Musings on Black nomadism (pt 2)

the home of selfishness

Welcome to Life Is In Love With Me if you’re new. If you’re a regular recipient of Life’s honied love, welcome back! I am excited to share that today’s dose of love is a continuation of a previous letter about Musings on Black nomadism (pt 1). I’m eager for the letter to land and prompt thought. Before this though, I’d like to celebrate a sweet milestone. In just under 4 months of writing, the LIILWM community grew to 300 subscribers! On January 1st, we arrived at 300 subscribers which feels amazing and affirming and absolutely worth updating you on so we can virtually smile at ourselves and screens together. As the month has progressed, the growth has too which I’m doubly ecstatic about. Appreciate you all for engaging, sharing, and taking time with my words. Thank you deeply.

Now for today’s letter. Read on x

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Credit: Alexandra Folster (pexels)

I consider it a part of my lineage to be among those who know the exact weight and worth of a departure. We’ve been in the practice of leaving for several generations now. I am confident that it is in my blood to know, not only how to leave, but how to leave well; how to offer thanks to the land, how to still smile while the tears gather in my eyes, how the good-bye dinner bears weight, how to locate and never forget where I have been, who I am leaving behind, when to return, and what to do if the path home becomes too heavy, erased. In a way, leaving has become hereditary. I am of a people who infuse it with joy and gifts, sadness and grieving; it is loss and it is gain and through no fault of our own it is what we have worked to endure and befriend. 

As I write this letter, I am at the airport, waiting to board a flight to restart and return to a chapter of life in Belize. This is also a part of the process of my life: contemplating the statelessness of transit. I sit here, observing how everyone else navigates their freedom in this middleness, not yolked to the life I’m about to enter nor the London of my childhood and everyone in it. I am always at the edge of birthing timelines at airports. I mean I’m always glad to be bold, ashamed that it causes such a void for those that I love at a distance. I’m reminded of the opening of Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, a poem I often read to myself to start the day:

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision 

crucial and alone

for those who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

Of course Audre Lorde is right, except that I could and did dare to regularly ‘indulge in the passing dreams of choice’. My choice was to risk being the selfish daughter, the one who, one plane ride at a time, country after country, designs a life of leaving and of emptying her mind of its wishes until they become lived in, places to invite people in from the cold. 

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The first time I left home to begin my journey of long-term travelling and living abroad, the leaving was quite awful. It was particularly awful because I love my family so deeply and also need to live a life that is mine, which is away. I watched my younger (and only) sister weep as I turned the corner for security, leaving it too late and almost missing the flight altogether. I saw my mother and best friend bury her head in their hugs, and tell me to go because the crying would not stop. I wept alone on the plane. I questioned how I had ripped myself from the comfort of togetherness completely at random. I wondered if my love of the world and travelling freely in it had blinded me from what I had. There were people who didn’t wish to leave home, family, loves, but must. They’d never do it at their own volition as I did, and would never be so thoughtless to make a life of it. 

I promised to be back for summer and to call every day but I was not there with them and this was the unignorable fact. This is also Black nomadism. It is not glamorous, it is constantly rectifying things at a distance, being an adult who sometimes renounces adulthood out of respect, inheriting hard-headedness and not-quite freedom, teaching self emotional intelligence, being sensitive to Black sadness in any form and not wanting to be the one to trigger it, and soothing the guilt of being away. Over 2 and a half years since that first flight and I am learning that it is possible to live with your heart torn between two or more places.

I have lived in my ideal locations around the world and lacked the presence of family, their touch, laughter, and ability to read me entirely. I have lived in London under the roof of family and felt my health decline, my happiness weathered by not accessing the basic things that keep me going: sunlight, the ocean, affordability to live in a space of my choosing. 

There is no other way to see it. I’m either Staying or Leaving. Staying as in ignoring myself, as in noticeably stressed. As in settling. As in wasting opportunities my degree and career have given me that my lineage could not access. Or I am Leaving as in leaving them behind. As in not down the road where I am reachable and therefore safe. As in why must we be anxious for you across seas? As in disrupting the nest to fly away again, and again. As in selfish. 

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The feeling of selfishness does not go away. In an impromptu ‘I’m leaving again’ call to a friend, I was told that he was surprised that I ever felt attached enough to feel sad about going. His comment surprised me, it made me feel more care-less than care-free. I had spent so much time storytelling the very unthinkable miracles of living abroad that, to him, it seemed that my nomadic life was one of breezing in and out of lives unscathed. Even while enjoying relationships that have to come to an end, friends who will change my life probably just once in a lifetime, homes that have witnessed my growth that I will likely never walk past again, l am always taken aback by the emotions of leaving. This is of course hard to document in an Instagram story. An essay too. I can write of the people who make me think about staying or leaving but it won’t really get to the essence of what it means for me to be constantly shushing guilt, and reminding myself that without this declared selfishness I could not have reset my body and health and offered my family an example of true ease.

In part one, I wrote about delicately moving the roots which is, for me, appreciating the legacies, the sacrifices, and the false enticement of staying where I did not choose. I feel the necessity of bringing in to view the generation of Caribbean elders who came to the UK during the Windrush Generation, with no idea about when they would next see their relatives back home. Many left children, parents, partners, and grandparents that they would meet again several decades later or never again. They aimed to get to England, make enough money, and create a nice enough life to be able to provide, (but didn’t anticipate the harsh systemic and social systems that would make this impossible or unbearable for them). Having access to the people that they saw daily became a luxury or a memory. I bring this up because Black nomadism, and in this sense, the Caribbean migration to Britain, meant accepting that you may not be near to familiar faces to receive love in your language, to wear the clothes you have always identified in, to smell the scents of home, to use the ocean breeze to settle your spirit. This is the unremedied reality of a singular route distinctly away from home. 

I know this isn’t my reality. I may come and go as I please. As long as there is a a slightly costly seat available for me, I may make my return to the UK. Another friend in a separate goodbye get-together reminds me of this. Our families have both learnt how to love long distance, how to adjust the way we are sisters, brothers, uncles, mothers, etc.

Sadly it was not a conversation I grew up around -  the wounds of being the leaver - and so I feel as if I’m learning from scratch. My grandparents, in true Caribbean fashion, did not speak about their emotions until we were much older and knew how to ask. I do not even know if they spoke to each other about how it felt to cross an ocean and make peace with not returning while starting a family.  

“Have you considered that this feeling may never go away?” she asks me as I tell her, two nights before my flight, that I fear that I’m leaving too soon. Before this, I was telling her that I was sure that I’d find a solution and that it would get better over time. To this, she replied “It might not, though. This might always be the way it is when you come back. How do you feel aboout that?”. And after some pausing, I realised how terrifying but true that has been for the past almost 3 years. The sadness doesn’t wane and nothing about leaving feels like the right decision, even when my intuition insists so. Why would it change in a future where I travel even deeper, dig roots and stay in homes for even longer?

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And then there is leaving as a motivator. This is what usually gets me on the plane. Leaving as in, leaving ends if you’re from London. As in ‘look where I have gone, you can go too’. Leaving motivates the idea that you have entitlement, permission, audacity to go where you feel called. Every time I leave and send a myriad of ‘landed safe xx’ messages, I watch myself slowly peel away the layers of home so I can I remind myself and others who look like me that the world is bigger than where we were placed. Make it yours. Imbue it, the home-making, with love, the way it is done in our bloodline. I say some silent iteration of this every time I make myself at home on new land.

I think about how frightening it is to move to the unknown, how whole communities developed because they knew that so and so’s cousin went and is doing more than OK. Or perhaps, observing that the land received them who came from where I come from, and so hope mingles with bravery and a one-way ticket is booked. I see this as part of the genesis of migrant communities and nomadism around the world. Go to Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Toronto, New York, and Límon in Costa Rica because Jamaicans are there and you’ll be at home, for instance. Someone had to leave first so others felt emboldened to do so too. 

When I left for University, I went a few hours north to the Midlands, in Birmingham. It was my first time leaving London which felt like the entire UK to me at the time (because London breeds centre of the world energy). A few years later, my sister made the same journey, to see that life could be lived outside of London for us sisters. I think of how moving my roots from the UK to other parts of the world will influence my family and close ones. It is my prayer, actually. How my leaving will make their leaving less weighty.

I cannot promise that the guilt will not meet them on the journey to the airport as it often does me, but it might dissolve when they arrive to find a space already carved out for them. Maybe nomadism will cleanse the bloodline of closeness as the only form of safety, or maybe it will not. Maybe we will always be a deeply feeling people who like to be near one another. Still, we will have introduced something different into our story, and addition is always good for wanderers who have forfeited much to be able to journey. 

Whether it gets easier or not, my hope is that every time I say goodbye to family, I will not take for granted what this has meant for me for several generations past. I hope that I will not force myself to conquer it, emotions like these deserve to remain untouched. I hope the tears that fall and the prolonged prayers will remind me that I come from a leaving, loving people who are eager for me to be here forever, eager to know where the next place will be that I go to lay myself and my dreams, impatient for the rest that we all selfishly want and that some of us go to collect.

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Thanks for being here. Life is in Love With You,

Amara Amaryah