AIRPLANES-AND-WHATSAPP-CALLS

AIRPLANESANDWHATSAPPCALLS

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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When grandma left, I’d constantly ask my mom; “ grandma’s gone now and you speak English, so why do I have to still speak Yoruba?” I hadn’t realized that by refusing to speak Yoruba I was not only severing my connection to Nigeria but also hers. Her family wasn’t with her. My father, brother, and I were all she had in this country. She only came to the US to support my father’s dreams. She only stayed so I could pursue mine.

One day my mother got a phone call; my grandmother had a stroke, but she was continents away. In that moment, as her face squished into the camera phone, tears rushing down, I realized that when my grandmother left for Nigeria, she didn’t just leave me with my mother but she also left my mother with me. Thankfully, she was still alive and wanted to speak with us.

My grandmother tried to soothe me, her “foreign” granddaughter, who everyone believed had forgotten her mother tongue, by asking “How are you?” but she was the one I worried about. At the time, I struggled to put sentences together, which is why I asked her “She-alaafia-wa-nibe?” A symphony of laughs from both continents filled my ears. I meant to ask, “Are you in peace?” but instead I asked, “is peace there with you?” as if peace were a person. My aunt played along: “yes, she is here with us and she is also with you!”

For a long time I’d been laughed at for being different, but that was the first time I appreciated laughter because it made me see family differently. I realized that distance doesn’t have to cause indifference and that if I can love and connect to people miles away from me, I can do it with anyone. If I can make someone smile, I’ve done something. If I can get grammar lessons from a person I’ve never met then the world probably needs to be a little more different.

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I’ve never met them, but every year on my birthday, my Nigerian family wishes me “long life and prosperity.” So wherever I go, whatever I decide to be, and however long I may live, I want to spread prosperity because, like family, it's more than a physical existence. It’s a state of mind. It’s appreciating human existence and accessing the depths of our shared humanity. It’s the desire to learn, educate, and spread peace and laughter beyond what an airplane can reach.

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