Sadaf Zekaria
“The job you never applied for and can't escape”

Alyssa Powell-Ascura’s Firstborn captures an experience that is profoundly relatable and, at times, maddening. The firstborn, or the eldest daughter, is a role found commonly in collectivist cultures, where responsibility is instilled from a young age. The eldest child often shoulders an unspoken yet overwhelming responsibility: the unofficial second in command.

Alyssa’s work highlights this reality, exposing the weight of expectations and emotional labour that comes with being the eldest daughter in a family.

As an Afghan Australian, the firstborn and eldest daughter in my own family, Firstborn resonated with me profoundly. Despite cultural differences, the role of eldest daughters is strikingly similar across backgrounds: we are, in many ways, stand-ins for our mothers.

While my parents worked or ran errands, I dutifully watched over my younger siblings—always alert, fearful that if I looked away for even a moment, something terrible might happen. Responsibility and fear became intertwined with my adolescence. You are the eldest. You are a girl. You are mature. You are responsible. Say these enough times to a young girl who is eager to please, and she will start to believe it. Then, add If anything happens, you will be to blame, internal thoughts that were never uttered by my parents but still lingered in my mind, and you have the foundation for what, in my case, led to a lifetime of severe control issues and an eventual anxiety disorder diagnosis.

I see the way this is woven through the generations. My mother, while the youngest of seven siblings, is the eldest daughter living in Australia. Although my uncles and mother share caregiving duties for my grandmother, the emotional burden falls most heavily on her. Watching her navigate this role, I recognise that the expectation for eldest daughters to bear emotional labour isn’t just a personal experience—it’s a cycle, passed down from one generation to the next.

Being a firstborn isn’t easy for most, and I am not discounting the struggles that the eldest son experiences particularly in collectivists cultures. However, as Alyssa highlights in her work, the eldest daughter has an added layer of expectation. due to the patriarchal nature of these collectivist cultures.

Despite being an only child herself, Alyssa has managed to provide a nuanced portrayal of an overlooked group in society, the firstborn. Alyssa provides examples for the word firstborn or eldest daughter across multiple languages. ‘Panganay’ meaning eldest child in Filipino culture, ‘bong’ meaning older sibling in Cambodian culture and ‘jie jie’ meaning elder sister in Chinese culture. In my case, ‘dokhtar bozorg’, the term for the eldest daughter in Farsi, a term that holds a lot of meaning, and one I have heard throughout my life. What Alyssa has done by providing these translations is demonstrate how the role of the firstborn or eldest daughter cuts across different ethnicities and cultures, making it deeply relatable for eldest daughters across these collectivist cultures.

While being the eldest daughter hasn’t always been easy, and I probably wouldn’t have chosen this role for myself. I can’t see myself in any other way. The firstborn. The eldest daughter. The steady rock for my family.