AIRPLANESANDWHATSAPPCALLS Maymuunah Quasim 12th Grade • George Westinghouse College Prep
Every year on my birthday, I would quiver at the sound of my parents’ phone ringing. The Nigerian Happy Birthday wishes and prayers of “long life and prosperity” from my “family” ironically made me feel sad and awkward. All the thank yous and empty promises of seeing each other soon became a robotic annual tradition. Yet, I’ve done it every year just so I can see my parents smile as their siblings squish into the camera phone to greet their “foreign” niece from America. The word family has always been different for me. The majority of my family lives on a different continent. Africa. I’ve never been there, but since Africa is my family's continent of origin, I was given the nickname "African" and sometimes “Jamaican” by my less geographically aware peers. It didn’t really bother me because being African and speaking Yoruba connected me to the person who I’d run to after having a lonely day at school, my grandma. Yoruba and English were my first languages. I learned English at school and Yoruba while watching Yoruba movies with my grandma who only knew “How are you?” in English, which she’d ask me every day. Eventually, my grandmother got tired of Chicago’s cold winters and went back home, leaving me in the cold, literally, to a land I can only visualize through the movies we watched and connect with through the language she taught me.
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