CULTURE
Breaking Our Own B oundaries WRITTEN BY
ILLUSTRATED BY
Claudia Ugbana
Kyra Wells
History and Culture Do Not Have To Be One-Dimensional
I
n 2018, my mother moved from her home, Lagos, Nigeria, to Houston, Texas. She said she wanted to be closer to her children, to see the lives we built for ourselves and make a new one of her
own. There was something about her decision that seemed so strange at the time; it was incredibly unheard of for 50-something Nigerian women to leave behind their home, job and husband to pursue an unknown future in another country. Angela Ugbana has been extremely well traveled due to her marriage to my father, who, 30-something years ago, was once extremely wealthy. She toured most of Europe, had her children in foreign countries, and most importantly, her children were, by all accounts, as American as they came. To her, the move seemed effortless and easy. She termed it a “natural life move I felt I should have made years prior.” To the women around her, it seemed like she made a decision women her age simply didn’t make. My mother was married at 24. Soon after, there was talk that she was barren, unable to have children because of a miscarry she endured a year into her marriage. Rumors started by my father’s sisters. “I remember feeling like God was punishing me for some crime I had committed. Something I couldn’t remember,” she told me. But I know deep down, she remembers it often, clutching on to the idea that she would have been a mother of five, and not of four children. So she and my father kept trying. They had my sister just three years later, another baby girl came
