thoughts on IDENTITY, DIASPORA, AND TRAVEL FROM A NON-TRAVELER (AS YET) BY LYDIA NYACHIEO
“Where are you from?” “I’m from here.” *grins knowingly* “Ok, but where are you really from?” *smiles* “I’m from here but my dad is Kenyan – he’s a pilot there.” “Nice! When are you going home?” Home? I haven’t been outside of Wisconsin since I was four years old. If I were to go back to Kenya now, I would not think of it as home. Even though my dad is Kenyan, even though I look African, even though I revel in learning about the continent, even though I love African music, and even though nimeanza kujifunza Kiswahili¹, if I arrived in Nairobi tomorrow morning, I’d feel just as an outsider as a foreign-born mzungu².
one perceives it as ‘traveling’ versus ‘going home’. This kind of connection was something I admired in several of my high school classmates – those who could speak their parents’ language, who told of summers spent in Africa with family, who had a different dimension of culture to their lives. I’ve imagined how it will be like traveling to Kenya given this more distant connection. On one hand, because of my ‘Africaness’, I don’t expect that I’d be treated like a complete outsider; they would expect certain behaviors of me and recognize me with a familiarity that they wouldn’t a tourist. Yet, I can’t imagine I’d slip seamlessly into the culture; there’d still be a dissonance, due to how I talk, my American mannerisms, and my incomplete understanding of that society’s unspoken norms, customs, and ways of being. I’d still be an outsider.
To clarify, the conversation above – which shouldn’t be confused with one that would otherwise be deeply offensive – is one I remember having with a coworker who himself is West African. It’s a variation of one that often occurs between Africans in the diaspora who recognize another black person to be African or American African rather than African American³. I’ve had to navigate it many times.
Qali Id, a Danish-born Somali freelance writer, precisely captured this sentiment in saying, “many first-generation kids struggle with identity—you’re never enough of your original home and not enough of your adopted one.” For me, the United States is where I was born and grew up for most my life – yet I’ve always danced (or maybe stumbled) around the line between identifying and being identified as African American versus American African – and have often settled in the unique shade of blackness in-between.
When thinking about travel, in this case that of Africans in the diaspora traveling back to their country of heritage, I can’t help but think of how the strength of the connection to that country – perhaps a continuum of rootedness – shapes the travel experience and how much
But back to travel. Since I haven’t been to Africa since I was a toddler, I can only imagine how my experience traveling back will be. There are some in the diaspora who, when going back to their country of heritage, finally settle a piece of their identity. Qali Id described such
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