It is your first time out of the country of your birth. Your first time on an airplane on a trip overseas carrying a brand new blue passport. It had happened so quickly. As your mother escorts you to the Jomo Kenyatta International airport, she says, look at God and you cannot help but agree…
Observing the largest gathering of black people I had ever seen in Amsterdam, I realised that their pain was familiar, yet we knew so little of each other, separated not just by geography and language, but also by a suppression of our stories.
In the mid-90s, my mother paid a visit to an aunt who had emigrated to Scandinavia and settled in Stockholm, Sweden, for over two decades. Of the many memories she held on to from that trip abroad, her most notable was the culture shock she suffered at a lunch that my aunt’s neighbour had hosted…