Beginnings > Endings > Beginnings

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 12

Endings are never neat, barely tidy. They happen quickly, staccato. Or are long, laborious and languid — bordering on impossible before they’re suddenly all-at-once. I can’t craft an ending to my immigrant story because I didn’t want it to end. Not then in real life and not now in my retelling. Frankly, I’m not sure it’s over yet. Maybe we’re in the middle or even still in the beginning. I’m wary of resolutions that are strictly warm and bright, never showing the scars. So, that’s not the resolution I’m going to give you. I’ll write it as it comes:

It’s pertinent to note that I am a liar. Despite my best intentions, I am not an immigrant and am actually just — sigh — an expat. I didn’t stay. I came and went. I’m not happy about it. Because it’s not what I wanted, but also because ‘expat’ has unofficially evolved to apply to westerners with freedom of movement who arrive in a country for work, often only socialize with each other, don’t intend to stay and depart without ever deeply interacting with their host country. That’s not me, but, according to the dictionary definition, it is what I am. I feel like that needs to be said.

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I mentioned scars. It reminds me of a poem I wrote on the 16th of February this year. It reads: 

tingling as it mends

a signal for work

in progress

our bodies remind us:

healing hurts, too.

I’m covered in scars, much more brazen with my body than my emotions. It feels right that this poem comes back to me while I’m wrestling with compound endings, though I can’t recall what inspired it in the first place. Sometimes you’ve already told yourself what you need to hear.

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Endings seem to travel in packs. Not only is this the final volume in this series, but it also marks the close of my fellowship with Ann Friedman. Another ending I don’t want. But I must make way for the new fellows, such is the nature of things. Fittingly, winter has come to a close in the northern hemisphere and spring has just descended upon us. A season known for rebirth, a word that signifies something had to die in order for something new to grow. 

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I have a book called Death in Spring by ​​Mercè Rodoreda. It’s pretty intense magical realism that was originally written in Catalan in 1986. A friend gifted it to me in 2012 shortly after it had finally been translated into English. We were both living in Copenhagen then. He’s Spanish, but resides in England now — a kindred wandering spirit. I hope to see him this year. 

So much of adult life is saying “I hope to see you this year.” 

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Sometimes I cosplay the version of myself who was able to stay in Denmark. I think about what she’s doing and who she’s with. I wonder if she’s a mom because the cost of children is less daunting. But most of all, I think about how she sees herself. She’s confident. I come across as quite assured — and I am in certain settings — but she’s Black in Denmark while I’m Black in America. Her shoulders are a little less tense. There are still bigots around her and willful ignorance galivants around, but the racism she experiences doesn’t really sting the same way.

I’m sure it’s different for Black Danes but, for me, Denmark always felt like racism lite. Kind of like how a stranger can make a hurtful comment about my appearance and it might make me  self-conscious. But if someone I care about who knows my sensitivities says the same exact thing, it will rip me to shreds. I might start hiding that part of myself for years. I believe what they say because they know who I am. Danish racism couldn’t rip me to shreds; I wasn’t theirs to hurt. But America tried me everyday.

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It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I was 12 and walking home from the park with a Filipina/white girl friend. Our hoods were on because it was windy and a truck drove by, catcalling us. When they got in front and could see my face, one of them yelled “Eww, it’s a nigger!” My immediate reaction was to turn to her and say “that’s not true” and that is the saddest part of that story. 

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In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois opens by stating that when people ask what it is like to be Black in America they are truly asking “how does it feel to be a problem?” I find that statement, 119 years later, still outrageously apt. In Europe, I didn’t feel like a problem. I felt like an other and often disrespected, but not despised or considered something to put up with. 

I don’t want to give the impression that Denmark is post-racism—it certainly, CERTAINLY, is not. It is still a wealthy, white country that harbors and benefits from deeply ingrained colonial habits and frameworks. But it was there, somehow, that race became a concept for me to think about, not my defining factor. I finally felt like I had the distance to actually start to understand what race meant to me and take ownership of it. Not just react to perceptions of it.

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In 2017, a friend from college was visiting Copenhagen on business and her mother was with her. My friend had a meeting, so I took her mother out for smørrebrød — traditional Danish lunch. I had never met this woman before but the conversation flowed easily and, having the mutual approval of her daughter and both being Black women in Europe, we were open with one another. Toward the end of the lunch she looked at me and said, “You just seem so free,” and then gazed off into the distance. 

I’ve thought about that for years. Constantly. Neither seen nor spoken to her again. A stranger could so quickly detect my ability to move through the world differently than she. Which is to say: not as a problem. 

Now, in 2022, I’m surprised how much it seems I relate my loss of Denmark to a loss of racial freedom and personal depth. The opportunity for safety and a different kind of acceptance. When I cosplay my Copenhagen self, that’s what I think about. Who would I flirt with, where would I go, how would I walk, when would I cry, what tone would I take if I didn’t live in a society that thought of me as a problem to be fixed or reined in? I wish I could know that version of myself. I wish she could have lived a full life and not just seven years. 

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If I were Muslim or from an Arabic country (or just looked like I was), I would have still felt like a problem.

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There was another version of this essay that had a clear, tidy ending. It finished on a positive note, but I didn’t like it. I took a shower to try and suss out the reason for my dissatisfaction. I realized it was simply a story, I was giving sequential details of events but not sharing myself. As the sound of the water hissed in my ears, I imagined telling my trouble to my little sister. I imagined her instructing me to “share myself because people will make up the story themselves anyway.” So then I got out of the shower, dried off and I’m writing this to you now.

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In 2012, I sent her The Storytelling Animal by Jonathon Gottschall for her birthday. It uses a combination of psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology to explain how creating stories is essential to being human. I don’t know if she finished it, but maybe it’s the reason my shower-apparition of her would give me such advice. I took that book from her things recently and now it sits on my shelf. 

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My sister died suddenly in September. She was 29 and a writer, too. 

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I thought of her unexpectedly yesterday. I immediately got worried that a thought of her could be unexpected. Then I realized I hadn’t thought about her for a while, over a day, and felt extremely guilty. Today, I reasoned that anything we think about compulsively is usually destructive. I would like my relationship with her to be healthy, even in her death. 

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I remember it was she who inspired that poem on February 16th. I was thinking of the tough healing she had been in the midst of, and all the tough healing me and my family now had to do. 

My brother, parents and I all found out about her death at the same time. I was with them in my childhood home less than three hours later. I was there before the coroner. I don’t enjoy thinking about what it would have been like for my cosplay Copenhagen self to get that call, so far away, unable to see her sister’s body one last time, unable to grieve with her family without the pressure of an approaching return ticket. I realize a lot of people experience loss alone, from afar and without any ritual for themselves or the departed. Without the ability to truly say goodbye, death can feel even more like theft. I know that’s been the case since March of 2020 for so many and it cracks my entire heart into rough and jagged pieces.

Maybe getting kicked out was a good thing if only for that. Or, maybe, if the universe chose my cosplay alternative reality and I was still in Denmark, she would still be alive. Maybe we’re meant to be apart.

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You may feel I’m digressing from the topic of endings. Maybe I am. Making sense of the past is a divergent exercise and inherently connected to the present. I warned you: never neat, barely tidy. 

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I suppose many of you are wondering where I am. After leaving Denmark in 2017, I spent about a year bouncing around. I still wanted EU citizenship and wasn’t keen to return to the US. In September of 2018, I ended up in Dijon, France with a student visa and hopes to hop on a fast track to citizenship. As the months progressed, it became clear that I wasn’t all that happy in France and gambling five years on the possibility of a passport seemed a little foolish. The relentless hurdles of visas and forms and stamps and deadlines and fees no longer seemed worth it when I wasn’t surrounded by friends. I guess it was a true rebound affair. So, in November 2019, I accepted a position in Los Angeles and moved back to The States.

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Danes often asked me, “What do you miss the most about home?” My answer was, without fail, “The mountains.” You can see a ridge in the distance almost anywhere in California. I’ve always felt protected by them, those ‘purple mountain majesties,’ and I feel a resonant gratitude whenever I glimpse them. California is breathtakingly beautiful all the time — no matter what she’s wearing, even when she’s on fire. 

I’m still here in LA. Having moved four months before a pandemic made strangers the most dangerous thing in the world, you can imagine I’m in need of more friends. Drop me a line if you’re around.  I’m almost right back where I was when you met me, slightly different this time, but there once again: Broken up, and, hopefully, near love.

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The end. C’mon spring.

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~*Stay tuned for an announcement next week about the continuation of this newsletter.*~

This is the final volume of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It was edited by Ann Friedman. Start from the beginning here. 

Nereye, Nereya

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 11

I was in Istanbul getting into a cab when my phone buzzed. A new email from Danish immigration services announced a decision had been made on my case. My fingers typed in my password to the online portal with a quickness only awakened by desperation. Your request for a renewal of your green card has been denied. You must leave Denmark by 23:59 on 11 October 2017. It was September 11th. The cab I was in was already headed to the airport, but my ticket was for New Delhi not Copenhagen. I was supposed to go for 12 days.

I arrived at the airport in a complete daze. Was the letter even real? Did I read it correctly? Ambling to the ticket counter, I tried to weigh the financial and emotional costs of rerouting my trip. Should I forfeit seeing some beloved friends in a new country to return immediately and try to sort this all out? If I went to India, it would leave me a little over two weeks to tie up loose ends, explain the situation to everyone important in my life, say my goodbyes, try not to cry, contact lawyers, pack my things, try not to cry, retract an offer I had on buying an apartment, write letters of appeal, request letters speaking to my character and contributions, try not to cry, gather data for my case, decide where I would go while my case was pending. Plus all the other things I knew I didn’t know about yet. 

The airline attendants waved me up to the check-in desk and I went into autopilot. Handed over my passport. Gave my name. Lifted my luggage onto the scale. My body knew what to do but I could feel my eyes bulging, frenetic and teary with the absurd turn of my life’s stability in the last 40 minutes. It took a few seconds before I registered that the desk attendant was trying to interact with me. He was a series of spheres: a rotund man with big saucer-like brown eyes on a round face with protruding ears next to squishy apple cheeks that could challenge the cutest of toddlers. A living example of the circle technique used in figure drawing classes. He pointed at my passport and chuckled. He nudged his colleague, an incredibly slim man who was loading luggage onto the conveyor belt behind the desk, then pointed back at my passport and said something in Turkish. It was apparently hilarious, his circles would not stop bouncing with joy. The slim man laughed too, silently, his appreciation evidenced by the shake of his sinewy shoulders.

Circle Man turned back towards me and smiled, his brown saucer eyes twinkled while they looked into my confused and watery ones. “You see,” he explained, “your name in Turkish means ‘where are you going.’ And I have to ask you that question anyway. Nereye, Nereya? Nereye, Nereya?” He wheezed gaily before he collected himself, cleared his throat and professionally tapped my passport against the counter. But he was overtaken yet again, a smile bloomed wide across his perfectly round face while all the overlapping spheres of his person unexpectedly lunged forward. It was like watching a figure drawing become animated, suddenly looming large and perching itself atop the desk. His eyes opened wide and his smile pushed his apple cheeks to their limit while he leaned towards me and gleefully asked, “So, nereye, Nereya? Where are you going?!”

I had not the slightest clue.

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I decided to carry on to India. I figured the new precarity of my residency meant that I might not get the opportunity to travel there with this sort of ease again. I spent a few days in Bangalore with a dear, dear friend and her new husband. Then I traveled to Goa where I had rented a small one-room homestay on a lake in the monsoon offseason. (It was Olaulim Backyards. I cannot recommend it or the hosts Prikko and Savio enough.) I used the time to journal and think and journal and think. I kayaked in the mornings and sat in the evenings. I took outdoor showers and watched a donkey named Marta amble by. I was able to push away the panic and lean into productive plan-making. I sent one email to my parents and a few to a good friend who also happens to be a Danish immigration lawyer. The rest of the time I wandered as a stranger in a strange land and lived in the bliss of new experiences afforded by temporary homes. Through the clutter of my mind, I was able to cobble together a peace and a resolve. I thought in ellipses instead of full stops. I remembered that circumstances can feel horrible but they don’t have to be permanent. Chaos and calm govern one another just like faith and doubt. Two sides of the same coin. 

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Upon landing back in Denmark, I went directly to my bosses, generous souls who treated me like family, and explained that I could no longer work for them. This kicked off a 17-day period in which I referred to myself as the “Pied Piper of Despair.” I traipsed through the city spreading melancholy. Daytime was filled with meeting lawyers, calling the municipality and giving away belongings. Evening was a marathon of breaking the news to the people who were both source and witness to years of my memories. My best friend asked me what would be the hardest to leave. I answered that I loved watching my friends become parents. She then couldn’t look me in the eye as she told me she was pregnant. The next day, in another friend’s apartment, I hadn’t yet brought myself to share the news when she excused herself to the building’s basement to get her laundry. I burst into tears when her door closed at the realization that all these little everyday realities would no longer include me. How long would it take to reach laundry level with a new friend, in a new city? 

The pied piping that sticks with me most is having lunch with one of my very good pals in a traditional Danish pub: the walls were dark, the beers were cold, the patrons were shrouded in a cloud of smoke and the fish was, somehow, incredibly delicious. He asked numerous questions about the ruling and the appeal process until he suddenly apologized for his incessant inquiries. I put my hand over his. “It’s okay, Bo. It’s happening to you, too.”

That’s the strange thing about lives: we’re all at the center of each other’s. Sure, I’ve been telling my tale through this series, but it also belongs to my friends, family, colleagues and neighbors. And now it belongs to you. That short email shattered so many people’s hopes for the future, that of me and my friends for our lives together and now yours for the narrator of this story. It all suddenly dissipated into a bitter and rancorous air. 

I filed the appeal, but it was denied. The party in control of immigration had run on a distinctly anti-immigrant platform. I was recommended to leave the country and then re-enter on a new visa, but there was little guarantee that the six years I had lived in the country would be honored. Were I to return, it would be as if I had just arrived. I would have to start from scratch, but in the same place. It would take me another nine years—for a total of 15 spent in the country—to be eligible to even apply for citizenship. That was too much to bear. 

And so this particular chapter of my life came to an unexpected close. There is rarely a day I don’t think about it or what could have been. But to be an immigrant is to step willingly into an uncertain future, and that’s what I did. Then October 10, 2017, I headed to the airport and took another uncertain step, less willing this time and completely unsure of where my life would live. What can I say? I’m living up to my name it seems. Nereye, Nereya.

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This is the eleventh of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Three Cheers for Hospitality

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 10

Just north of the lakes in the center of Copenhagen, you’ll find a little street that’s much busier than it should be for its size. There, waiting at Ravnsborggade 17, is Kind of Blue, a bar that has more personality than most people. It’s innocuous from the outside. The windows are nearly always foggy and shrouding the inner goings-on, reserving them for the deserving folks who walk through the door. Inside, it’s a sea of cobalt blue peppered with pops of orange; walls adorned with rare photos of rock, jazz and soul greats from the 70s and 80s; navy blue candles atop cathedrals of wax drippings; bathrooms smaller than a matchbook; a sign that reads “Time Out (of mind)” placed on the abandoned bar when the keeper needs a smoke; the constant yet faint scent of sandalwood incense; a John Lennon quote quietly demanding you search the depths of your psyche; no menu to speak of; free cigarettes and wine gums placed on the bar to pay homage to a mother and father long passed; and the most soul-baring music coming through the speakers at any given moment. More than a bar, it’s a biography of the man who owns it. 

It welcomed me. He welcomed me. And so it was also there, in that place, that I discovered the love that blooms for immigrants in the hospitality industry.

The number one place to find people who hail from various countries and speak multiple languages is anywhere with a plethora of bottle openers or an alarming amount of knives. Bars and kitchens are welcoming arenas for those who might not be proficient in the national tongue but are fluent in the language of food and beverage. Hospitality is full of people who have traveled the world and are adept at building communities quickly. Folks who know how to extend visas or find the cheapest immigration lawyers. Folks who know what it means to celebrate a birthday in a city where you know no one. Folks who know what it’s like to get a phone call about a family emergency at least 32 hours away. Folks who know how to spot these sensations in others. 

When I started working amidst the sandalwood and candle wax at Kind of Blue, I gained access to this hospitality club. I was a bartender, so I was welcomed throughout Denmark by other bartenders, chefs, line cooks, busboys, servers and service managers. I was getting the nod. Many of them, equally far away from their families, stepped in to help me form a new one. Not as proxy siblings or cousins, no, it was something different. It was a family of recognition, of bearing witness. People I wasn’t supposed to know who  supported my existence in a place I wasn’t supposed to be. It was a defiant, lucky and pure sort of love. We made a pact via our alien status. We built houses of cards and called them foundations. We practiced the ultimate care in knowing the likelihood that we might leave each other but loving with all our might anyway. 

This is what it means to be in the presence of people who dedicate their days to service. Hours upon hours devoted to the pleasure and joy of strangers. Making sure any soul who walks through the door is welcomed, attended to, nourished, looked after, satiated, smiling. Sure, there are a lot of big personalities and a fair few hot heads, but each and every one of those people are greatly concerned about how guests feel when they’re under their care. It’s a nurturing, guardian-like business. Perhaps that is why immigrants make community so quickly. If I was in charge of a society, this is the only service I would make mandatory — it makes you more considerate. Hospitality is replete with people who endeavor to put the well-being of others in front of themselves.

When I started working at Kind of Blue (and later at a restaurant and bakery, at one time working all three while finishing my master’s degree: I do not recommend), I didn’t know I would gain this web of support. I thought I would gain a few friends, sure, maybe a couple dates here and there. But I didn’t foresee those blue walls being the catalyst for acts of care to solidify my presence in this foreign land. When my student visa was expiring and I didn’t have enough money to pay for my rent and the application extension fee, it was fellow bartenders who threw a party to raise money. Not only did I make enough to cover the fee, the party was so good the police came not once but twice — the second time essentially saying “close the windows, lower the music and turn down the weed.” Every holiday, I was practically accosted with invitations to partake in a friend-ebration with other foreigners to make sure I wasn’t alone. Or our Danish coworkers would make room for us at their families' tables. Any time someone wanted to celebrate something of their home — say a Lunar New Year feast — I’d be ready and willing to bring life to their traditions, too. We learned how to swear in each other’s languages while we made up our own.

After four years, I left the bar to work as a copywriter at an advertising agency. I was preparing for permanent residency, and a higher salary improved my profile. Just as I was applying to renew my green card before making the leap to residency, I was unexpectedly laid off. There was no way I would get approved if I wasn’t working. I texted a friend of mine, explaining the trouble of my situation. I told him how all I needed was to be working 10 hours a week, but I was worried about finding a position in time. I had barely sent the text before my phone rang. It was him, using his professional voice, offering me 10 hours a week at one of his businesses, effective immediately. It was located very close to Kind of Blue, the reason he and I met. I hung up the phone and cried grateful tears. I knew giving me those 10 hours meant he wasn’t paying himself for them. He with a toddler and a pregnant girlfriend. But he and the co-owner gave them to me anyway. Because they believed in the house of cards that was my foundation, they guarded it with what they could. They were immigrants, too.

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With all that said, I would like to thank those fellow hospitality workers I met who wholly believed in my house of cards as I did theirs. In no particular order: Claus, Amelia, Peter-Emil, Awinbeh, Uni, Carl, Max, Gwen, Jarek, Kamil, Le Petit, Alex/Sonny, Morten N., Ollie, Juan, Elena, Nando, Perth, Nis, Kristoffer, Lasse, Birk, Freja, Rhoda, Lesley, Rasmus K., Brandon, Terkel, Marie, Alex S., Malin, Morten B., Rasmus M., Smiley, Slider, Caroline, Nana, Aallaa, Frederik, Thomas, Johan S., Renata, Maj, Euri and so many others I’m sure I’ve overlooked while writing this.

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This is the tenth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

What I Think About When I Think About Immigrants

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 09

I’ve had a lot of difficulty writing as of late. Someone very close to me passed away. Close enough that people mistook us for one another on the street. Sounded-like-me close. Shared DNA kind of close. In the wake of it all, I want to share a brief thought.

The essays in this series have ruminated on a very practical, dictionary definition of immigration. Focused on moving and living in relation to physical countries across recognized borders and measurable distance. But there are other ways of moving life into unfamiliar territory, other types of migrants.

People who choose to go to therapy. People who confront their trauma. People who work to get clean. People who decide to get sober. People who go to rehab again and again and again, more scared and more embarrassed and more determined each time. People who come out to the world as something the world claims it can’t understand. People who leave a home that hurts them. People who venture inside their psyches even when it terrifies them. People who survive accidents or illnesses and must adjust to a body different from the one they inhabited before. People who find themselves living without the people they’ve built their lives around.

I think about those people. Though they may have never immigrated to a new country or even left their hometown, they know the rush, the fear, the unspoken urge to move towards an alien, uncertain life. For some, perhaps there was no urge to go but a sudden necessity to adapt — to learn a new normal. To navigate pathways their brain hasn’t had to orient itself in before. To attune to a language that forces habitual words out and ushers alternative realities in. Maybe you, dear reader, are one of those people.

I think about you. I’m thinking about you now. As an immigrant. A person who has permanently settled in a foreign way of life. A person who leaves what you know. I said in volume six of this series that “the word ‘immigrant’ should always be met with respect and the necessary implication of intelligence, resourcefulness and bravery.” When I say I think about you, this is what I mean. Intelligent. Resourceful. Brave. I hope you are finding solace in the new home you’ve built. And I also hope, more than anything, that you are safe.

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This is the ninth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

But There It Was

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 08

The first thing I saw when entering the exhibition was a gigantic photo of some two hundred or so Black children giving the nazi salute to the American flag. The wall label said the piece, entitled Pledge of Allegiance, was a photograph taken in 1899 in Virginia and the children were giving the “Bellamy Salute.” I took a deep breath, grateful I was alone to experience whatever I was about to experience, and proceeded forward. 

I had heard it was Arthur Jafa’s most expansive solo exhibition to date. I had heard it was incredibly resonant. Jafa, an artist who has called himself an “undertaker,” focuses on stark truths of the Black American experience. He’s known for his visual means of storytelling and the power of collage, rearranged contexts. I was surprised that his first retrospective would be in super white and quaint Humlebæk, Denmark; but there it was.

I spent three hours in Jafa’s Magnumb, the most powerful art exhibition I think I’ve ever witnessed. It was entirely about being Black in America, and it had a depth of nuance, of coherently shifting from the reverent to the vile, that I had never encountered before. I cried about 80% of the time—sometimes with silent, graceful, appreciative tears and sometimes with my shoulders shaking and thick saliva caught in my throat. I hadn’t considered that, surrounded by only non-Black faces, I would become part of the exhibition. 

In every room, sets of pale blue eyes ping-ponged from the walls to me, my reaction to the work becoming their experience of it. I went late morning on a weekday: prime time for the student, unemployed and retired crowd. A dear, dear friend of mine once told me that meeting me was possibly the first time his parents had ever touched a Black person. They were from the deep Danish countryside. I’ve never quite known if he was kidding, but I do know it’s plausible. How many of those parents were there that day? Their first personal interaction with a Black person framed by the simultaneous questioning and affirmation of Black humanity. Would they recount their museum visit and proudly mention that the Black woman next to them was shook to her core, that the work is really something to behold and they knew that to be true simply because of their proximity to my affected state? Would they use the word “authentic?” Or would they rather I wasn’t there at all?

An older couple—in their mid-70s, I’d say—entered the exhibit at the same time I did. We kept pace with each other throughout the works, and I started calling them ‘Jeppe’ and ‘Lærke’ in my head. Jeppe and Laerke are looking at me again I’d think. There was a video work in the show called “The White Album” (2018). It’s a representation of Black America, but through visuals of mostly white people — and it earned Jafa ‘best artist’ at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Slow, moving portraits of some of Jafa’s white friends are peppered in among recontextualized surveillance footage, social media rants and pop culture tidbits. Jeppe and Lærke sat through all of it, all 40 minutes of film. I am 99% positive they wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been there. At one point, Jeppe got up to leave and I looked at him, simply because my eye was drawn to the movement. But I had been crying, and so it was with crying eyes that I looked at him. He immediately sat down again, his eyes fixated on the screen while Lærke began to gasp and huff at the sentiments coming from the projector, indignant that people who look like her would say such things, be such a way. 

It’s a film that makes white people want to defend themselves. Audibly. In addition to Lærke’s huffing, other viewers cleared their throats and nervously shuffled their feet. The work is visceral and uncomfortable and unnervingly unhurried in its unfolding. It shows white people from a Black man’s perspective: wary until proven safe; sure some of the faces are friendly but all the friendly ones are silent.

Weaving through the rooms dotted with real-life friendly white faces, I couldn’t help but be both in awe of Jafa and upset with him for making me feel so incredibly lonely. For knowing that the few Black folks able to make the journey here would be, too. I became very self conscious, like I was a glass through which others were viewing the work. Another elaborate construction placed by Jafa to thin the barrier between the abstract and the real. A truly interactive, recontextualized work.

Perhaps that is what made the exhibition so impactful for me. I, like one of Jafa’s found video and audio snippets, was pulled out of the origins of my creation and plopped in another. I had remixed myself. Though I was still the same person, the new environment sometimes changed my meaning. But here, in this carved out Jafa-curated realm, the new environs morphed into the old. I was here but there. It made me feel wobbly.

Jafa’s work so painfully represented two things that I thought about constantly after having left America. On the one hand there was relief from the relentless presence of violence, hate and racism. On the other, there was the absence of the beauty of Black America, the awesome ease with which Black people spark communion, fluidity and serenity. His work juxtaposed my deepest fears and most elated joys with a dizzyingly potent precision. The art enthusiast in me was slack-jawed by his deft elegance at boring through the poles of the human condition. But the me in me, the sum and overlap of all my identities and experiences, was confused by so much of my psyche appearing in a place it was supposed to be rare. The weight of my former identity became heavy — and I suddenly realized I was still carrying it. 

Even now, after months of ruminating on the experience, I find it difficult to explain. I guess the simplest way to say it is that there was a sense of loneliness that I saw as mine and only mine to carry, driven by memories of my home and my place in it. Jafa stole that from me, that solitary weight of a former life. The full constellation of my past. It was all there, no longer secret and, because of the public display from a stranger, clearly not solitary. Yet no one was there who could actually carry the weight with me. Not a single pair of eyes in the museum met me with a sense of I know, but it was this museum that gave Jafa’s subject matter the respect of that much space. And so for those three hours, I was living in a vortex of limbo. A beacon of light in exactly the place I thought I’d disappear.

• • •

Here is a bootleg version of one of Jafa’s most famous works “Love is The Message, The Message is Death,” also featured in Magnumb.

This version doesn’t do it justice.

• • •

This is the eighth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

The Interstellar Effect

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 07

Let’s begin with me turning into a weeping heap.

There is a scene about halfway through Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in which Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, is viewing video messages left by his family. Why? Cooper (spoiler alert) is on a secret exploration mission that is taking him further into space than any Earthling has gone and safely returned. His time in space has felt like weeks or months to him, but decades have passed on Earth. Cooper’s eyes shimmer, squint, tear up, and erupt into full-blown sobs while watching messages from his kids. His teenage son is suddenly a married father of two and his daughter, aged 10 when he left, is 33 and still traumatized by him choosing a space adventure over being present in her life. She all but tells him so via a grainy screen, her tears betraying the coldness she wanted to convey. At the end of the 4-minute scene, McConaughey’s Cooper is a shaking, emotional wreck. 

And so was I. 

In the wee hours of that same day, some 16 hours prior to going to the movie theater, I had spoken with my mother via Skype. I called at 4am Copenhagen time so that I would reach her at 7pm California time—when her workday was over and a bit of relaxation had been had and maybe my Dad was home, too. I, like Cooper, was familiar with space-time negotiations. At this particular point, I hadn’t been home in almost three years. Hadn’t hugged my mother or smelled her in almost three years. I’d seen my father once because I was able to meet him on an international trip my mother couldn’t join, but I was talking to her and not to him on this Skype. It was she who asked me, through my own grainy screen, when are you coming back? and mused I wonder when I’ll see you again. At one point she said, I never thought I wouldn’t see you for this long. 

She didn’t guilt me the way Cooper’s daughter did—she has always been incredibly supportive of my decisions—but there was no denying that I’d chosen my own adventure over being in her life. And I, again like Cooper, had no idea when I’d be back. I didn’t have the money for a ticket home, and every opportunity to leave seemed to coincide with work picking up. When I watched that scene, replete with Danish subtitles underscoring my truth, I felt the weight of my absence for those I’d left. I recognized the pain and uncertainty I’d unearthed while doing something for my own benefit. I never thought that odd constellation of uncertainty, pain and benefit would prepare me for a pandemic six years in the future.

When Covid hit and those of us lucky enough to have safe homes were restricted to them, unsure of when we’d be able to be out and about freely, I had a faint sense of deja vu. When waiting for confirmation on an extension of my student visa, I was unable to leave the country and missed a friend’s wedding. It was in Sweden,  less than an hour away by train. After sending in my application for a green card, I had no clue when a decision would be made on my fate. A friend asked if I wanted to go to a concert that was two months away. I responded: Yes I would surely like to, but I have no idea if I’ll still live here. It was months and months of I don’t know. A seemingly endless period of it’s out of my control. A time when my mobility and freedom were completely subject to the wishes of an unseeable governmental entity. There was no one to get mad at, really. All I could do was wait and hope that soon, soon I’d be able to say yes to a planned concert and move freely through the world, unafraid of getting stuck somewhere I wasn’t trying to be. 

My green card approval took about seven months (a rather quick turnaround, as many other countries can take well over a year). The entire time was a high-stress, no-say-in-my-own-life rollercoaster. I could only tell myself that this difficult period was in service to something better on the other side. I had to think that the anxiety and struggle was an investment in a safer, improved future. That the short-term pain was worth the long-term benefit.

It surprised me to rediscover and flex these muscles in the time of Covid. I’d learned that circumstance is not something we create for ourselves, but simply something we find ourselves in. I had figured out how to develop a reserve of understanding and patience for living through amorphous, vague conditions of being. I had already lived with the knowledge that a sense of autonomy is not always included in a sense of safety. Sometimes we’re strapped into a rocketship, isolated from the ones we love, crying into screens, feeling foreign in our own minds and unsure of when we can truly be together again—but we do it because we have to. Because we feel deep, deep in our intuition that it is necessary, that it is a strategic move for an improved tomorrow, that there is a reward for this pain. We sob now to breathe freely later, envisioning the day we invite our loved ones into our homes and we both feel welcome there.

• • •

This is the seventh of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Too Many Birds

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 06

I had just moved in with a good friend to her snug Nørrebro neighborhood apartment when Syria imploded on itself. It was novel for me to hear about a humanitarian emergency through a Danish lens. In the U.S., there is a perpetual feeling of things happening “over there,” and the immediacy of a situation is primarily about our opinion of it. The relative proximity of the Middle East made everything seem that much more urgent, while the tone of Danish news made the predicament and its victims seem that much more encroaching. I knew many of those fleeing Syria were arriving to their new countries of residence (or place for being “processed”) by plane: first, business and economy class. Some were coming by car, bus, boat or maybe even train. But then there were those who weren’t. The ones who had only their limbs, their flesh and their health as their vehicle; determination their only fuel.

I often imagined a father. A proud father who was happy to meet his wife and raise his family on the same soil and streets that he roamed as a boy. I pictured his face solemn with resolve, his eyes steadily panning a modest home as he weighs the consequences of staying one more day. I could hear him telling his family to pack what they can carry, fit it in one bag. I could see them leaving on foot, a discreet caravan of incremental height, slowly putting one foot in front of the other. The attitude of reception at their destination country of little concern; it is safer than where they are coming from. No newspaper headline or political pundit could dissuade them, because it is not up for debate. My mind’s eye saw them persevere, knowing that they needed to walk and walk and walk in order to eventually rest.

* * *

My own immigration tale is anchored by personal choice and desire. Any life adjustments, cultural difficulties, linguistic trials or emotional missteps were set in motion by *raises own hand* me. But as I’ve said before, “there are as many reasons for and approaches to becoming an immigrant as there are ways to make a sandwich.” Some of those approaches and reasons are synonymous with pain, loss and injustice.

Though the news of displaced people has never slowed in this world, it has certainly been at the forefront of my current news cycle. Afghanistan. Haiti. The thousands and millions of people who terribly want and need to leave their country. Yet, with equal fervor, those same thousands and millions desperately wish to stay. Or perhaps to time travel, backwards to when they felt their country was truly theirs. Or forwards, to a world that is more at peace and settled within its multitudes. A future in which my country has grown out of its destructive hedonistic rebel phase and is quietly radical. By this I mean their wish to stay in the country they know in their hearts as opposed to the one the world offers now.

As the Afghan realities were unfolding at the end of August, I was reminded of that Syrian father I had often imagined. I thought of him again when my screens were flooded with images of vulnerable Haitians being corralled and whipped in Texas. I do not wish to conflate these countries and conflicts, but they share an unavoidable truth: people needed to get out—and quick. Neither by their own choice nor borne from any desire, but based on the survival instincts that have kept our species alive and evolving for millenia. They had to leave simply for the fact that they are human and, for many, to stay would have been relegating themselves to less than such. 

The word “immigrant” should always be met with respect and the necessary implication of intelligence, resourcefulness and bravery. Refugees are often not even considered immigrants, the popular narrative robbing them of the full breadth and depth of their humanity. I began this series intending to focus on an immigrant narrative not centered around tragedy. Yet I find myself writing this very volume all about disaster. I suppose I’m pulled to violate my own rule because misfortune is frequently rearing its head, and we have an opportunity to exercise viewing these events as more dimensional. To more wholly regard those who tragedy tosses about in its wake. 

* * *

There is a song about hardship I listen to often. It’s by Bill Callahan, an artist I consider to be one of the most profound songwriters (though, to quote Callahan himself, mountains don’t need my accolades). The song is called “Too Many Birds.” It’s a song about fatigue, resolve, safety. I’ve always felt it to be an immigrant’s song. Not an elegy, but a tribute.

Too many birds in one tree

Too many birds in one tree

And the sky is full of black and screaming leaves

The sky is full of black and screaming

And one more bird

Then one more bird

And one last bird

And another

One last black bird without a place to land

One last black bird without a place to be

Turns around in hopes to find the place it last knew rest

Oh black bird, over black rain burn

This is not where you last knew rest

You fly all night to sleep on stone

The heartless rest that in the morn, we'll be gone

You fly all night to sleep on stone

To return to the tree with too many birds

Too many birds

Too many birds

The close of the song has Callahan revealing a single sentiment one word at a time. It’s a technique that never fails to make my heart quicken in anticipation, no matter the hundreds of times I’ve heard it. It’s a staccato build of a single sentence, a series of emotionally charged thoughts that, when examined individually, aren’t thoughts at all but pleas. Each line a plea unto itself, an appeal to an unseeable power, a petition for a vague possibility. He leads with his patient baritone, a discreet caravan of incremental thoughts, slowly putting one word after the others. Reminiscent of the steps my imagined family takes toward an unknown new home, each line stacks the burden of its unsaid meaning upon the narrow shoulders of the one preceding it. Never reaching a proper conclusion, but ending all the same. 

If

If you

If you could

If you could only

If you could only stop

If you could only stop your

If you could only stop your heart

If you could only stop your heart beat

If you could only stop your heart beat for

If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart

If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat

I became enamored with this song after moving to Copenhagen. When I was exhausted or felt misunderstood, I sympathized with the black birds he sings of. I identified with them. Perhaps I still do: a creature prone to flight. I’ve been part of Callahan’s “black and screaming,” an active player in an unrooted moving mass looking for a safe place to land. But I did land, I’m in a tree or maybe on a fence. I’ve been preening my feathers, calmly discussing the hardships of the flight, showing my battle scars in a way that suggests the fight is over. Meanwhile there are countless other birds filling the sky and circling overhead, veering in all sorts of directions, searching for rest and refuge. The mark of a refugee being a desperate seeker of safe shelter. It’s not the fault of the bird that the bough is only so big. It’s not the fault of the bough that the birds are so tired. 

• • •

This is the sixth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Halfrican American

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 05

You know, it’s funny: It wasn’t until I left America that people started considering me unquestionably American. 

Thanks to the combination of my name and skin color (Twix bar exact match), I’ve been used to giving explanations and validation of my belonging in my home country since I was young. I was Black and American, in that order.

That all changed when I left. In Denmark—also during stints in the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and South Africa—I was American first, Black second. When people spoke to me, they heard an American speaking. No one commented on me being articulate in English. I was more often identified as the American friend than the Black friend. It seems I only had to leave the country to taste the ideal that had been paraded in front of me all my life: that to be a citizen of America is to be regarded as a contributor to and representative of American culture. That all people can be American, and Americans can be all people. In the U.S., this ideal lives perpetually just around the corner of the next decade. Overseas, I found myself living it for the first time. The shift was a bit jarring. I didn’t know what to do with it—the ease of being accepted and recognized as the American I am. 

It was a contrast that was difficult to acclimate to in the Obama years, but reached true cognitive dissonance in the Trump ones. In Europe, I was asked to explain the cause of his election, the reasoning behind his travel ban or the economic priorities of the American midwest. I was asked to explain these things as an American. Meanwhile, back home, my Americanness was on trial. My name is cause for pause at the U.S. border, too many vowels to be trustworthy. It carries in it the legacies of the Luo people of Kenya, my father’s tribe and his homeland—now dubbed a “shithole country.” Yet my European counterparts saw me as a direct line to the American psyche. If this is what you are, tell me how this works. A fair amount of mental gymnastics was necessary for me to steer my way through their expectations while honoring my own truth. They recognized me as an American, which ushered in an unexpected personal victory. If America is the land of dreams, it felt as if my reverie was finally becoming three-dimensional—at the same time it was clearer than ever that this country would never choose me as its poster girl. I felt grateful and gaslit at the same time. I was American, finally, but not American enough to relay what America is.

While I am Black and I am American, I don’t feel like a Black American or an African American. I am, as I saw on some random guy’s Instagram bio circa 2017: Halfrican American. Though the term has been bopping around the digital ether for a while, it was my first encounter and the term felt right. The most succinct summary of my ethnic identity. My realities in America were unlike those of many other Blacks. My name tells a story very different than that of a Shawn Carter or a Michael Jordan; an Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin or a Latasha Harlins. The power and beauty in my name is rooted in its origin. The power and beauty in theirs is rooted in its resilience—in its persistent defiance in continuing to exist. The way I navigate this country with my heritage is naturally different from other Black Americans. 

I know what it means to be a Black person in America. I wear the mask. I’ve been taught—directly and indirectly—to maneuver with the fear and vulnerability necessary in the most innocent of interactions. I know the wellspring of safety that comes from a deep belly laugh shared between brown faces, the care that emanates from the first harmonized notes of Solange’s A Seat at the Table. I, however, don’t know what it means to carry the legacy of America on my shoulders, to hear the echoes of slavery as I take an afternoon walk. Other people might think I do, given my Twix bar hue, but I don’t. I remember learning about the dark corners of U.S. history as a child and thinking to myself this is such a horrible thing to happen to these people and looking up only to find my young classmates’ eyes on me, their minds clearly concluding this is such a horrible thing to happen to you.

The Black population in America has a peculiar disposition: there are those whose lineage goes as deep as the United States itself. Then there are those, like mine, whose lineage mostly coincides with the liberation of a colonized African or Caribbean country between the 1950s and -80s. Most other immigrant groups (Eurocentric included), have a timeframe they can trace the immigration onset of a certain peoples to. For Black Americans, it’s layered. We’re a minority group that doesn’t automatically have a shared history; there’s a fissure, however slight, somewhere down the line. 

I think this is why being recognized as an American was such a relief to me. Danish strangers and random barstool company gave me a truth I never claimed on my own. My calculations as to my place and role within society were rendered useless in my day-to-day Copenhagen life. There was no need to add the qualifiers I was so accustomed to. I was American and, in the foreign understanding, that already encapsulated my color, mixed heritage and heavily-voweled name. They had faith in that American ideal we try to tell ourselves of cultural birthright.

Where are you from? I’m from California but my father is from Kenya. 
Okay, so you’re American? Yes, yes I guess I am. 

• • •

This is the fifth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Your Papers Have No Personality

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 04

For those who have never done it before, the process of applying to stay in another country for years (or forever) is a pile of dry, dry paperwork. Scaly, crumbly, almost dusty paperwork. 

Unless you are uber well-connected or famous, this process will be trying. Your personality means nothing. Your greatest achievements mean nothing. Your impact on the existing citizens of the country, no matter how much they like your dinner company, means nothing. With many countries going digital, you can’t even zhuzh up your documents with impressive handwriting.

Aside from applying for asylum or family reunification (which is very, VERY different), in most cases you simply have to prove that you will work X amount of hours to earn X amount of pay in an accepted field—and promise to never, ever get arrested or try not to ask for governmental assistance. In other cases, you may be in love and have someone who loves you back and is willing to sign for it. Good for you. You might still have to prove you will work X amount of hours to earn X amount of money in an accepted field, and then also be challenged as to the validity of your relationship and perhaps your naturalized partner’s satisfaction with you in bed (Kidding! But am I?).

I think it’s high time for an alternative application. The kind of paperwork that will help the immigration officials better assess an applicant’s true viability as a resident of their country. I’ve drafted a version using one of my favorite fictional places, Stankonia (please don’t sue me, Outkast). Here’s how it could go:

1. In the event of a small or large catastrophe, provide the names of between three and 42 citizens of Stankonia who you can contact for assistance. You can use the back of this page or send an attachment.

   • Can any or all of the names listed also contact you in the event of a small or large catastrophe? Yes/No/Some

2. How many Stankonians would be willing to help pay your rent or taxes should you be unable? __________________

   • How many conversations would it take to convince them to pay (on average)?__________________

3. If you won our lottery, how much would you give to Stankonian organizations (in percentage)? __________________

4. Do you know how to conduct yourself in a post office? Y/N

   • If yes, can you describe the paperwork required to mail a package to your country of origin?

   • If no, are you willing to learn?

5. Do you know how to conduct yourself in a grocery store? Y/N

   • If yes, please outline your strategy for not stalling the line at the register or for getting an employee’s attention.

   • If no, are you willing to learn?

6. Do you enjoy AT LEAST TWO of our holidays/traditions that seem absolutely absurd to anyone outside Stankonia? Please list them in order of affection.

   • Will you celebrate these holidays with visible joy and exuberance?

7. How much debt are you comfortable incurring? (Hint: Best to write “None at all”) __________________

8. Define ‘allegiance’: 

9. Are you prepared to have your accent in both your native tongue and Stankonian fluctuate between ridiculous and seemingly faked? Y/N

10. Name the television show that aired between 1960-1980 that everyone says is “how to understand Stankonia”:

    • Have you watched it in its entirety? Y/N

11. Are you willing to follow the subtle but consequential updates to our immigration policies that will change with every governmental shift for the rest of your life and/or until you apply for citizenship? Y/N

    • Are you willing to do this even if we communicate these updates poorly?

12. On a scale of 1 - 10, how resourceful are you? 1 being “I’ve never heard of this word” and 10 being “I’m an immigrant.”

• • •

This is the fourth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Pledge of Allegiance

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 03

I had just ended a conversation with someone I cared for deeply, and my mind was reeling. They were in a bad way and called to let me know. We exchanged solemn but heartfelt farewells, both hoping the intent and care would traverse the multiple time zones between us. As my laptop clicked shut, the room felt claustrophobic. So I threw on a coat, purposefully left my phone on the bed, grabbed my keys, and headed out to the Copenhagen canal. I figured my thoughts would fare better where they could grow and dissipate into the brisk air of my adopted city. There was a breeze, gentle on my face when I opened the door.

I had been walking for all of three minutes when a Fiat full of teenage boys drove past pointing at me, their pubescent voices blending together to shout one bold and clear “Neger!” The n-word in Danish. A large stone suddenly formed in the center of my chest. My hope for consolation from the phone call dissipated along with the echo of the ‘r’ trailing from their window. 

I had the sickening sense of being betrayed. Not by the stupid boys in the car or by the persistent unfairness of the world. But by Copenhagen. By Denmark. I still haven’t quite forgiven it for that night. For the first time, my respect for my new home was unrequited. Our relationship was not equal, and the only one who would be making compromises was me. I had pledged my allegiance to the country, but it had pledged nothing to me but an open door on the condition of having the right paperwork. Its allegiance was merely alleged. 

My expectation of reciprocation was naive — or at least misunderstood. This discrepancy is the essence of allegiance. Its foundation is a completely imbalanced relationship. One party does absolutely nothing, and the other party must be prepared to give its entire being in support of the other for the possibility of safety. Thinking about it now, perhaps the demand for civil rights should be viewed as a citizen’s request for the country’s allegiance in return. 

Countries aren’t just land masses with borders and applied social systems. They are sites for shared historical narrative and understanding. More than lines on a human-made map, countries are more like characters with values, personalities and habits. Denmark, to me, had been rugged and sensitive — not the coolest guy at the party, but the one who knew the closest open grocery store and would come back to help clean in the morning. We personify our places. We imbue them with depth and sentience. We pretend like they can talk back. We give them attitudes and morals. The spirit of a country exists, though it cannot be neatly packaged and is often difficult to see. When I moved to Denmark, it was like courting a majestic mountain, but also seeing that mountain as my new mute best friend. When my silent-best-pal-of-a-mountain found a way to call me the n-word, I started to question the relationship.

Mountain courtship isn’t new to me. I spent my youth pledging allegiance to the US. Every school morning without fail I would recite I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. It’s so ingrained that it’s impossible for me to read that as a single, smooth sentence and not in the children’s-choir staccato. I was steeped in the idea that devotion to a country would result in its respect and protection. I understood, from a young age, that I had to show my hand first, but I would be rewarded for my support. My honorable action toward a country would have equally honorable consequences for me. But for all my daily declarations of allegiance, I have never felt America to be loyal to me in the same way. Sometimes I didn’t even feel that it claimed me. As James Baldwin famously said, “the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” That flag has afforded me many luxuries in life (an American passport is elite global currency), but none of them have equated to feeling undoubtedly wrapped in its protection or held in its esteem. I kept offering my allegiance in the hopes that it would one day offer some back. The possibility was enough to fuel my fidelity fire. Then I left, disheartened but still hopeful.

When I moved, I carried the righteousness of loyalty with me, anyway. Though Denmark, like most countries, has no oft-recited pledge of allegiance (only a one-time oath made upon citizenship), residents are still expected to display their fidelity through actions and behavior. Our agreement was unspoken but almost ceaselessly demonstrated. I felt obliged to the Danish people I’d met, to the simple and sudden Danish wildlife, to the calmness that Denmark grew within me. I was willing to enter a contract with the government in order for me to engage with those things. But my allegiance was never an obligation, it was a choice based on merit and respect. Something I truly thought was reciprocated though hard-earned. 

I’ve now been called the n-word more times in Denmark than I have in the US. Always intentionally and degradingly. When Denmark highlights my racial difference with insults, I experience it as a violation of my expectations. The slurs undermine my choice to move there and mock my chosen obligation. The disregard of my offered fidelity makes me feel foolish and tricked. Dispensable. What did it mean that night when I searched for solace in a place I assumed would care for me because of the sacrifices I had made for it? What did it mean when that place took careful and exact aim at my vulnerability? What does it mean for any of us to enter into relationships with countries — whether by birth or by choice — to which we pledge our everything and hope for just a little allegiance in return?

• • •

This is the third of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Who's Afraid of the Post Office?

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 02

I felt my hands get clammy as soon as I left my apartment, the package tucked neatly under my arm. Through numerous trials and errors, I’d learned how to carry the box just so to allow my palms access to my jeans for the needed periodical dry-off. This happened every single time. Hours before I’d depart, my heartbeat would quicken while my pride would fire off a foreboding, anxiety-laced fear to my brain. It used to be just an errand, an easy stop on the way home. It never used to induce this silent, furtive terror. It, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, is the post office.  

Back home in California, the post office and I understood each other. In fact, the worst thing about it was the inconvenient operating hours. All that changed with my legal place of residence. When it became the posthus (or la poste during a year in France) instead of the post office. That’s when anything involving sending and receiving mail became a light form of psychological torture.

That might seem like hyperbole, but we tend to skew reality when fear is involved. Walking with my packages to the simple building  — sometimes tucked away in a deceptively friendly corner of an innocuous grocery store — the disquiet of my mind grew from a low rumble to a steady buzz trailed by the mocking echo of my pending ineptitude. I knew one of two things would occur: 1) I would make a mistake or 2) I would have to ask for help. Neither of these things is usually an issue for me, but in this foreign setting, it gets complicated. If there is one thing the post office means, it’s “I live here.” As an immigrant, if there is one thing I’m trying to prove day in and day out to both passers-by and myself, it’s “I live here.”

Perhaps you’re thinking, “It’s just the mail.” But it is exactly the perceived simplicity that tormented me. Other areas that commonly conjure fear are actually much more welcoming to strangers. A train station, for instance, is by its very nature well-versed in interactions with outsiders — it has maps, check-in points, prepared staff, and often directions in multiple languages with imagery. For fellow travelers, an anxious foreigner with a furrowed brow can represent a straight shot to a good deed. Police stations and immigration offices are like that as well. They’re imposing, yes, but accessible and serve to outline rules for the uninitiated or unaware.

A post office, by contrast, is insular. It’s like a modern home TV setup — everyone has one and they all do the same thing, but if your neighbor came over, you’d likely have to instruct them as to the specific order of buttons to press to get a picture. Oh, they want sound, too? The lesson might now extend to additional remotes. The way countries handle their mail is similar. Post offices look alike in the macro view, but there are micro internal differences that can throw the whole thing off. A form to fill out here that isn’t required there, for instance, can make you spend five minutes feeling dumb while looking for a piece of paper that doesn’t exist. Or a box that you definitely need to check there isn’t required here, and now you’re worried that your father will have to spend $200 to accept some trash Christmas novelty socks. Or the ins and outs of what constitutes “domestic” when living in the international EU. The postal service may accommodate goods from all over the world, but not people. Even the procedure to take a number to be served in Denmark features a taunting, triangular little piece of paper sticking out from a simple machine like the tongue of a schoolyard bully. It’s unforgiving.

The post office, that federal hostel for mail, became a battleground for my own internal validation. That’s the honest truth. It was the arena in which I could dispel the doubt I feared in others. Here, I could quell any notions of my being an imposter. I could display my adaptive capability with an ease so great it would go unnoticed. And yet, in this realm of redemptive possibility, I failed. I constantly felt ill-prepared and unconfident — suddenly bereft of the language needed to explain my needs clearly and succinctly.  I couldn’t serve as my own resource. How pathetic to not even be able to get a piece of mail from here to there! The thought of not being able to properly perform such a basic task made me feel wobbly inside. Insecure in my footing. An interloper extraordinaire. I hated this feeling because I knew it was, in some ways, true. A disappointing reminder that I could find ways to fit in, but I didn’t belong. 

Perhaps you’re wondering why I didn’t just ask for assistance from people who already knew I was foreign. It’s a good question, a logical question. I did start asking friends if they needed to go to the post office, then offer to accompany them. This improved things, but for some inexplicable and asinine reason (read: pride), it felt like cheating. Even thinking about seeking help was in direct opposition to my goal of proving my belonging. I would rather stand there alone for extended periods of time, fooling myself into thinking I was unnoticed, trying to figure it all out from afar using my powers of observation and telescopic eavesdropping. It rarely worked. Anxiety would creep in and proclaim that I would never truly be home in this place, that I was foolish for trying, and that everyone around me could clearly see now that I didn’t “have what it takes.” I imagined them all in a group text with the Minister of Immigration, the emojis surely not favorable. 💩 👾

Standing there, disrupting the natural order of their post office, I would become extremely aware of the confusion I caused both patrons and staff. I think of it often when I see a group violating the expected etiquette at a restaurant or someone queuing improperly at the grocery store. I wonder if they have an accent and if they hesitate to speak because it would reveal their otherness. I wonder if my offering to help will be a relief or a catalyst for an internal tornado. I wonder how many other people think they must simply be stupid, as I know many people thought I was stupid. They failed to register my behavior as my stubborn dedication to learning on my own. I wonder if you, dear reader, think this as well when you see an adult awkwardly taking up space and poorly masking their confusion in a place you consider to be habitual. I wonder what you’ll think next time.

In writing this, I’m reminded of a memory. I honestly had forgotten it until just now. In 2017, I found myself in Goa and an older Indian gentleman came up to me off the bench where he was sitting surrounded by his belongings. He had just witnessed two different sets of East Asian tourists ask to take photos with me because I was Black. We laughed about it and chatted for a while before he asked where I lived. “Denmark,” I told him. “Ah! I know only one Danish word: frimærke,” he said. Stamp. I asked him why he knew such a random word. “I met a Danish man traveling many years ago,” he replied. “I asked him for a stamp so I could write him a letter. Then I asked him how to say it. I’ve always found foreign people take me more seriously when I know the word for stamp.”

• • •

This is the second of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. Read the first installment below and sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.

Broken Up

ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 01

In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

- James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name”

I decided on the breakup when I realized I was falling in love. Perhaps I was primed for a new beginning because it was late January, that time of year when resolutions are still fresh. But really, I’d been wrestling with the idea for quite some time. I had lived in Copenhagen for two and a half years, and my student visa was up. I knew this day would come. I had to either go back to the States or commit to a new way of life in Denmark. Break up with my old home or end the infatuation with my new one. It was an extremely difficult decision, and I made it easily. 

I moved to Denmark in 2011 for curiosity and practicality. Living abroad sounded fun, sure, but I was also granted a full tuition waiver for a master’s degree. Naturally, my mama having raised no fool, I went. It wasn’t just the place and the friends and the new way of life I was enamored with — it was also myself. I was solely responsible for navigating this new territory. I was building a life with absolutely nothing grandfathered in (a phrase which, as a Black American, carries much burdensome weight). I was confidently ordering my slices of carrot cake in a new language (gulerodskage, tak), cultivating an organic and alternate sense of humor, rereading American literature from a perspective only gained by distance. I was carefree. I recall responding to an American friend’s inquiry of how is it? with “I’m living the dream and hoping nobody finds out.” 

I’m an educated, upper-middle-class, single woman from an industrialized country. Which is to say, not the type expected to leave. I am also the daughter of a Kenyan immigrant (funnily enough, my father became a US citizen while I was in Denmark waiting for confirmation of my green card). I am the story that many believe to be the goal of both immigration and migration. I have enough agency to leave simply because I can, simply because I want to, with “me” at the center of all my decisions.

Let me make one thing clear that the headlines don’t: immigration is as diverse as immigrants. It all depends on who you are, where you’re going, where you’re leaving, who you’re going with, and what time in your life (or time in world history) the whole jig is going down. There are as many reasons for and approaches to becoming an immigrant as there are ways to make a sandwich. But at the center of every individual experience is one thing: belief. A belief in something better — maybe just a little better, maybe a whole lot. Maybe it’s not a belief strictly for themselves but for their family or unborn children. A belief so enticing it usurps the others that came before it. A belief that the believer, who is positioned unequivocally at its core, feels a bit guilty to hold — though not enough to abandon it. Once I tasted being carefree, I believed in it. And, what’s more, I believed I deserved it. 

So, tinged with guilt, I followed my fluttering heart.

My choice to go meant embarking on an adventure with a distant end date. My choice to stay was something else entirely. The permanence made my priorities extremely public. In staying I said no to my parents’ expectation of experiencing me become an adult, to their ability to attend a lecture I was giving, or to any in-person conversations that underscored the shift from my dependency on them to the realm of reciprocated respect. No to meeting any of my siblings’ new friends casually at a neighborhood bar. No to a shared holiday calendar, to the imperial system, to familiar cultural norms, to watching friends from my youth fall in love and get married. I said no to all of that and yes to a question mark covered in European Union red tape because, for all the terrifying mystique of the question mark, I liked me better there.

Then Michel Brown happened. And Eric Garner happened. And Tamir Rice happened. On December 8, 2014, almost a year after my decision to stay and in the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests following the acquittal of the police officer who killed Eric Garner, I made a Facebook post that began, “There is a strong guilt in being so far removed from the events that are rocking the soil that cultivated my person.” The post went on about music, because art is how I process, and I linked to this song, which is still, I think, one of the saddest, most beautiful songs ever written. I wrote that post and listened to that song and wondered how much more often my exiled Black face may have recently smiled than all those protesting for their right to. I thought myself perhaps undeserving of being carefree because I hadn’t fought for it in a way that was so visible.

Still, I stayed. Uneasy but unharmed. My body feeling no immediate threat — but also no immediate sense of community. Devoid of anyone in my vicinity who could truly understand the pain of that song or the ripples of the headlines. Knowing one reality while living in another, I was alone in the safe haven I’d built. 

This is the decision that my immigration required — that many migrations require. To be both and neither. To be alone but safe. To be carefree and guilt-ridden. To be broken up and in love.

• • •

This is the first of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. Subscribe to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox below. Feel free to say hello or share your thoughts or own immigration experiences by emailing me at hello@nereyaotieno.com.