The Long Road to a Place Called Home

I have been asked where I am from more times than I can count.

In Lagos, nobody asked. The question did not exist because the answer was obvious. I was from here, from this noise, from this traffic, from the particular chaos of a city that raised me without asking my permission. I belonged to it the way you belong to something you never chose. Completely, without paperwork.

In Toronto, the question follows me like a second shadow.

It is not always unkind. Sometimes it is genuinely curious. Sometimes it comes from someone who is also from somewhere else, looking for the coordinates of a shared experience. But there are other times, a certain tone, a certain pause before the question, a certain expression when I give my answer, when I understand that the question is not really asking where I was born. It is asking whether I belong here.

I have been working on my answer for six years.

The honest answer is that I do not know anymore where I am from in the way the question expects. I am from a city that does not wait for you. I am from a mother who cooked jollof rice on Sundays and made us sit at the table whether we wanted to or not. I am from fourteen-hour flights and winter coats that were never quite right and the particular loneliness of a city that holds eight million people and does not know your name.

I am also from here now. From the TTC at rush hour and the specific kindness of strangers in a snowstorm and the sound of my daughter speaking English with an accent that is not mine and not Canadian but something new, something that belongs entirely to her.

Identity, I have learned, is not a place you arrive at. It is the accumulation of everywhere you have been and everything it cost you to get there. It lives in the hyphen. Nigerian-Canadian, home-away-from-home, the person I was and the person this place made me into.

I am still finding the words for it.

But I am no longer afraid of the question.

Tag: Nigerian diaspora, Toronto, belonging