Displaced

My name is Oluwagbemisola and I’m not sure where I’m from…

This is what I imagine an introduction to an Alcoholics Anonymous-esque meeting for the ones without a heritage, the cultural pariahs, the ones who neither belong here nor there (and not for lack of trying), addicted to identity discovery, will sound like. Heritage-less Anonymous. HA. A name that aptly describes our situation.

In my first meeting, I will stand in the circle with my head bowed solemnly and my heart heavy with the lack of belonging that has followed me around for the past twenty odd years, trying to belong in a room full of people like me- misplaced identities and fragmented senses of self. Kindred spirits. I would hope that amongst these people, the mismatched jigsaws of our lives would somehow merge into an imperfect puzzle.

In this room, I will have finally found my clan, the ones whose skins are varying shades of black or brown, rich with earthy undertones. People who may have been blessed with ethnic tongues, but who unfortunately have been caught in the crosshairs of an older generation that despised their roots and yearned desperately to be other - Western, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian; anything but themselves. A generation that has grafted vigorously either by adaptation of ideology or religion. I will stand there in this room, too foreign for home and not foreign enough for wherever the ones before me have forcefully tried and failed to translocate my needlessly displaced roots, roots that have grown tenuously.

During my introduction, I will state my name again as if to stress its importance, with a freedom I will have only just experienced. This will be a re-emergence of sorts, after burying it underneath years of acquired pseudo-Britishness. I will do that because although my name is an endless prophecy, a herald of unending wealth and blessings, a few years after birth, it will be considered a mistake. It will be thought of as a mistake because how can one anglicize Oluwagbemisola, a name that sounds like three morsels of fufu, filling your entire mouth and throat? It is not Kamiye (shortened to Kam) or Demilade (shortened to Demi). It is none of those names because it weighty in its length and breadth, as thick as it is wide. It can’t be broken into two parts, halved to blend in with the blandness of the Janes and Johns and Joes. By the time this first mistake is realized, it will be too late as God had been called and he answered, and God doesn’t do take backs. And of course, it will have been memorialized on my birth certificate.

With the first mistake committed, there will be a fight to avoid a second. This fight will ensure that although I was a child birthed in diversity - a Yoruba born in Ibo land who eventually settled with the Hausas - my mind will not be tainted by their traditions, nor my tongue twisted by their languages for fear that it will be untwist-able, not malleable enough to roll my rs or drawl my words with a twang. The catalogue of languages will be withheld like bad apples and called “vernacular”, forbidden even within the safe confines of our walls. And then, now that I am grown and misplaced, my mind a patchwork quilt of haphazard pieces, unsure of who I am or where I belong, I will be reprimanded and asked why I never learned my language or loved my culture. Why I am not quick to gossip in Hausa or haggle in Ibo or insult in Yoruba, like a typical Nigerian. It will evoke anger that I never fought to spend my school holidays in my quaint village, eclipsed by the warmth of Ikogosi. That I showed little interest in splashing around semi-nude in the village’s freshwater spring or learning to wrap moin-moin in ewe plucked from the valleys of Arinta.

So yeah, my name is Oluwagbemisola and I’m not sure where I’m from.

Welcome, Oluwagbemisola…