There’s a mural in Clarkston, Georgia, that little city under Atlanta’s shadow. I first saw it from a car window, under a bridge. The whole thing, a metaphor.
Atlanta is famous for its murals. Its murals don’t know me. But this one did.
The woman in the artwork looked like me. In the corner, the mural read “welcome” in every language — I could make out a “Khushamdeed” in Urdu. It felt like someone shook my hand and offered me warm cardamom tea.
About a year ago, I immigrated to Atlanta from Islamabad, Pakistan.
At first, America was upside down and inside out. I turned light switches the wrong way. Drove on the wrong side so it could be right. Cut coupons instead of haggling with the cashier. I kept forgetting the subtext of the new world and its new language.
Slowly, I learned to say, “Hon, I got you,” the Southern version of Khushamdeed.
Snow greeted me when I arrived, the city’s first snow in decades, then it snowed again. A cold welcome, another quiet metaphor.
Atlanta’s veins froze. Its roads stilled. Everything felt impersonal, and I longed for community.
Last Christmas, I gave Atlanta my heart.
This year, I found Clarkston better.
America became the safest destination for my family
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Clarkston is just about two square miles, but nearly half its residents are foreign-born. The city hums in accents — Somali, Burmese, Sudanese, Nepali. Many, like me, are trying to find their way home, sleepwalking.
I did not come here empty-handed. My life was already a long chain migration.
My family was expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin in the early 1980s, just like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In East Africa, our bodies marked us as foreign, though our families had lived there for decades. “Africa for Africans” was the new slogan, and we were written out of that definition. The rebellion that knocked on our door left a bullet mark on the floor but none on our skin. We left anyway, as if we’d been shot. Almost any day, the terror of death is bigger than death itself.
Home then shifted to Kenya.
Go way back, and home was India; before then, Afghanistan, if you trace the bloodlines far enough. Every time we settled, someone powerful told us to go “back.” So, we learned to fail forward, stitched together by hyphens like perforated pages.
America eventually became the safest next destination.
But the old slogans ring familiar. “Make America Great Again.” An open democracy that sometimes echoes a strongman with xenophobia.
The recent Brown University shooting was quickly wielded as “proof” that immigrants are a menace. The Trump administration cut the refugee cap from 125,000 to 7,500. ICE raided Hyundai’s plant near Savannah, detaining about 475 workers, many of them South Korean.
In Clarkston, those numbers stop being abstractions.
They become faces on the sidewalk.
Credit: spe
Credit: spe
Exile unites immigrants of different nationalities
The same afternoon by the mural, I saw an Afghan family of seven walking, parents in traditional clothes against a Georgia chill. We pulled over in the middle of the road and waved. They froze. Four of the five children hid behind their mother’s chador. I remembered my childhood fear as I watched them run for cover. The fifth kid stares back fearlessly, too young to know fear yet.
In America, strangers stepping from a car can look like immigration enforcement. Viral videos of raids have taught refugees how danger descends: suddenly and in plain clothes.
Typically, in homeland politics, Pakistanis and Afghans distrust one another.
Here, exile unites us. We are the aftermath of the same wars.
We greet the family with a salaam. They exhale slowly, then a cautious smile. We shake hands.
The mother later welcomed us into her small Clarkston apartment over tea. The fearless little one ran a high, untreated fever, but refused to be listless and raced around the cramped space, thrilled by visitors. They offered us joy.
She insisted on offering more. She pressed her wedding ring into my palm. I handed it back, heart stinging. She wanted to repay a bag of fruit with gold. I know that ache of being seen, but not this fierce generosity.
That ring — the mother’s only stable thing — was an offering to a country still deciding if she deserves to stay. Despite my mosaicked identity, I somehow represented America to her.
Credit: Sophia Qureshi
Credit: Sophia Qureshi
Even families like hers, who pass every check and interview, can be told to wait in place — for a stay-or-leave decision.
I wonder what she thinks of America.
Does she think her spunky young boy is being treated well as he wheezes into the cold air?
In any relationship, there are two. In this America, public health is not only about vaccines; it is about whether that child sees a doctor at all. Whether she can go to the free clinic called Mosaic nearby and find a pediatrician, without fearing a knock on the door later. Whether it will count is that her husband served in the American military during the war and was expelled by the Taliban. Whether a city like Clarkston can keep being what it already is: a sanctuary.
What she thinks of America is not inconsequential.
Under this policy climate, she lives under a one-way conditional tagline: Welcome. Now leave.
If Clarkston is to be America’s healthiest city, it will not be because of its hospitals but its humanity.
The nation’s body, like a human one, needs diversity to stay immune to threat. Seal it off, and disease festers. Open it, and blood flows freely again.
If America wants to remain well — politically and physically — it will need more cities with murals, mosaics, and people who stop strangers on the street just to say, “I got ya.”
It will need more Clarkstonians in public life — and to stay.
Aisha Sarwari is a feminist author, and her most recent book is “Heart Tantrums and Brain Tumors,” published in 2024 by Penguin and Hurst.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
