the yearn to be white

on borrowed skin and severed limbs

driving to the grocery store, you sob to ‘wild at heart’ by lana. it’s a ritual now. but it’s not yours. it feels like borrowed skin. even though there’s a bubble at the bridge of the song where only you (and lana) exist. you get the same feeling when you say summer (or grocery store) even though you mean harmattan (or supermarket) in your essays, and when you slur your r’s and soften your t’s as you speak to someone with (god forbid) a british accent. when you realize you don’t like beyonce half as much as you should.

your excuse is this – you grew up watching disney and friends so to you, life is only worth living when your room has a bay window, a wall of trophies, posters of britney spears and pink, fluffy sheets. and you’ll only ever be an adult when you have a studio apartment with light hardwood floors and a cat and a cushy writing job in new york and then you’d get bored and move to la so you could touch grass more.

you’d never say you despise your country, but you hate it. with its rainy nights and blinding sun and fog and dust, and if you’re being honest zero hardwood floors. just tiles. cold, dead tiles. your longing is a fifth limb, poking out of your chest, grasping at the empty air. needless, unforgiving. destructive.

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yes, for a while there i longed to be white because life would be so much easier. my skin would finally fit my dream reality without the pesky issues of race and identity getting in the way.

until i studied history and read frantz fanon¹ and know the innards of what went down centuries ago. and while burrowing into those dusty old books opened my eyes to imperialism and societal conditioning, i think the book americanah² was the very first to describe what i’d always felt but never had the words (or guts) to define.

…they would not understand why people like him, who were raised, well-fed and watered, but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty. – americanah (chimamanda ngozi adichie)

this quote was a plunge in ice-cold water. the desperation for a life somewhere else, the longing, the eternal neck-stretching, tip-toe peering into life outside of my world.

i’ve always been alarmed by the disdain that americans expressed to their country without seeking an eternal escape. they remained tethered, with reluctant patriotism, yes, but patriotism none the less. while i was a fetus, floating in fluid, untethered and starved, begging to be let out. the lucky ones were those that got to flock outside of our burning nest.

but america (or anywhere else) is not heaven. and our nest isn’t burning.

patriotism is a dirty word here, with the bad governance and so on but there is so much to love. so much that when i discovered it, it felt me gasping and almost drowned me. i love the frigid harmattan that haunts the air with a fog and teeth-chattering chill. the hot, sweltering heat. the raging rain that splits the sky in two and sends ice cubes onto our roofs. i love the morning after, with the cleansed, crisp air and hawks shadowing the sky on the prowl for chicks. i love the mangoes in my backyard that are almost as big as my head.

i love the food and the entertainment and the people, with our enthusiasm and genius and well-meaning (and sometimes pure evil) intent. i get a flash of pride now when news come to my ears that someone did something remarkable in or outside of the country.

there’s much to be fixed, yes, but it is home. and it’s so freeing to say that, to exist within these ancestral walls instead of trying to knock it down, to be tethered.

the fifth limb has been cut off… well, its slowly in the process of being severed. i’d love to die here, retired in a beach house where i’d have my morning pap overlooking our side of the atlantic.

and god, how lucky am i to dream in my native tongue? how grateful am i to have grown up here, to have eaten the sand as a slightly demented four-year-old and to have learned to write (and live and love) against the backdrop of my lineage? how wonderful is it that there’s a part of me that’s fiercer than the tentacles of imperialism could ever be?

and also, listening to lana doesn’t make me more white or less black. it just means i have fantastic taste. a realization that came after finally settling into own skin as a garden takes weed.

1. The Wretched of The Earth - Frantz Fanon

2. americanah (Chimamanda Adichie) is a exploration of cultural identity through the eyes of ifemelu, a nigerian residing in new jersey. the story presents her personal experiences, along with sections from her writings about race and immigrant life.

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