In this week’s episode, both our storytellers explore the divisions and limits that influence how we understand and operate in the world and in science.
Part 1: César Nufio's childhood experience as a Guatamalan immigrant shapes his life in science.
César Nufio is a scientist and educator who is passionate about understanding the natural world and working to increase diversity and inclusion in the sciences. He is currently a multimedia content developer at HHMI’s BioInteractive where he works with artists, educators, filmmakers, and scientists to help engage and inspire students. Previously, he taught tropical biology courses for the Organization for Tropical Studies and explored the effect of climate change on insects in the Rocky Mountains while working at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. Coming to this country as an undocumented child and experiencing the generosity given by so many during his journey has impacted his commitment to giving back and his Latin American identity.
Part 2: Seeking acceptance as a child of Kurdish immigrants in Denmark, Cansu Karabiyik decides to become a scientist.
Cansu Karabiyik is a neuroscientist at Columbia University. She was born in Denmark to Kurdish immigrants. In 2013, she moved to California for her studies in Biomedical Science and decided to never go back. She moved instead to Portugal to conduct the research for her Master thesis focusing on neuroprotection during stroke. In 2021, she completed her PhD at University of Cambridge in the UK focusing on neurodegeneration and has since been in NYC, where she spends her days in the lab researching molecular mechanisms of neuropsychiatric diseases.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
When I was about six years old, the taxi came to the front of my grandmother's bakery. It was warm outside and it was foggy and there was still nobody in the street.
I'm going to catch my breath here, but there was still nobody in the street.
I remember my grandmother leading my little sister and my brother towards the taxi on the dirt road and my aunt placing our suitcase in the back of the taxi. My grandmother placed us into the taxi then she gave us a big hug and a kiss and she told us to mind my aunt. She also told us that we would see our parents very soon.
We had been with my grandmother for about a year so it was really hard to let go.
About a week later, we crossed the border and we joined our parents. I still remember my mother running across the street to embrace us when we arrived. My mother took us into the house. She weighed us and then she clicked on the door how tall we had gotten since last she had seen us.
Then she took us to the grocery store and it was the biggest, brightest grocery store I had ever seen. I thought I was rich.
In Guatemala, my father was a firefighter and in the United States he was a janitor. In Guatemala my mother was a nurse and, now, she was working in the kitchen and in the laundry room of a hospital.
César Nufio shares his story at Smitty’s Bar in Washington, DC in September 2022. Photo by Ellen Rolfes.
My parents worked really hard and they worked many jobs and we hardly saw them during the day but, to their credit, they were filled with a sense of hope and promise that they told us about constantly.
The house that we lived in had a single bedroom in which all five of us slept. We didn't really have much but it seemed like we had enough.
When I was six years old it felt like the world was just totally different than it had always been.
The first grade was really difficult for me. Spanish was the only language I spoke so I was often really lost in the classroom and I was disoriented. I didn't feel like the teacher had any patience for me.
When I was in the first grade, I was usually paired with another boy that constantly got in trouble and so I sort of felt like I must be trouble too.
I remember one day we were playing a card game and, as I recall, I was reaching for the card that I needed and he grabbed the card as well. We started to fight over the card and we were pulling on both ends. Then when the card bent, he let go.
The teacher came to us really angry to find out what was going on and I still recall the little boy pointing at me and me being completely lost for words to explain what had happened. Needless to say, I did not like school.
My mother soon had to wait at the bus stop for me to get to school, because if she didn't wait I would hide in the bushes and then I'd walk home and I'd tell my mom the bus never came.
I remember one day my mom leading me onto the bus as I cried, because I didn't want to go. I got on the bus and I fell asleep. I remember when I woke up, there was a whole new group of kids going to a very different school than I was going to.
So I felt at this point that I really wanted to be more invisible than I felt like I was in the classroom. And I soon learned that drawing allowed me to do that. I remember when the teacher was talking and I felt lost, just reaching for a piece of paper, putting it in front of me, grabbing a little pencil and then drawing the cat, drawing the whiskers, drawing the nose, because I just needed to be away.
César Nufio shares his story at Smitty’s Bar in Washington, DC in September 2022. Photo by Ellen Rolfes.
Soon, art became much more than just a comfort. It became a tool for me. In one classroom, I remember the teacher had a whole side of the class where she put a race track. Then she gave each of the kids a little cutout of a horse and she said, “Color the horse and then put your name on it.”
So we colored our horse, we put our name on it and then we put a magnet behind the horse.
And then she said, “Now, go and put the horse in the front of the starting line,” and we all went down there.
And then she told us, “Okay, so this horse runs on points. The more assignments you turn in and the better you do on your assignments, the faster your horse goes.”
Now, I was petrified. I never thought my horse would win but I was really scared that my horse would come in last.
My little pony, I just remember looking at that pinto and just knowing that that pinto could not win. So, I decided I needed to do better and I needed to do better especially on the spelling and vocabulary tests because I tended not to do very well on those.
So I started a new strategy. Typically, the teacher would say a word and then she'd used it in a sentence. So she might say ‘locomotive’ and she might say, “The locomotive ran down the train track.” And she might have the word ‘flutter’ and she would say, “The butterfly fluttered as it flew by.”
What I would do is next to locomotive, I would draw a little train track, and next to flutter I would draw a little butterfly.
Then when we got to the vocabulary section, the teacher would say, “This is a train that is found on the train track.” And then I would look for the picture that matched that vocabulary word and then I would put down that vocabulary word.
This strategy worked amazing. It worked amazingly well and my pony was not the last one to finish the race.
Things changed again for me when I was in the sixth grade in a way that I learned to appreciate a great deal later on. In the sixth grade, I was still small and I was still shy and I was still in the lowest reading and math groups. But I loved my teacher. I really looked up to him like a father figure.
And he really encouraged me to draw. He really liked that I drew pictures of him. In fact, he made such a big deal about it that he posted the pictures behind his desk where everybody could see. There was something about that that I really liked.
So if you were to zoom in on those pictures, you would see him in his cardigan and his patches on his jacket with his pipe that he liked to smoke. Or I knew he liked the Dodgers so you might see a picture of him up at bat with his Dodger ensemble.
One day, my teacher took me aside and he said, “You know, if you worked hard, you can be in the highest reading and math groups.”
There was something about the way that he said it that I felt like he saw me and that I felt like it was possible, so I tried real hard. I remember just picking the books that were not full of pictures but maybe a little bit more words and spending a little more time on my math.
By the end of the year, I was in the highest reading and math group. I know it sounds like something that's very small but, for some reason, I just never felt like I had to be invisible anymore.
Then when I got to Junior High, I remember in my art class I made a mug for my teacher so that he could put his pencils in. And this mug had his face on it. It had his mustache and it had his curly hair and it had his beard.
I remember going back to the sixth grade and giving the mug to my teacher. I think at that point I just didn't know how to say thank you but I wanted him to know that, in a way, I was still drawing him.
César Nufio shares his story at Smitty’s Bar in Washington, DC in September 2022. Photo by Ellen Rolfes.
Art then became and drawing became a really important part of my identity. I remember being on the school bus and kids would pass down sheets of paper that had squiggles on them. My challenge was to make something out of each of the different squiggles.
So this squiggle might be a toucan singing and this squiggle here might be a dog running with a sock, and this one might be an octopus holding a candy cane. I loved that and I loved being known for that.
And I remember kids would also pass me their notebooks to draw their favorite animals. Then during election time, kids would say, “Draw my sign.”
So by the time I got to high school, I was drawing for the school newspaper and I had gotten a scholarship to go and do art with the college students nearby. This was really wonderful for me. It was a really important part of sort of being seen.
Then when I got to college, I obviously knew that I wanted to be an art major. I just couldn't think of doing anything else. It was just part of my identity. And the type of art that I wanted to do was I wanted to do science illustration. I wanted to be a science illustrator because I really liked the idea that a science illustrator could observe and they could describe and they could help people understand. That just hit me for some reason.
I also liked the idea that a science illustrator can create a picture from a composite of many different pictures and that that picture was going to be much better than any photograph could be.
So I started to take science classes to learn about organisms and how organisms are made and how they work, but I never really thought of myself as a scientist.
But soon enough, a couple years later, I really learned that science and art were really beautifully intertwined for me. This happened when a friend of mine asked me to take an entomology class with them. The funny thing is I had to ask, “What is entomology?”
And then they said, “It's the study of insects.”
And I said, “Are you kidding me? Like there's a roach, there's a beetle, there's a caterpillar, there's a wasp?”
And I was thinking this class is going to be so easy.
So I got to the class and I was just amazed. I was amazed by how diverse insects are and how they play such a big important role in the world and how they're really invisible to most people. I also really love looking at insects under a microscope and seeing how intricate they were, how diverse they were, how colorful they were and how they came in so many different shapes and sizes. It was really amazing to me.
I think what entomology taught me is that science and art, by that point, had become a really important tool for me to be able to understand the world and how complicated it was and my role in it. In a way, I think that entomology helped me realize that art and science were the promise and hope that my parents had talked about.
Thank you.
Part 2
My name is Cansu. I'm not from here. I grew up in a rough neighborhood in the inner city, a place that my government legally calls the ghetto. It's a ghetto in Denmark so it's pretty nice.
I was raised by Kurdish immigrants from Turkey surrounded by other refugees, immigrants and some standard white Danish people.
When I was five years old, I started primary school. First day of school, this teacher came up to me. She sat next to me and she said, “So, where are you from?”
I told her our address my parents had taught me in case I should ever get lost. She said, “No, no. I mean, where are you really from?”
I was so confused. I only knew of Denmark. I didn't know I was different from other people. My friends and I all played the same games, we ate the same candy, we all spoke Danish to each other. Sure, when I went home to my parents, I switched to Turkish and Kurdish, but I genuinely thought that my friend Suzanne and Camilla also spoke Turkish and Kurdish to their parents when they went home.
So, my identity crisis started that day and it went on for a long time. Growing up, I constantly found myself frustrated by suggestions, the public discourse and suggestions that immigrants and Muslims weren't good enough or like they could never be Danish enough. That Middle Eastern people could never adapt to Danish culture. Statements made by politicians every election cycle courting the votes of the far-right.
But I was adamant that since I had been born in Denmark, against my will, that they accept me.
My first day of college, I found myself surrounded by white Danish people. During orientation week, I saw this girl standing in the corner, she kept glancing at me. And because I'm a lovely person, I went up to her and started chatting.
I found out that she was from a small village in Denmark I had never heard of before. She, on the other hand, had never met a person of color.
And after talking for a bit, she said, “I was really nervous about talking to you but you guys are so much nicer than what the media always says.” Isn't that lovely?
It was statements like these that frustrated me. That made me want to own Denmark to create a space for myself in it. And sometime around my early 20s, in an attempt to do that, I became a dialogue ambassador. That's a fancy word that means I had to talk to racist people.
Cansu Karabiyik shares her story at Caveat in New York City, NY in October 2022. Photo by LiAnn Grahm.
We would get booked for workshops in remote places in Denmark where farright voters often lived and have workshops with them, tell them about our experiences. Tell stories like the one about my first day in school. Stuff like that in order to create an emotional connection with them. Trying to gap the divide between the minorities and the majority. That was my attempt to create a better Denmark.
Sometimes, an audience member would say, “Wow, I never realized how othering language could really be. I'm sorry you felt that way.”
And on those days, we'd feel like we were really making progress. But then other times someone would say, “Sure, you're okay, but not all your people are like you. They rape and steal and kill.”
We'd have the wildest conversations with people. One day this guy told me, “Muslims are the reason we have so much crime and violence in Denmark.”
I wanted to say, “What crime and violence, man? It's Denmark. Did someone steal your bike?” But that is not how to dialogue.
More than once, an audience member would say, “If you don't like it here, you could just go back to where you came from,” but I couldn't do that either. I never lived in Turkey where my parents grew up and I didn't want to go to Turkey because I'm Kurdish. I'm just as unwanted in Turkey.
Denmark was my home. Despite of othering language and daily experiences of disenfranchisement, it was the place I felt I belonged to and I was adamant that they accept me in it.
At this point, I had been studying Biomedical Science at university. I wanted to be a scientist because not only did I love science, I also thought it was a respectful job. I thought it would give me a seat at the table, make them accept me as someone worthy of living in Denmark.
My thesis advisor told me that in order to become a great scientist, one must go and do science abroad with other people in other countries, and I decided that I was going to go to our collaborators’ lab in Portugal to study stroke.
I was really excited. This was my first time leaving to go abroad. I was 23.
I went to our collaborators’ lab. I was fascinated by the brain. And if you had a stroke, the fact that if you had a stroke that blocked a part of your brain, there really wasn't much to be done. When an artery in your brain is blocked, it leads to reduced oxygen and nutrient levels in the brain and that leads to neurons dying.
In an attempt to fix that area, the brain causes more damage. Causes inflammation, essentially, when it tries to clean that up. So when it tries to fix the problem, it just makes it worse, and that's like a lesson in life. Remember when Donald Trump tried to make America great again and everything got so much worse?
So we were essentially trying to stop the brain from fixing the problem.
Cansu Karabiyik shares her story at Caveat in New York City, NY in October 2022. Photo by LiAnn Grahm.
When I was in Portugal, there were elections happening in Denmark, a tool that politicians often use is identity politics. They would come together on nationalized televised debates and talk about Muslims, immigrants, refugees and how we were a burden on the Danish welfare system.
At this point, I had been in Portugal for eight months. Portugal, I found, was very homogeneous. For the first time in my life, I look like everyone else but I had nothing in common with anyone is what it felt like. So I became quite homesick. I started following the election.
One day, I clicked on this Facebook post about the televised debate. Politicians had been discussing the hijab and how it was an affront to feminism, once again. And then I did something you should never do. I read the comments section.
There were comments like, “They'll never be like us. These people are barbaric.”
One guy wrote, “We should just bomb the ghetto.”
I sat there in my room in Portugal, thousands of kilometers away from my home, and I felt this icecold sensation spread in my body, from the back of my neck to the tip of my toes. This feeling of loss.
That day, I lost my national identity. I knew that this place that I had once called home was not mine and it never would be. I was no longer homesick because I didn't have a home. All that was left was the sick.
So I went into deep depression. That feeling of loneliness and uprootedness was just too much to handle, so I stopped socializing. I stopped going out. I would only go to the lab to do my research but I wouldn't talk to anyone else. My research was the only thing going well, so I fully immersed myself in it.
Being Kurdish, Danish, Muslim were all identities I couldn't figure out. Being a scientist was the only thing I understood.
We identified a gene that, when deleted, reduced the inflammation in the brain. So essentially, we were able to stop the brain from fixing the problem and that fixed the problem.
As my time in Portugal was coming to an end, I dreaded going home. I miss my family and friends but I knew that the Denmark I had left behind would be a different one than the one I would go to.
Cansu Karabiyik shares her story at Caveat in New York City, NY in October 2022. Photo by LiAnn Grahm.
And then one day, just like that, I realized what it meant to not have a national identity. It doesn't matter what nation you live in if you don't have a national identity. I would not have to be restricted by borders and nationalities. I would never have to go to war for a country. I could go and live wherever I wanted without ever trying to fit in, because I never would be.
So I decided I would go back to Denmark, finish my degree, see my family and friends and then pack up my things and leave again. Whether it was that revelation, the beautiful Portuguese springtime, the fact that my research was going so well, suddenly, I was out of depression. Just like that, the future felt so much brighter.
I had been spending my whole life trying to be a better version of myself, try to get a seat at the table, try to be the better version that they would accept, and then realizing no matter how good I was, they would just never accept me.
So in my darkest time, I reimagine the world where nationalities and borders didn't matter. Somehow, in doing that, I became the best version of myself.
Thank you.