Americas | existabovethenoise

The terror attacks in Kenya have weighed heavy on my heart. So much so that it’s taken til now and with great deliberation to even discuss my disdain for the entire affair. My peripheral intersection with the events in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall have left me grieving — perhaps for a sense of youthful immortality that has, apparently, died a quiet death.

Like 9/11, Nairobi’s attacks affected me around the edges in a way that some might say have shaped me. When those four planes headed West ward they departed from both a town I’m from and a town I was residing in at the time. Only years later when I moved to New York for almost 7 years would I associate those events with those towers. My fears, at the time, weren’t for people in the WTC, but for people possibly on those planes. Had my aunt Trudy traveled for work that week? Wasn’t a friend’s parent traveling from Logan? Such were my thoughts then and thankfully my people weren’t on those planes. I wasn’t touched – some might say – because they weren’t touched. Yet, sealed in that close call somewhere was the feeling that if it could happen so close to home and spare me and mine, perhaps this would always be the case.

Kenya undid all of that. For the reality is that as the events unfolded, I quickly thought “Of course, I don’t know anyone in Nairobi.” The same way I’d thought, “I don’t know anyone in Libya,” “in Syria,” “in Afghanistan”… But I did know someone in Kenya. I knew someone in Nairobi. I knew someone in Westgate Mall. In fact, I knew two someones – one who lived and one who died.

The irony that these two people would be my two people, in the same place at the same terrible time, is haunting. They’ve been part of an interwoven story in my life that’s left me speechless and afflicted with writer’s block since the realization dawned on me.

She hosted me at Barnard on prospective weekend. In deciding if I’d chose Barnard over Hopkins, over UNC, over… I’d slept on her floor and tried to live her life and be one of her friends. In deciding to choose the college, I chose her shadow – taking courses she had taken, being similarly disappointed with the administration’s ‘color blind’ shenanigans, sharing a suite with her my junior year. The cake may have been that, but the icing and the irony is that she went to Ghana in 2004. On an otherwise unprecedented trip led by British novelist Caryl Phillips, she and a cohort of Barnard women made the reverse transatlantic journey. From what I hear it was chocked full of white girl guilt trips and Black girl breakdowns. Soon after, she graduated and headed for Harvard Law, as she’d always planned. And I headed into my final year.

I, too, joined Caryl’s course and I also went to Ghana. In 2005. Similar tales resulted, except that my cohort upped the ante with multiracial girl ambivalence. I, too, met with Ghanaian students, had an amazing Ghanaian tour guide, and spoke with Ghanaian intellectuals – one of whom was Kofi Awoonor.

He met our group throughout the ten day trip. He introduced us to the students of University of Ghana’s Cape Coast campus. He dined with us and entertained us with diplomatic war stories at an Ivorian restaurant in Accra. And he even took us out to a resto-bar overlooking the Atlantic. Or maybe I’m mixing up my boys born on Friday and he only went to the dinner with us. Or maybe there are other punctuations I should remember, but don’t now. Nevertheless, he was a figure and remains a phantom – tireless and effervescent – in my Ghanaian memories and my West African dreams.

Just shy of 7 years have passed since that trip. And in those 7 years of separation, I’m sure he’d long since forgotten us – she from ’04, me from ’05.

Some twist of fate made these two individuals, my people, show up in Westgate Mall that day. One could say it was no coincidence. Neither are Kenyan. Months earlier, maybe even weeks earlier, neither was even in the country – much less in the mall! I bet they didn’t even know that the other was there. I suspect that even if they’d passed one another, they wouldn’t even have recognized each other by name or face. But there they were, fighting for their lives.

Unfortunately, he lost.

There are requiems that must be written for the loss of such lives like his. But you could google such memorials and they’d be more intimate than anything I could produce. Yet her shattered serenity I know more dearly and could argue that it too deserves commemoration of its own. I could pity these two people and praise their bravery or simply honor their greatness – tragedy not withstanding.

What these events have raised in me is the nagging knock of mortality at my own door, followed by – not the fear that life is too short – but the fear that the world is frighteningly small.

I know people in Libya. I know people in Nigeria. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. And in Washington, DC. Safety has become its own mirage, now more than ever. It’s trigger finger, though, remains brilliantly, divinely, randomized.

Perhaps if it weren’t these two people, these uniquely separate individuals, whose lives intersected almost a decade ago for just ten days…

If they could find themselves deeply entangled in danger in a foreign country, far from, distant from, their own…

Were it not them, were it not now, maybe I’d still feel spared the disruption of the world’s violent explosions so closely to home…

Ifs and buts get us nowhere…

So it was them. So it is now. So far, but so close.

I wish we were close enough to hug, but weren’t not. We’re just close enough for tragedy, but not enough for comfort. I’d like to hug her to let her know that I love her and that I’ve always appreciated her shadow. I haven’t the words to express both condolences and respectful distance. I haven’t the vocabulary to say that I’m happy she walked away, bruised but breathing. That these events aren’t hers alone to suffer. For, we are all utterly too close, too shamefully close to a Kenyan mall near you.

And I am so sorry, so deeply sorry, for her loss and for the loss of Kofi.

…We’ll always have Ghana.

We are not all immigrants. I learned this the hard way in seventh grade when all 30 of us were asked to create a poster about our ancestry, naming the first person in our families who came to America. I thought, “Trick question! Right?…right?” Wrong! Somehow, every student other than me actually had an immigrant story to tell. E-ver-y other student! Even the Black ones (And there were only three of us in the bunch). Can you believe it? It was Ellis and Angel Island all up and through that classroom. I was shocked.

I was shocked that I could come up with photos going back at least six maternal generations of my family being in America. (And I was also shocked that I had no White ancestors in the mix on that side of the family) I asked about the family before those six generations and they all were still American though there were no surviving photos. These were people who survived the Jim Crow South, who survived the Great Migration, who survived the Newark riots. These people were my people and these people, my people, were and still are American. But, they/we are not immigrants.

So, my seventh grade assignment earned me short shrift. My poster board, I, my family, my family’s American story wasn’t that interesting. We just didn’t have that ‘immigrant’ swag. I had pictures, and I had actually met each and every one of those people in my pictures. In comparison to my classmates’ two generations of photos and heart wrenching anecdotes of someone’s relative’s ancestral remembrances, my family’s story was so complete and so full.

Even today, I remember despising going to my great, great grandmother’s nursing home because “it smells like old people.” Yes, I actually said those words and I remember saying them. Which is not to suggest that I was just a jackass 8-year-old, but it is to prove that my family was not, at the time, based in historical fiction. They were then, and remain today to be people who I know. I mean, know know. These photographs dating back to the early 1900s, of people who were born in the late 1800s, were of people of my present. I, in seventh grade, could discuss their flaws and features. Yet, somehow, I forgot to say… sorry, we’re not immigrants.

As I have grown more academically invested in languages, foreign cultures, Diasporas and dispersal, I realize fully how foundational that experience was in shaping my trajectory. I wonder if somehow I’ve been trying to overcompensate for the lack of global exposure in my ancestry by offering global exposure in my lifetime. I wonder if I felt compelled to show the world that the terms ‘Black’ and ‘African American’ are not always synonymous. (It’s like people say, ‘Every Sikh is a Singh, but not every Singh is a Sikh’ – or is it the other way around?) I wonder if I internalized a sense of shame about not having an immigrant story, so much so that I wanted to create my own. Maybe I grew a curiosity, intellectually asking myself “What’s so fascinating about immigrants anyway?” These are all possibilities of the inner workings of my subconscious mind.

I can’t identify what pushed this African-American girl to wander the world, but I’ll tell you one thing I’ve never actually looked for in my travels: a sense of belonging. I’ve never seen people from a foreign land and thought, “maybe they are my long-lost cousins.” Nope, all of my cousins are in New Jersey, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina. Done.

I don’t go to West Africa hoping that they embrace me as if I were their own. I don’t read stories of ancient Ethiopian and Egyptian civilizations and use their accomplishments to bolster my self-worth today. I am proud of these people’s accomplishments because they are worthy of glory and awe, just as ancient Rome and Greece, just as Nubia and Benin. But, they do not inform my life, as in my own life story.

Mine is of African-Americans in the most classic sense of the term. And in every sense of pride I can muster, I am proud of their story (as my story) and I can only own their story (as my story) alone. I am proud of Africans brought to America in a condition of slavery. I am proud of what they’ve made of families broken, and how they formed adopted families out of necessity and conditioning. I am proud that their fictional homelands did not outlive their ability to cope with present realities – despite how distressing. In the classic sense, we – children of these people – are supposed to feel lost.

No connection to a space beyond the enslaved one, no history before that institution. And what of the history thereafter? Well, we, like the institution, were supposed to disappear. We were supposed to go to Liberia or be impoverished in an America that preferred World War II refugees to those Americans born of African origin. We were supposed to be as ashamed of our lack of an “America, the land of the free” narrative, as I was made to feel in seventh grade for not having an immigrant ancestor. In the classic sense, I am still supposed to feel lost.

But, I have never had the luxury of feeling or being lost. This very present family, in this very fixed space of America, in an expanse of time immemorial leaves me firmly rooted. Thankfully, firmly rooted. As I better understand diaspora formation, I am more clearly able to understand how distinct and unique my history is from other dispersal narratives.

Just because we all came by boat, except for Native Americans (Mexicans and Canadians), we didn’t all come with the same tale. And, for me, there’s something voluntary and knowing about identifying as an immigrant. For individuals there may be more push factors than pull factors, but immigration is still a choice. In that, I don’t share the immigrant narrative and I simply never will.

We haven’t all shared in the belief of America as an idea. And we don’t all share it equally now. We all have our different stories, none more valid than others, but certainly the immigrant protagonist is more valorized than say my forefathers. Despite what I may share with my peers of immigrant origin in the tale of downtrodden ancestors making something upon which we now stand, I feel a sense of relief in my ability to be American – with no caveats, no undue deference, and no remorse.

I am thankful for my ability to own my Blackness in this American space, without thought of justification or apology. I owe this place nothing, yet it is my everything. I believe this sense of rootedness, despite its original formation, has empowered me to roam the rest of the earth undoubtedly confident of who I am and what I am made of. My family is not mythical. My sense of entitlement (no matter how hard-earned and at times unwarranted) to my identity and my place in my country, past and present, is unwavering.

I am the daughter of a African-American billing agent and an African-American techie nerd, who were the first-college degreed children of an African-American military photographer & an African-American amateur model, and an African-American AT&T/ Bell South factory worker and an African-American Bear Sterns maintenance worker. They being children of African-American sharecroppers, and an Irish man and an African-American woman with epilepsy. (Hey! Nobody told me about this paternal great-grandfather in seventh grade, because he supposedly raped said Floridian great-grandmother. And, were it true, it would be just as true to the African-American narrative as chitterlings and the Baptist church.)

I could go on, but I fear it would all be redundant and self-glorifying. It’s safe to say that I am not of Garveyists or Germans, not of French Creoles or Holocaust victims. We are not all immigrants (or descendants of immigrants), and we don’t have to be – to be American.