Grateful… with Limbs Everywhere

Can a body function when its parts are connectedly scattered across time, space, worlds, and realities? Does the light of the brightly burning firefly leave a shadow of want and desire after its departure?

The stories we hear about unbelonging are about displacement—stolen land, stolen people. The visible nakedness of displacement has an obvious face. My African American, Black British, Caribbean, Indigenous siblings who were either taken from their lands or had their land taken from them. That is the kind of unbelonging we name. What we see. What we hear. What we know. What we stand against. What we defend.

But there is another kind.

Recently, more people of African descent—often the children of immigrants—have moved past the expected gratitude of being "saved" from a backwards Africa… or some other ‘third world’ nation. They have begun to hold their experience with nuance. The experience? For a while, if not all your life, you never fully belong to any of the worlds you traverse. Assimilation is all some of them know, because in the beginning, where you live is simply all you know. Many of their parents believed the West was an upgrade. Family back home assumed an "arrival." While traveling from what is familiar can open one up to opportunities otherwise unavailable, this is not always the case. There has always been a trade off. Always a cost. Now these children of immigrants are growing and they__we_ are saying, "I never truly belong anywhere." I hope at least that in this admission, there is camaraderie.

But there are layers. And I write to you as an inhabitant of a liminal space within liminal spaces.

The liminal space I write about has no language. How do you make someone hear how displaced you are from community and belonging when that displacement is tied to moving toward what is considered "better" opportunities and a better life? You are supposed to be grateful and in a sense, you are. But you are also confused, removed and even more confused. So you learn to be quiet.

When you immigrate willingly—well, when you are a child there really is not much of a choice, but we say you immigrate willingly—between ages say 13 to 17, you are young enough not to have a choice, but also old enough that you do not really forget.

When you move to a different continent, city, town, country at that age, move into a space with mostly people who do not look like you—people you cannot relate to—and then shortly after this, move again and then again into spaces where you have to dig to get some semblance of cultural relativity, there is a kind of labor that you may never be able to explain. A kind of liminality that cannot—in fact, never be captured by words.

A girl moved to the US from Ghana when she was 17, in high school—a boarding school.

Mind you, when she was in Ghana, she was born in one part of the country, one region. But for the first seven years of her life, she moved to about five different places, so there was really no solid foundation of community. At age 9, she moved to go be with her father because her mother was traveling out of the country. This was the longest place she stayed, and even so, she was new to the place and it took a while to find her people.

After about five years, she went on to high school—a boarding school—and it was during this time that her dad retired and had to leave the company's property. She was in boarding school when this uprooting happened. The family moved to a town where she used to visit for holidays. A place her dad had lived before but she had never really lived full-time. She continued her boarding school education while here.

She came home from school one day and her mother was home. She did not know she was traveling until the night before. She did not get to say goodbye to her friends. She cannot remember the details, but she was on the way to the airport, hair braided, an unaccompanied minor tag on her wrist and around her neck. She was on a plane to a country she had only seen on TV.

Her first point of entry: a place with many white faces. She lived there for about four years and then left for college. It was another predominantly white space. Though the college campus had diversity, the thing about college spaces is, they are transient. She made friends here, but then one by one, people graduated. She lost track of some. A year after she graduated, she continued her education. Accepted into a prestigious university, she had to move again to another transient college space. Another predominantly white space.

Over the period of her being in the US—which has been over a decade—she has maintained, when she could afford it, trips back home to Ghana. Except as familiar as it sounds, and as much as it sometimes reminds her, it does not truly feel like home. People look at her differently. Even though she speaks the languages and can remember social etiquette, she is the "American girl." Expected to sometimes cough up cash on demand. She calls this place "home" because it is the country she was born in. She really does not feel at home. She rents an apartment in a place where she has very few friends and even fewer family members. She cannot just up and go to her family's home when she arrives, and it is not because her family has no brick-and-mortar house. The place her family calls home—the place her mother calls home, the place her mom is tied to by virtue of her birth—her tether to that place was "as a place we went for holidays."

She has had to look to create community in what she would tell outsiders is "home." People already have their groups, their squads, their people that they have known for years. People that they have established consistent routines with, often tied to proximity.

Her life has made it such that she has moved a lot. Meeting and connecting with people and then having to maintain those connections through different time zones and spaces.

On top of this, she is queer. A truth she came into a little less than a decade ago. It is not safe to be queer back home. In the US, however, while it is generally safe, the spaces she's been in have made it difficult to locate community where she has relatable experiences. She's felt like the labor to not be isolated falls solely on her shoulders—after all, she is the one who has moved. She is the one with different people in different areas and different time zones.

A firefly… full of bright light when met, but transient in time and groundedness.

I am the girl we speak of. And I know there are many more like me who are supposed to be grateful.

There is a liminality that does not get spoken of or regarded. Because what complaint does she have? She can trace both her maternal and paternal ancestries. She can find her way to her hometowns and speak the languages. She can translate certain rituals and has memories of what home was—ish—from her childhood. What does she have to complain about?

When no space feels accepting because you are beautifully pieced fragments of time, space, connections, realities, growth trajectories, opportunities, and struggles that cannot be articulated in a single or even a few streams of conscious articulation—

There is nowhere you truly belong.

Even if you have a limb, an eyelash, a tooth, a liver, and a kidney everywhere.