I dey come

There are many beginnings to this story of becoming, or perhaps many becomings in this story of beginnings.

There is a moment that occurred in the summer of 2011 that has never slipped my mind. In fact, it has held fast to the deepest crevices in my memory.

I was born on a Spring Wednesday in 1997. Many things become in springtime. This was a significant becoming for me, as birth is for most people. Becoming an embodied spirit by the miracle of birth and, in my case, a little bit of help from science. Becoming a sister and a daughter by virtue of the love of those who welcomed me to this world. Becoming a United States citizen by statute of the law of the land. Becoming a Black girl in the US, with all of its accompanying weight, by virtue of policy and history, and simple reality.

On a Spring day in 2005, I abruptly became a huérfana de padre. The Spanish language uses the word for orphan, huérfano, even for the loss of one parent, and I appreciate that. My orfandad was obviously life-shifting. In hindsight, it was around this time that I realized life required becoming, an active search and reckoning as opposed to blissful, passive being.

My first migration transformed me in ways I could not have imagined at the time and in ways I am still reckoning with to this day. This was in the Fall of 2016, fitting I guess, as I changed along with the leaves. I moved to the Caribbean and embarked on a journey that was and has been both shorter and longer than I could have possibly imagined. It was there that I found self and began to become me.

These becomings and beginnings were somewhat linear. Leading me down a trajectory on which I continue to advance. But the Summer of 2011 was the beginning of a somewhat circular becoming. A moment in time from which I’ve long since left yet continue to return to.

As we neared the entrance to our compound, my beloved uncle was on his way out. We stopped, and asked, “Where are you going?” “I dey come,” he said nonchalantly with a wave.

As a diasporan, oftentimes two truths cohabitate a single moment. “I dey come.” I understood the intended sentiment: I’ll be right back. But I also remember thinking, you say you’re coming but it kinda looks like you’re going.

Surely enough, he was back within the hour and I spent a few more days under his loving gaze before returning across the Atlantic. I haven’t seen my beloved uncle since then, and I won’t until the next life, the transition to which will be another all-important beginning and becoming.

My uncle’s death was a circular becoming in that it began the return to my orfandad. When I heard the news, I immediately crumbled under the gravity of what I had lost. Not only was he my sweet uncle whose deep bass voice always put a smile on my face, he also seemed my last human connection to my father and my father’s home, to my home.

My uncle’s death was a circular becoming in that it began my return to my search for self. Who am I without these connections he singlehandedly maintained?

There are many beginnings to my story of becoming, and many becomings in my story of beginnings.

But I often return to the moment when I was looking at his face and hearing his voice: “I dey come.” The words ring true.

There are many beginnings to my story of becoming, but, perhaps most importantly, there is no end to my becoming.

Signed,

N.A.

The Ties that Uplift

.. this one is dedicated to my community, you know who you are, happy three years of Signed, N.A.! ..

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli is a masterful portrayal of community; an exploration of loneliness, community, and the ties that not only bind, but uplift.

The tale is centered around Aṅụrị, a twenty-something who has been severally disappointed by those biologically predisposed to love and protect her most. On the one hand, a result of simple, unadorned tragedy, on the other, an ambivalence so intense it reeks of malice, but is really just grief in pernicious disguise. Aṅụrị is the Igbo word for happiness, a name bestowed on this protagonist with all the best intent as the very fact of her existence is a miracle, but which the universe seems to interpret as a summons to the exercise of irony.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances that shadow Aṅụrị’s beginnings with the antithesis of her name, a hodgepodge of loved ones encircle and bolster Aṅụrị with an unmatched determination to see to her triumph. Even while battling extremely conspicuous yet illusively indescribable hardships, working through anxiety and addiction, and being weighed down by grief and sorrow, Aṅụrị’s journey is undeniable proof of the power of community. Loving grandparents who always provide refuge at a moments notice; an aunt with an unmatched ability to simultaneously exude annoyance, sarcasm, and maternal comfort; friends who are endearingly omnipresent; and a new somebody who might actually be willing to endure increasing levels of weirdness. Aṅụrị’s tribulations, while novel and niche, stand no chance against the bulwark of loving humans erected around her.

I devoured this enthralling book as my year of travels nears a close, and I found myself reflecting on the community I have built or reconnected with as I’ve bounced around the world. I made new friends in Mexico City and Bogotá, I rekindled with old ones in Toronto and Panama City, I met up with travel buddies in Cartagena and Salvador, and I was welcomed with warm hugs and tea time every time I returned to DC. Along this sojourn, my community has shown up for me in too many ways to describe, manifesting itself in people and places I never expected.

There was a time in my life that I lamented my inability to host a birthday party with all my closest friends, given that they were all strewn around the world. Barring a huge life event, there is nothing I could reasonably expect all of them to show up in one place for. The hilarity here is that I don’t even like parties, never mind hosting them! This random longing to wine, dine, and entertain was likely just an instance of envy, and I chuckle at the memory now. Nonetheless, I am now living a life I could never have a imagined, and my community consistently pops up to it-takes-a-village me in ways I could never have imagined. Turns out they were right where I needed them to be all along.

When I started this blog three years ago (today!), I took on the moniker N.A., nwanyị akwukwọ, acknowledging that I was embarking on a journey of learning and discovery of the unknown. This year of travel has been a spectacular extension of that initiative, and I’m confident it will continue to be. What I was not expecting however, was that a year I expected to be one of my loneliest yet – it many ways it has been as loneliness is pretty much unavoidable as a solo traveler – has also taught me so much about community. Similar to Nwabineli’s Aṅụrị, my community continues to gently nudge and lovingly uplift me into the realization of my name.

Signed,

N.A.

Dear Aeden

Today, I visited the grave of an old friend. And I am way too young for that sentence to make any kind of sense or be any kind of fair. Here’s a letter to her:

Dear Aeden,

I never really planned on coming back to this town, for all of the reasons you know all too well. But ironically, if it ever were to happen it would have always been to visit you. Before you passed a few months ago, I never would have thought it’d be a visit like this, sitting here by your grave.

Since you left, I’ve thought so much about our relationship. There was a period of time when we spoke practically everyday, and saw each other almost as much. Then life just got to being life.

I remember the day you told me and some other friends you were diagnosed with cancer. It was 2020 when all of us still had no idea how the world was about to change. It couldn’t have been more than a couple weeks later that the whole world shut down. And shortly after, I moved to a different state, then a different country.

We kept in touch, but life was just different. The love and the sisterhood was always there, but we drifted to checking in once or twice a year.

When you died, it had been about nine months since we spoke. We had tried to meet up but it just hadn’t worked out and we decided to leave it til the next opportunity.

When I heard the news, I immediately felt the weight of our distance, of the months that had passed since we spoke and the years that had passed since we embraced. Your death was so devastating for so many reasons and for so many people, and I was bewildered.

But in the days and weeks that passed, I was overwhelmed by the grand demonstrations of the mark you left on this world. The legacy of love and friendship you left with me was the same legacy of love and friendship you left on an entire community. I couldn’t be here for the celebrations of your life, but even witnessing them from afar warmed my heart.

As I drove through Sardine Canyon today, and got closer to your resting place, I was hit again by a wave of disbelief. Some places are just never the same without the people that light them up.

I’m so grateful I finally got to come visit you today, after all these years. It’s been a long time coming. You changed my life in inexplicable ways. The world is a bit dimmer without you here, but the light you shared will shine forever.

Love always.

Signed,

N.A.

Dede Aloh

When you’re in the middle of a move, adjusting to a new job, preparing for a drastic lifestyle change, and processing a new medical diagnosis… and then your favorite person dies.

Three weeks before that straw hit the camel’s back, I began listening to This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley. On the front cover is a review by Ashley C. Ford. It reads, “This is the kind of book that makes you different when you’re done.” In hindsight, I wonder if it was placed there not as an invitation to embark on a journey, but rather as a notice that my life was about to change.

As I listened to Cole’s voice extrapolating, and dare I say testifying, on “spirituality, liberation, and the stories that make us,” I was struck by her musings on LAMENT. I rewound and relistened several times. Cole asserted that lament is evidence of hope. “Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.” She explains that we would not lament if we did not have a sincere hope of a better reality. She also asserts that the positivity that people are oftentimes instructed to forge in place of lament is a denial of our physical and mental experience of the tragedies of life and earth. In this sense, lament inherently bears witness to divine glory.

So what is the body’s physical, tangible manifestation of lamentation?

The body wails:

“I don’t know if I’ve encountered better emotional truth-telling than when visiting Black churches. Black people of faith know how to wail… If there was any performance in it, it was the kind of art that is for healing and not for consumption… Black lament is something to behold. Some churches know how to shake the numbness from your flesh.”

I listened to this reimagining of lamentation as a physical embodiment of hope as I made preparations to sell all the physical comforts of my home. At this point, I had yet to shake the numbness.

“Sister June taught me how to grieve with my body,” says Cole. “She taught me how to feel the tears on my face and not wipe them away.”

I trecked back and forth to doctor visits trying to uncover why my body seemed to be screaming at me. There were no tears on my face, yet.

Cole says “there is no such thing as a lone wail.” She says that “when God bears witness to our lament we discover that we are… inviting God as a nurturer – a mother who hears her child crying in the night. She wakes, rises, and comes to the place where we lie. She rushes her holy warmth against our flesh and says, I’m here.”

When people ask me what I believe in, I always mention the company of my ancestors. Since I was a child, I’ve been consistently blessed with their companionship. For me, they are the God(s) that bear witness to my life, who surround me with their holy warmth.

But with everything going on, I had yet to wail.

When I heard the news, that news that Dede Aloh was gone, lament came without any effort at all. I got off the phone and, as if in a trance like state: I changed into comfortable clothes; I covered my hair; I turned on Igbo gospel music, loud enough to bother my neighbors and call on my ancestors; I got in my bed. Then, I wailed, I wailed like I don’t believe I ever have before. I wailed in the company of my ancestors and in harmony with the chorus shouting hopeful praises to God, I wailed.

“Your wails are worthy to be heard… it’s called healing.”

This is probably also a wailing of sorts, and I am healing. In all the ways and of all the things.

Hopefully signed,

Daa Aloh, N.A.

My Small Offerings

Some months ago, I was sitting in a meeting with several of my peers and the conversation wandered to the topic of pets and the, in my opinion, ever-exasperating debate of dogs versus cats. As we went around the room declaring our stances I was met with the usual appall at my calm pronouncement that I don’t like either and that my preferred relationship with animals is that we each stay in our separate corners. One of my friends, in an effort to redeem me in the eyes of our dismayed crowd, asked if I at least have plants. I replied negatively and was met with a response I had never before considered in all of my experience with the perpetual pet debate. It was something along the lines of, and I paraphrase, So you’re the only living being in your home??

That was something I had never considered. I pondered that idea for a moment, but a fleeting one.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she explains that Potawatomi culture (and many other Native North American cultures) holds human and nonhuman life in similar regard. In Potawatomi language there is a distinct pronoun for nonhuman living beings, parallel to he or she for human beings. Plants, trees, lakes, etc. are honored for their contributions to daily life just as we honor the people who add to our lives.

I was intrigued by this paradigm that ascribed to nature a value I had never imagined. I always appreciate a new perspective, but again, I filed it away.

Then, some weeks ago, I was introduced to the word “ecocide.”

Ecocide, noun; destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action. (Google).

I heard this word from Yoalli Rodriguez, scholar of environmental racism, ecological grief, and other equally impressive disciplines. In her interview on the For The Wild podcast, Rodriguez delves into the collective grieving of a particular Indigenous community in Oaxaca as the lagoons in their ancestral lands slowly die due to ecocide enacted by the Mexican State. I was struck by the word’s conspicuous similitude to the more common (at least in my line of work) “homicide,” “femicide,” and “suicide.” I was also struck by her explanation of a people grieving for their nonhuman community members, the lagoons.

This time, I reflected for more than a fleeting moment. This community in Oaxaca, and many others all around the world are grieving the loss of loved ones, nonhuman loved ones, but loved nonetheless. And, as Kimmerer explained in her book, these natural beings that are disappearing are not strangers, but family members with whom many Indigenous peoples have had reciprocal, life-sustaining relationships for generations.

I don’t consider myself a participant in this grieving. How can I be when I am only just now learning of the higher value of these dying natural beings, their value independent of my use of them? However, I too know grief, as many of us do. And I don’t believe that empathy is worth much without action.

So, I began to think of what I can do, and here’s what I came up with: 1) learn more, the obvious step one to any change-making. I’ll strive to learn more about the long-held and cherished relationships between earth and people, specifically Indigenous peoples. And 2) I bought a plant. I figured it was time to make some space in my home and heart for another living being.

Many cultures have traditions or rituals of paying respects to those that our grieving. These are my small offerings.

Signed,

N.A.

Beauty and Beast: On Grief and Care

There is the Turkish word hüzün, which cannot be translated into English. Instead of meaning a simple sadness or suffering it denotes a collective, Istanbul-wide phenomenon that some call spiritual, some call nostalgic, but the one thing we know for sure is that the word exists because it is pridefully shared with others. The ideal is not to escape this suffering, but to carry this suffering.
The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin

For my eighth birthday – the one that occurred just weeks after my father’s untimely death – one of my aunts gifted me a special copy of Beauty and the Beast. At first glance it appeared to be a run of the mill Disney picture book, but further inspection revealed that I, along with my brother and cousins, were included in the story as Belle’s friends and helpers. Despite my indifference to princesses at the time, and my growing recognition of and annoyance with Disney’s portrayal of princesses as I got older, this gift is the sole reason that, to this day, I have an answer to the terribly unoriginal question Who is your favorite Disney princess? I still take this 30-page knock-off book – containing a story that I now consider highly problematic – with me everywhere I live because it is one of very few bright spots in what I remember as a very dark time.

I want to say that grief is ugly, or horrid, or awful. But grief is also two-faced in that it manages to be both beauty and beast simultaneously. Grief has an incredible talent for warping perception. Sibel, the protagonist in The Four Humors, is buckling under the weight of grief after the death of her father. She is losing herself while also indulging her wonder by searching for a new self. She exhibits impressive fortitude, or stubbornness, by expressly ignoring the concerns of others and continuing her off beat path through grief.

Sibel eats. Sibel gains weight. Sibel smokes. Sibel is sometimes mean. Sibel walks, but is actually marching due to the sheer tiredness of life. Sibel lies, to everyone, at different times. Sibel is ill, and Sibel is selfish. And in all these ways, Sibel grieves.

But Sibel also cares, immensely. Sibel cares for the comfort of her lover in a strange land. Sibel cares for her grandmother and Sibel cares for her baby sister, both of whom are dying in different ways. Sibel cares to know her great aunt despite her unforgivable past. And in all these ways, Sibel grieves.

The next time I find I must reacquaint with grief, I hope I allow myself to do so with as much poetry and shamelessness and collective melancholy as Sibel; if even just for one day.

Sibel embarks on her summer in Istanbul with a directive to care and a need to grieve. One might wonder if the two can be done simultaneously, but from Sibel it’s learned they are one in the same: beauty and beast.

Signed,

N.A.