Josephine Bakhita

She helps me to ask the question of identity

Today is the feast of a really beautiful Saint St Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese girl who went into slavery, freed later and became a Canossian nun. She was sold many times in the slave trade; trauma was so much that she even forgot her own name. Bakhita was a name later given to her, and Josephine much later. It made me ask this question, what is in a name? Today’s mass in the community was celebrated by a Jesuit who worked in Chad (neighbouring Sudan) for 50 years, first as a Jesuit priest and later as a bishop. His reading of the forgetting of identity was in some sense a forgetting of her own identity; Or she was searching for identity and her later life was building the same.

I just wish to reflect a little more on the question of identity. Is it so important? What is our identity ? I am a Jesuit ; I am a married man/woman; I am a Muslim/Hindu; I am an artist/poet; I am a prisoner; I am an unemployed person; I am an Australian/Italian. We have different shades of identity; some of them are clear and specific; some are important, others less so. And on another level, many will say I am a child of God (almost like in the baptism of Jesus). And our name, can be a miniature mixture of all these identities. Arun (that is me) is surely different from all others having the same name (Arun) and my name is in some sense a short form of all these identities merged together in me.

Are identities well defined? What is the meaning of an Indian… Born in India? Christian… Having baptised? Engineer… Having a degree? Yes, we have certain rules and regulations to define this. Are those boundaries porous? Are those boundaries open to be reinterpreted and expanded? Is there a search for identity as in the case of St Bakhita? It’s sure that the search in her was necessitated by an evil system called slavery; but despite that grave difficulty, the search invites us to something.

The questions of identity and non-identity are the basis of many conflicts in the contemporary world. I personally see polarization in the world, between and within countries as the basic difficulty in the world. The response is not to throw away identities or to be stuck in islands of identities. It’s somewhere in between, that grey between black and white. Probably that path opens us avenues and broadways for greater freedom and peace.