Home in Heritage

Today we’re talking about home. If you listened to the first episode you’ll know we touched on the difficulty of leaving home behind, and in this chapter I want to explore the version of home that stays with us. Indeed not the four walls and the fixed addresses but the kind of home we carry with us the way Beyoncé carries hot sauce in her bag.

As diaspora, we are masters at assembling home from scratch: a little bit of memory, a dash of music, a dose of instinct and a lot of fantasy. Because we have to be crafty: we only get a few kilograms per suitcase after all. So everything that doesn’t fit gets reinvented with whatever we’ll find where we’re going. The pain of leaving is a distinct one, especially when it comes to those who emigrate from the so called “global south” or nowadays more aptly named the global majority. It is a distinct hurt because The moment we leave, we don’t know if things will be the same again when or if we come back.

Nowadays, things on that side of the world, can change in just a few months and so leaving means grieving and longing because we’re pretty sure things will not in fact be the same again. Leaving is a form of burial of the version of home that gave you everything you loved or hated it about it.

So by a carefully curated process, we begin to gather the slices of home that will make the Final Cut into the retro viewer of our narrative. On this retro viewer, each reel is sacred and preserved with an attachment just as strong as the distance is great, and revisited only when we are in the safe proximity of people who we sense carry a similar treasure chest. Only then, like children, do we open the box and compare our slides with delight. Exchanging familiar jokes, references, places like children exchange Pokémon cards; careful not to give away the best too soon. Never mind the fact that meanwhile at home, life goes on, and in fact our entrepreneur cousins and aunties are busy pitching investors with virtual reality goggles, selling hyper realistic versions of a new dream.

But we, we hang on to the old ones.Sometimes I wonder if that makes us jaded ? Passé perhaps even? Maybe, but the beauty is in the longing. As diaspora, we build home in translation, yes but also in resistance. Resistance to change and challenges to our sacred memories threatened perhaps by newcomers freshly arrived from home, but resistance also to the threats to the values we hold dear, like solidarity or community. Oddly enough, in doing so, we often become more local than those who never left. Let me explain.

I’ve noticed something about the people who’ve left and returned, or left and never returned, or left and don’t know if they’ll return. We learn to see through walls. No really, I scan through a city with laser vision, looking for hints of home anywhere I can find them. I take note of the market stalls where the mangoes taste just right and where the Nigerian auntie serves my favorite dishes, shoutout to Ebony Afro kitchen by the way, right here in Utrecht. My senses have attuned in a way that would make Spiderman jealous, and I stay ready.

We find the salons to braid our hair and share the classified information in hushed tones. We deal in addresses of Cafés, churches, and even supermarkets where you can find Maggi cubes, cassava, or salted fish tucked in the back. You name it. All of a sudden those of us who were not that Togolese or Ghanaian back there become hyper aware or the latest news, football games, and musical hits.

There’s a particular kind of auntie you know the one who left town back in 1993 all alone and built her life abroad, where she now has stronger opinions about how things “should be done” than people who never left, for better or worse actually. She hosts the best weddings, cooks the “real” egusi, she teaches the little nieces and nephews how to greet elders properly all of it right from her house in Atlanta, or Brussels, or Hackney.

My point is that sometimes, diaspora preserves culture even more fiercely than home does Because when you live far away, you realize what’s at stake and you appoint yourself the keeper of memory. The archivist for the uprooted generations to come.

But here’s the irony: the more fluent we become in these hybrid worlds, the less understandable we are to either side.

When we show up to family functions we’re always ready to be called “too Western”, especially if we bring quinoa to the function. Conversely when we arrive in Western spaces, and put our orange rice in the communal kitchen, we’re easily seen as “too foreign.” We become… confusing. Untranslatable.

I remember once feeling my loneliest after being told while discussing visiting a colleague who had just given birth that it was not necessary to offer so much help. As if I didn’t know.

What was an act of community for me and probably would have been considered not enough where I come from, was seen as too much. And it was the only way I knew to express joy at the event. It felt crazy to me. I was stuck once again in between worlds and I had to promise myself I would never stop offering, even if it kept being turned down, becauseI just don’t know any other way to be.

And if you pay attention, you’ll notice: the world is starting to look a lot more like us, it’s multipolar, fluent in multiple languages, non linear, with multiple recipes for joy.

And in that world, the next world which by the way is already here, with borders in flux and modern belonging even more expensive emotionally and literally, the out-of-place who became the most local of all, I see you. I’m one of you. And this episode is for you.

So I ask “How are you creating home in heritage? How are you building belonging by design?”