We have been so long gone from Africa.
We sometimes fail to recognize
that the new arrivals are also us.
The major difference is
they just came here
on the late-night plane touchdown
rather than early in the morning
on the sufferation boats
that shipped us here,
so long ago.
We seem so different.
We sometimes hardly recognize each other,
although, psychologically,
we face much of the same challenges.
We are a heart broken in two
–a twoness that is
really historically one.
Although we were birthed
by the same distant mother,
we are not twins nor the same age.
Not really siblings
but much more than mere cousins.
Putting our parts together
often hurts terribly.
Is almost unbearable.
Warsan articulates our alienation.
Her memories and recollections,
hopes and dreams.
What happens when reality feels
too awful to be so true.
Moving somewhere else is difficult duty.
Being super-intelligent
and knowing you are not slow,
regardless of how those strangers
around you judge you.
Especially when the strangers
so often look just like you.
So much so,
you could be mistaken for kin.
No immediate relation,
but yet, all
of the same heritage.
We are all
the people
from somewhere else.
Eventually, you may get comfortable.
Come to regard this strange land
as your own.
The conundrum of being
not just a stranger but an emigre.
I have come, and am willing
to strive to make this a home,
even though, deep down I know,
not only that I am not from here,
worse yet, I realize
that becoming accepted here
will too often demand
foregoing significant pieces
of where I am originally from.
Ask Black Americans,
we know all the trauma
of forgetting
even as we serve
as models of assimilation.
The here-and-now doors
in our heads
are actually gates
of no return
–they swing only one way,
regardless of how much
some of us push to go back.
Our tragedy is truly tragic.
Once here, en masse,
only a few of us will ever
be able to return
to a too distant home.
So distant.
We worship
the god of transformation,
ashes on the altar of forgetting
even as we remember
fragments of a severed self
that vainly strives
to somehow reconstitute
all our various selves whole.
Is it a betrayal
that becoming new
means sacrificing old?
We think that she
is nothing like us,
except in the midnight hour
when we don’t want to be
where ever we are;
except in the morning
when we get up
and momentarily wish
we didn’t have to strive
for acceptance
where ever we are;
except when we thank
whatever gods there be
that we
are no longer threatened by death
in our birth location
where ever we are
knowing our living is only
because they do not
have not,
can not
kill all of us
in this place, this space
where we are now situated.
Not all of us.
But unfortunately some of us.
Too many of us.
An assassin can sneak up on us,
occasionally because
they act like
the person we see
in our morning mirror
as we ready ourselves
to survive another day.
Imagine the disaster
of being here,
try as you might
to make this place a home.
The deepest disaster
be the devastating reality
that you just might succeed
in becoming
something else
other than
what your mother birthed.
Fully an emotionally
settled stranger,
permanently encased
in the time and trauma
of an amnesia,
required of you
as the price of existence
in this,
your new home town.