Object Diaries
Stories About Human Connection Told One Secret Object at a Time.
Object Diaries
Imran's Paper
This story is about the unexpected power of a single object, a piece of paper, and how one man was able to use that power to change his life.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque has had to hide his identity for more than half his life. You'll find out why in this episode of Object Diaries. Stories about human connection told one treasured possession at a time.
This episode was produced by Jessica Terrell, April Estrellon, and Lisa Weiss. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Learn more about Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque's work via his website, here.
Bring an Object Diaries workshop to your community or workplace. Foster connection, engagement, and belonging through a modern version of childhood "show and tell."
This is a white piece of paper, and it would be like 8 by 10. Very thin. This is the paper that I have kept for so many years.
Lisa Weiss:This story is about the unexpected power of a single object, a piece of paper, and how one man was able to use that power to change his life.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I have never had a piece of paper to show who I was, where I was from. I have never had a birth certificate. I didn't have a passport.
Lisa Weiss:Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque has had to hide his identity for more than half his life. You'll find out why in this episode of Object Diaries. Stories about human connection told one treasured possession at a time. I'm Lisa Weiss.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I'm doing very well. Thank you. How are you?
Lisa Weiss:I met up with Imran on a chilly November day on the north side of Chicago at the Rohingya Cultural Center. It's a sparsely furnished space in what used to be a two room storefront, with lots of photos and photo collages on the wall.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:young kids, they were born in other countries, so they don't know anything about Myanmar, they don't know anything about, you know, this is how we live, like, you know, all these things.
Lisa Weiss:Imran is in his late 20s. He's slender and unimposing, with neatly styled brown hair and a goatee. His eyeglasses frame a kind and very serious face.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:On this side, uh, we have some pictures of
Lisa Weiss:As he shows us around the cultural center, he stops and pauses in front of a photo of children jumping into a river. This photo, he says, reminds him of home.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:We just want the kids, the young generation, to know, you know, um, about our culture, uh, about our tradition, so that they don't forget.
Lisa Weiss:There's no written record that Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque was born. There's no birth certificate proving when he came into existence. But Imran knows he was born to Rohingya parents in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I was born in 1994.
Lisa Weiss:It was a seemingly simple life at first.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I spent a lot of time with my mother and my sisters, and um, we had a garden.
Lisa Weiss:Imran's family garden is on Myanmar land, but the Rohingya are a marginalized community without citizenship in Myanmar. The births and deaths of many Rohingya in Myanmar aren't recorded on paper.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:All the Rohingya people have the same date of birth, like 1st of January, that's it. Everyone has the same date of birth. The year is different, but the month and date is the same because they don't know their date of birth.
Lisa Weiss:Imran's mother couldn't read or write, and she didn't have a paper calendar. But she buried a wooden box in the ground and filled it with objects that she used to track the passage of time.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:She had things that reminds her of date, time, And the year, like clothes and also like wood, mud and also money coins. She puts them in a, uh, in a certain way, so I can't read it, but she can,
Lisa Weiss:and it's through his mother's arrangement of objects that Imran knows that he wasn't just born in 1994. He was born on April 10th, 1994.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:She also remembers when her dad died. She remembers all those things.
Lisa Weiss:Imran's mother used the wood, mud, and coins to tell the story of their family history to remind them of who they were and where they came from. Telling her children their history was important because the Rohingya aren't considered one of the national races in Myanmar. They're a Muslim minority in a nation that's 90 percent Buddhist, and they have little power or security. By tracking her children's birthdays, Imran's mother was carving out space for them and their identities, finding her own way to write them into history.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:She taught us how to be disciplined, even from a very young age. The way she organized her days, I think she was trying to teach us discipline in our lives.
Lisa Weiss:Every morning, Imran's mother began reciting prayers at dawn. The rising and setting sun anchored each day, she woke up early every morning to pray, holding the Quran.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:So she would just move her finger.
Lisa Weiss:She'd recite the prayers that she couldn't read, sliding her finger beneath the words in a gesture of faith and devotion. Imran yearned to learn to read. But it was not an option for most young Rohingya men.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I didn't go outside much. I didn't go to school. I didn't know anything about the world. She was my world. So I did what she did.
Lisa Weiss:Imran would one day become a powerful voice for his people. But to understand his story, first we have to talk about how powerless he was. Imran's mother kept him close to her. It was too dangerous to leave home. In 1982, 12 years before Imran was born, Myanmar passed a law that revoked the Rohingya people's citizenship. The Rohingya became a stateless people, no longer recognized as citizens of any country. Imran's family, like any other Rohingya in Myanmar, needed to request permission to travel outside their designated township. Imran didn't have permission to go to school, and he had no protection under the law. Imran says the military could come for him at any time.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:That's why, you know, most of the men leave the country, and the women are left there, alone. For our people, we have constant fear something might happen. So, you know, our eyes are open all the time.
Lisa Weiss:And something did happen. Imran says his father had long bribed the local military, the Nasaka, to stay away from their family. But when Imran was 16, the bribe could no longer be paid. That put his life in danger. One night, there was a knock at the door, and his father told him to run. Imran had to leave the only home he ever knew. He fled in the dark, with only a sarong and a t shirt.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I ran for nearly two hours. I had to be far away from my home. It was a tough night.
Lisa Weiss:He traveled a familiar route, one he'd followed before when getting medical treatment for his mother.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I found people from my village, and then we just, um, got on the boat, and we sailed for three hours, I think. And, uh, we ended up in Bangladesh.
Lisa Weiss:Imran was able to board a smuggler's boat without any money because he was with fellow villagers. And so it wasn't until after he got to Bangladesh that Imran first realized he had a big problem. He had no passport, no birth certificate, nothing that would let him cross borders legally. Without documentation, he would face a perilous journey.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:It's very scary. To cross the border without any piece of paper. You don't know, you just, trust your heart. You have nothing else. And you don't know where they are going to take you. Oof. I, I hope no one would have to ever experience that type of journey.
Lisa Weiss:Along that journey, Imran hid in the mountains at night to avoid getting caught and sent back to the very country he was fleeing.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:Why do you hide? Because you don't have a piece of paper
Lisa Weiss:during the day. He disguised his identity trying to blend in with the local population, pretending he was Malaysian, Bengali, Indian, Pakistani, anything but a Rohingya.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I want to say who I was. I couldn't say it.
Lisa Weiss:Imran had escaped danger in his home country, but now he was a stateless teenager with no education, no rights. No safe haven. He carried his mother with him. She hadn't been able to send her son to school, but she had taught him about how to read people, how to judge their intentions by their body language. And those skills kept him alive.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I was young, but I was dealing with people, smugglers, right? That's how I survived.
Lisa Weiss:Eventually, his luck ran out. Imran was arrested by police in Indonesia and detained for 17 months in the Manado Immigration Detention Center. He should have been in high school, but instead he was imprisoned, trying to catch glimpses of life in the village beyond the walls of the camp.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I saw children going to school and just broke my heart because I couldn't go.
Lisa Weiss:Imran could easily have given up. Instead, on his own in the camp, without access to books or the right to go to school, Imran found an Afghan refugee who started teaching him the English alphabet. The lessons planted a seed in Imran that would later bloom. Then, after nearly a year and a half, he was granted refugee status and released from the camp. It was a huge moment for Imran to finally have documentation. But this object that he had so desired didn't really give him freedom. He still didn't have the papers he needed to fully live. He didn't have a work permit, couldn't go to school, travel. So he pressed on to a place where he knew some Rohingya had been able to get passports.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:That's why I decided to go to Australia.
Lisa Weiss:Imron has written about his journey for the Pulitzer Center, and if you have time, you should read it for this story. What you need to know is that it was a terrifying and dangerous trip, and that after braving storms and seeing people die, Imron was detained again. This time it was even more severe. He was taken to Australia's infamous offshore detention center in Manus Island, where he was stripped of his refugee status. Everything he'd gained was lost in an instant.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:The first day when I arrived in the detention center on Manus Island, um, it just broke my heart. The heat, the heat was so tough. For the first few weeks I was so depressed. The I was so depressed because I had some kind of expectation from the Australian government because I heard a lot of good things. When you have expectation and you don't meet your expectation, it's very heartbreaking.
Lisa Weiss:Learning English in Indonesia, even informally, had given him something to take his mind off his suffering, and so he turned to that again.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:After a few weeks, I said, I have to control my mind. Because is, um, is the only thing that I have. So I started learning English and I started writing.
Lisa Weiss:Initially, he started learning English so he could communicate with the guards inside the camp to tell them when an inmate was sick. It also helped him cope.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I didn't know how to write at all. I didn't have books. We were allowed to have cigarettes, but we were not allowed to have pen and papers.
Lisa Weiss:Imran spent as much time as he could talking to the guards and to caseworkers in English, trying to improve his language skills. Then he took a big risk. He picked up discarded papers and squirreled them away.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:The first piece of paper that I took was from a garbage bin.
Lisa Weiss:Imran wasn't allowed to have many personal possessions, but he knew that this seemingly worthless object had value. He found discarded doctor's notes about sick inmates, detention forms. Writing on the backs of those papers gave Imran a sense of purpose and power.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:People didn't have a reason to wake up in the morning. So the day I started writing, um, the next day, uh, I felt like I had a reason to wake up.
Lisa Weiss:The process wasn't easy.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:Because our language is not written, it's very difficult for our people to learn the language. I didn't have any education background, but I started learning, like, how do you create a sentence? How do you put subject part and object and make sense?
Lisa Weiss:It was a way for Imran to write his identity into existence. Making indelible marks on paper helped him keep a record of who he was, what he was experiencing, even his own name.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:When we went to Australia, we were given a boat number. And that's how I was known for five years. Room number C3 and the date.
Lisa Weiss:Imran's name was taken away. He was identified only by the number of the boat he arrived on and the date.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:So for five years, everyone forgot their name. The guards call us like EMP 65, EMP 65 on a daily basis for five years. So when people call me by my name like Imran, uh, it felt strange. But when people call me like EMP 65, oh, it's me. I respond immediately. They wanted to take away the sense of humanity from our heart, from our mind, like they treated us like animals.
Lisa Weiss:He was on Manus Island for five years. And in that time, learning to read and write became a lifeline.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:When I started writing, I got lost. I was not there at all. The guards were talking. I didn't even pay any attention. I didn't even know what's happening around me. That's how I forgot.
Lisa Weiss:What began as a way to communicate with guards inside the prison became its own means of escape.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:It gave me a purpose, and it helped me to survive. Uh, it helped me to escape. It helped me to go back to my country. It helped me to go to different places. Writing from prison, it's amazing. It's incredible, because it's all about imagination. You don't see the world, but you see the world through your imagination. I was free. When I grabbed my pen and I started writing. I wasn't there. I wasn't there.
Lisa Weiss:Writing also started to give Imran a sense of power.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I'm a very tiny person. The guards were like giant. If they punch me, I'm done. So at that time I said, OK, I can fight with pen and paper.
Lisa Weiss:At one point during his imprisonment, someone brought in a map of the world. Imran had never seen one.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I didn't know anything about the world. I didn't know anything about the U. S. and other countries, you know. Um, it was incredible to see that there were so many countries and I couldn't belong to one.
Lisa Weiss:Despite being contained within those walls and fences, Imran's world was expanding, too. He collected discarded papers whenever he could, and he wrote. Secretly, Imran also began stockpiling cigarettes. When he had enough cigarettes He traded them for a phone.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I had a smuggled phone when I was there, and I buried it every night.
Lisa Weiss:The guards couldn't know Imran had a phone. Not only was he writing his story on paper, documenting the psychological torture he said he was experiencing within the walls of the detention center. He was now able to use his phone to share what he wrote. He'd learned about social media during his time in Indonesia, before he was first detained. He never knew what to do with it, but now he did.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:Whatever I learned, I posted on social media and, uh, I posted, um, something on social media and they were picked up by journalists from around the world. I was shocked. Wow, that's when I learned the power of writing. Words travel so fast, so quick. Physically, I can't change anything, but with words I can. And I kept writing
Lisa Weiss:through his writing. Imran was no longer an anonymous, stateless person. He was becoming known.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:It felt very powerful, and also it gave me motivation to keep going. I was scared, but I have the right to say what I wanna say. I started learning about my rights, uh, before I had no idea about my rights. Now the world knows me. Uh, the world knows my name, and so I cannot be hidden. I cannot be destroyed.
Lisa Weiss:Imran wrote his way to freedom. He wrote his story, his autobiography, on sheets of paper that he squirreled away or bartered for, and when he shared pieces of it digitally on social media, journalists around the world began hearing his story too. His words traveled. He reached out to people around the world, including Australian lawyers and advocates. In June of 2018, Imran was freed from detainment and transferred to the United States as part of an asylum agreement between the Obama administration and Australia. He was 24 years old. This time, his refugee status was permanently recognized. When I asked Imran to sit down with me and share his story, I thought his object diary-- the object he owned with the most personal meaning -- would be the papers he wrote while detained on Manus Island, including what became his autobiography. He left Manus with 18 kilos of writing, more than 40 pounds of paper. Those papers are incredibly important to Imran. They helped him feel free, even while he was trapped behind bars and fences.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I kept everything because I want to remember that journey. It's not just a sad story. There are beautiful moments, too. I want people to read it. It's not just for the people who are living in a safe environment, it's also for, uh, for people who are stuck in those environments, you know, to find that hope. And also I want them to know that, you know, things will eventually change, you just don't know when.
Lisa Weiss:Imran says there are so many things in this world that people have no control over. But they have control over hope.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:Just find a way to hold on to your hope. Control the things that you can. That's what I see when I see this paper again.
Lisa Weiss:Through getting to know Imran and digging deeper into his story, I came to understand that the object he valued most in this world wasn't the suitcase of papers he wrote during his detainment. It's that 11 by 10 piece of white paper he described at the start of the episode.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:This is the first paper that I received from the UNHCR, so United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. So this is my refugee status. Um, I think it would be my first, uh, Paper, my first documentation that shows my name, where I'm from, my date of birth.
Lisa Weiss:We talked a little bit earlier about how Imran was given the paper in Indonesia at the end of his 17 months of detention. It was the first time he'd ever had a piece of paper that had his real name on it, that said he was Rohingya, that recognized him.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I didn't have any other paper in my life that shows my name, that shows my picture, that says my state name, my country's name, my date of birth. It was a moment that I cannot describe.
Lisa Weiss:That piece of paper didn't truly set him free. But it was his first official recognition. He's since acquired others that give him more power. He has a pile of them now. Lots of papers with his face and name.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I had to hide my identity all the time. But when I came to the United States, I did not have to hide myself. I proudly say that I am a Rohingya..
Lisa Weiss:These papers, a social security card, employment card, and proof of permanent residency, are the objects he risked his life to get. They also allowed Imran to do something he'd always dreamed of.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I got my high school diploma. I just finished my associate. Um, so, uh, two years of college. Now I want to get my bachelor and then eventually master's. I changed my major many times. Now I am thinking about social work because, um, uh, I think I can use my voice, uh, there for the communities.
Lisa Weiss:Imran found safe haven in Chicago after he landed in the U. S. and grew accustomed to snowy winters while earning his high school diploma. He went on to earn his associate's degree at Truman College. When we spoke, Imran was working at the Rohingya Cultural Center, helping other Rohingya refugees learn and practice English so they could pass their citizenship tests.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:I'm very proud of this space because, you know, back home, um, we didn't have this opportunity. You know, they come to take the citizenship classes here. When they get their citizenship, it's like a huge thing for them.
Lisa Weiss:Now, Imran is working towards his bachelor's degree at Buffalo State University. And the object he wants most? A U. S. passport.
Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque:Getting my citizenship would be a huge thing. For the first time in my life, I could say that I belong to a country. It's a kind of feeling that you cannot describe it. It's beyond description. It makes you feel human.
Lisa Weiss:You've been listening to Object Diaries, stories of human connection, told one treasured object at a time. I'm Lisa Weiss. This episode was produced by Jessica Terrell, April Estrellan, and me. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions. Thank you to Wendy Widom for your wise consult and for connecting us with Imran. Without you, this episode wouldn't exist. Thank you to John Barth for consulting on this project. Thank you to the Rohingya Cultural Center in Chicago for hosting us. Thank you to Imran for sharing your story. Hear episodes and share your own story at objectdiaries. com
