XL. kiss the ground

on home and history

A few weeks ago I went home for just under 48 hours and was surprised by the churning industry of my grandparents’ retired time. They have created an Eden. During the family barbecue, I tasked the only child in attendance with counting how many succulents he could find: he stopped at 200. Someone must constantly be watering or weeding or measuring or cutting this suburban forest, making the long days of summer seem short, dictated as they are by need. For my part I did nothing, beached myself on the couch swaddled in blankets to combat the inexhaustible AC. I returned to New York with a String-of-Pearls plant tucked into my backpack along with a bag of drainage pebbles, a bespoke soil mix, and the promise of a FaceTime to receive specific potting instructions.

made this plan immediately upon touchdown at LGA

Since my big move to Philadelphia as a kid, I have maintained a strong sense of homegoing. Even as it has been made complicated with the spooky march of time, I know the feeling of missing home, going home, arriving home, and leaving home to return to your newly created satellite home. This negotiation with returning and its attendant feelings is deeply familiar to me, which is perhaps why I never considered my travel to Ghana a homegoing.

A decade ago, when Obama was president and having a little ethnic splash was in, Ancestry.com reached its cultural zenith. My maternal grandma started tracking down distant cousins and my paternal grandma was disappointed to learn that there was no evidence of the Native American (you know those aren’t the words she used) genes she was so proud of. From my results I learned that my non-European roots are predominantly Nigerian, with a murky mashup of percentages from its neighboring countries with Western ports. The information reaffirmed the uncharted history I could already guess, offering the barest genetic touchstone beyond “we all came from Africa.” The little pie chart of my racial and ethnic background had only three tangible effects:

1. I was admitted into a three-person group chat called “the nigerians”

2. My friend Maya changed my name in her phone to “Mia 32% white casper”

3. I wrote my first video sketch and it delighted undergraduate audiences for years until we had to take it down due to certain participants’ career aspirations (but I am linking it here because it makes me laugh, don’t tell anyone)

For a long time, Nigeria was the only country I felt a tentative pull towards, and only because of my friends. I wanted to see their origins: family members they had names for and relationships with, cousins’ marriages they would travel back for, the tangible connections they had—scattered and complicated as they may be—as children of immigrant families. I never had the feeling that I would return to the continent, I would only visit.

For the first few days in Accra I only had one thought: it is wonderful to be surrounded by black people. I don’t think I ever realize how psychically isolating living in a predominantly white world is until I come up for air in an all-black space. And to be in an all black country! Not just one neighborhood or family gathering, but everywhere—the grocery store, the restaurants, the schools, the best neighborhoods and the worst, drivers and passengers, across every gender, wealth, and educational divide—everyone is black. It was glorious. Though I was in a state of constant stimulation, I could only write briefly about my trip while I was there. One of the lead professors asked if I would expand, perhaps write a whole series and I told him I would which was a half-truth. I knew I wouldn’t be able to digest enough in real time to write a coherent travelogue, but I could also feel that more was being seeded with each passing day. I could feel Ghana working on me.

As I said, I didn’t experience anything resembling a return. I did not feel that I had come home, but there was an internal shift. The best way I can describe it is like I was a dash hovering above a broken line and then I was gently clicked into place. Gentle in the way I arrived to my historical slot—drinking palm wine, eating fresh fish, joining the laughter that seemed to jingle through every conversation—disquieted in the aftermath.

I have written ad nauseam about how reading is the ultimate conversion tool for me (see: here and here and here). I have only ever known something important about myself by reading it in someone else. Even that revelation came by way of Virginia Woolf:

Yes, one feels, I should never have thought this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture. But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.

Upon reading Ségu, the first novel in a series by Maryse Condé, I experienced two, separate but linked, racial reckonings. One was new and one was But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! The first is that I exist as, for lack of better terminology, a historicized self; and the second is about how whiteness has shaped that self. Broadly speaking I think of these categories as: what was lost and what was made. Today we will only touch on the first. I have never had such trouble putting something into words.

Ségu is the story of the once-powerful Traore family and the internal and external forces that rent it apart. It’s a sprawling story beginning in present-day Mali but spanning much of the northwestern parts of the continent including Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, not to mention tracking the characters sold into or making their fortune by the slave trade in Brazil, Portugal, England and the waters between. I read it with the emotional sensitivity I read most good books with—taking on thought patterns and moods that I have to actively remind myself don’t belong to me—but I noticed that certain passages in this book were feeling distinctly personal. It felt as if I Mia, not the Mia who has slipped a little too far into character, had a stake in the outcomes of Condé’s world.

Without prompting, I don’t think backwards into my lineage very far. I would go out on a limb to say I’m probably not alone in that. Black americans have been deprived of our own history or shown its violent ends so often that it has become undesirable or emotionally unsustainable to go rooting around in the timeline (cue the insane Taylor Swift lyric). That being said, I have always considered my immediate family history to be extremely influential on how I move through and understand my position in the world. My mother’s feeling of racial displacement as a mixed kid bears on my understanding of blackness and sometimes leaves us at odds in discussions around colorism. My white grandmother will hit me with an incisive racial observation and then I’ll recall that she did go ahead and marry a black man in 1969, five years before Kentucky would repeal its anti-miscegenation laws. I am aware of being a product of who and what came before me, but I never considered the extent to which that is true. In Ghana I got the first stirrings of recognition, a faint pluck on a thin thread, that I have an origin point beyond the accounted for branches on my family tree. And then in reading Ségu I was struck by just how far removed I fear I will always be from those origins.

**spoilers ahead**

In Ségu, Condé sets her family drama at an inflection point in Africa’s history, ensnaring three generations in the colonialist, capitalist, and religio-political fervor of the 18th and 19th centuries. Towards the end of the first book, Islam is sweeping through Africa from the North and East. When it finally arrives to Ségou, the Bambara are backed into a corner. They have dwindled in power such that they cannot succeed in taking on the two warring Islamic factions that pose a threat and so must ally with their former enemies to prevent total annihilation by the impending Toucouleur Empire. The alliance comes at cost: the Bambara must renounce their native religion, destroying all evidence of fetishism, and embrace Islam, at least in appearance. By this point in the narrative, we’ve seen the kingdom of Ségou and its dominant families in a downward spiral. There is too much external pressure, too many children leaving the fold, for it to maintain its hold on the region. The generation we are left with, grandsons of the narrative’s first patriarch, abandon dominance for survival; and Condé presents a version of what is lost in that struggle.

Small groups of tonydons, supervised by Fulani, entered every house in Segu, going through the series of courtyards to the huts containing the pembele and the boli. They took them out into the daylight, then brought them to the palace square and the bonfire…Fur, bark, roots, bits of wood, tails of animals—all were consumed by the crackling flames. The tonydons brought a harvest of sacred objects from all over town, smashing the red stones that represented the ancestors and couldn’t be burned…Tools belonging to distant ancestors and kept hidden in holes in the ground, a reminder of the ancient underground dwellings of the smiths at Gwonna, were taken from their shrines…Then they dragged the holy men to the square and stripped them of their necklaces of horns, teeth, leaves, and feathers, and their belts hung with magic charms.

It was so weird to read this and experience what I guess was an echo of grief—a religion and a way of life that was never mine to lose felt taken from me. And then I thought perhaps it wasn’t this fictional account at all, that more likely Condé scraped against something that had been made tender in the short span of thirteen days, in a country I can’t even claim by the smallest genetic marker. Black americans have been taught, so many times and in such demoralizing ways, about the atrocities that happened on this side of the slave trade (shout out to Masterman High School for having students “write their own spiritual;” double shout out to the student who came up with Let Me Go in the style of Frozen’s Let It Go) but I don’t feel I was ever taught to consider that on the other side of that forced journey was home.

One of the reasons I do not claim a religion even while I consider myself religious is because I don’t like half committing to something. If I cannot accept all the principles of a religion I don’t want to falsely advertise myself as an adherent. With the caveat that life is hard and everyone should do whatever aids them on their journey, I am not a fan of a la carte spirituality. Thus, it is hard for me to imagine forging any real relationship with my African origins because I don’t know what they are and I am loathe to cobble together a weak understanding from Ancestry and Wikipedia. Save the glaring fact that somewhere along the line someone survived insurmountable odds and then so did their children and theirs until you reach me, mourning the fictional account of the destruction of rites and talismans I have never known, my family and I have no ties to Africa. And I guess all this to say that for the first time I felt that as something lost, something severed rather than an inherited circumstance. And for the first time I wondered what all that lost knowledge was—what were the stories, who were the gods, what would I be sure of and where would I question—and wondered who is preserving that knowledge today. Or is it truly gone: lost at sea or crushed underfoot. And then to think of what comes after the great colonial smash and grab, the question that is somehow still at play: “Is the white man’s civilization better than that of our ancestors?”

More soon.

xx

Mia