
Noor, 22, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
Futures & Finding One Another
the mosque that houses a free clinic
neighbors feeding the hungry
standing with the oppressed
these are the worlds worth living in,
worth passing down
Reshmail, 28, first-generation Pakistani immigrant
Inheritance
I want children.
I always have.
i want my children
to know
We are one people.
Politicians divided us
in 1947,
in 1971.
I want
to pass down
the stories
the devotion,
for them
to believe in unity
for our history,
our founding principles
away from propaganda
and poisoned textbooks
trembling,
rising
like lungs breathing
the same air
Unite
but not to disappear.
Not to translate yourself
for gora comfort.
Not to make ourselves
easier to swallow.
If I succeed
if they carry even a fragment
of that unbroken thread
That will be my greatest achievement.
Sheza, 30, second-generation Pakistani immigrant
[1] This piece draws inspiration from: Hannah Jo King’s “Poems in Black Water Ecologies” and Tina Tona’s collage art.
[2] A type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and passages from non-poetry work and reformatting them into a poem. Also called a “literary collage.” This work was done with integrity to the original meaning from interviews.