Memory in Diaspora

The pieces that follow are my interpretation of the voices of two women (one fictional, one real) of Caribbean descent who, in response to certain traumatic incidents, are forced to confront their understandings of home. I chose to write from the perspective of these particular characters because their experiences mirror some of my own. My parents’ ethnic background (and my birthplace) is Nigeria. I came to Canada the year I turned seven, almost 15 years ago. While I have lived in Canada for most of my life, I still grapple with whether or not I consider it home. For the most part, this uncertainty has been driven by my experiences with various identity-based questions and the discourses that surround them. For example, what it means to be (perceived) Canadian vs. an immigrant, or what it means to be black vs. African (Nigerian). Questions such as “Where are you really from?” always remind me that “foreign” is a presumption that precedes me. Conversely, nativity has been ascribed to the White European population in a way that systematically marginalizes the history and perpetuates the violent erasure of Indigenous communities, a practice that persists to this day. I do not consider Canada my place of origin—a sentiment shared by many Canadians—yet those with a perceived sense of belonging have vastly different experiences from those who do not. I am fortunate enough to have been raised learning about and continuously engaging with my culture, but even that has had its limits. There is a certain tension, what I would call a double-sided alienation, that often comes with being a first-generation immigrant, particularly of a racialized background. For me, that means not feeling either Nigerian or Canadian“enough,” yet being significantly shaped and socialized by both societies. This is a tension I recognized and wanted to highlight in the stories of the two women mentioned above. Moreover, the continuity between my story and (my representation of) their stories is signified by the framework of memory I adopted in the pieces (i.e., “I had forgotten/I remember”), which is from an earlier poem I wrote about my own experience coming to terms with some of the ways my identity changed after moving to Canada.