A Mirage of Belonging
As y’all know I’m Ethiopian American
Which means,
My heritage is manifold, leaving me grateful for this reservoir of rich ancestry. My place in this heritage is preceded and will be outlasted by beautiful stories that flow from that land I never lived in, but whose residents for generations developed, mutated, and reproduced a DNA that now resides in me.
No part of my childhood was robbed of a community with my cultural and ethnic heritage. I heard Amharic every day for the first 14 years of my life. I tasted homemade, not gentrified, injera and doro wot and hawaze tibs, and kitfo and other delicacies that belong to my people.
Yet no matter how ideologically and culturally familiar I was with my parents’ language, friends, and immigrant spirituality of survival, my distance from the geography of their homeland, in a real sense, showed my deep connection to my roots as ostensible.
You ever told your friends how much you loved a TV series of which you only caught a few episodes but to connect you fronted as if you were on the same episode as them? That’s kinda what being raised in a very Ethiopian house (i.e. coffee ceremonies, distinctly African worship customs, long meals, etc.) while in a monolingual land feels like. You have a sense of the main characteristics of the plot: I could tell you the capital of Ethiopia and what to expect at Ethiopian weddings. But, you’ll be lost concerning the nuances and the deeper values of the characters: my experience even of Ethiopian community is myopic because it abides in a space overwhelmingly represented by Christians—my ties to the Ethiopian Orthodox faith were halted once my paternal grandfather turned toward Protestantism after having been an Ethiopian Orthodox Priest, his children followed suit.
The unfamiliarity I’ve had with my own heritage has persisted in this country we call America. I didn’t know what type of food White people ate in their homes outside of the fast food restaurants we shared in common because I was so accustomed to Ethiopian food until I ate in the homes of my White friends. Later, I learned to code-switch with the best of them and read almost only European and White American authors. The assimilation helped me feel that I got along with everyone, but not without understanding that I was assimilating hardcore even when I benefited from it. Along the way, I’ve met White friends whose reception of me has not been determined by my surrender to the demands of hegemony, praise God.
In middle school and high school, my Black friends and I would sit at the lunch tables at our PWI, freestyling, roasting, and talking about winning our basketball games later that night. But there was also an ignorance on my part of Black traditions, history, authors, and stories that stemmed from the racialized and complicated relationship between African immigrants and African Americans in America. There is too much about this topic to write about that I can’t fit into this space, but what I’ll say is that the project of racism in this country has done a number on minority and marginalized communities, spawning distrust and agitation between them. Of course, there are other factors, friends, but high on the list is an incentivization of all immigrants, but especially Africans, to acquire an American dream that required the subjugation of the bodies of people who look like them. Part of this affected, in ways I didn’t know until much later, the rift between me and my Black friends.
Many times I thought of myself as having a trifurcated identity: (1) Black, yes, but from (2) an Ethiopian heritage, comparatively unscathed from the traumas of colonization, deculturation, and forced separation from their families and land, all the while in (3) a country predominated by a white hegemony that yells “speak English!” and infantilizes the likes of my parents.
Is this triple-consciousness? Unifying all these identities into one acceptable mode of being is impossible and not preferable, but when you’re committed to working at these different temperatures for so long without listening to the warning signs, the light of truth will eventually bend and refract into a mirage of belonging that doesn’t exist.
I’ve been lucky. My go at it has been filled with unimaginable twists and turns, but I’m starting to believe that true belonging will have to come about by the acceptance that “I contain multitudes,” as my brother Robert Monson wrote to me recently. The multitudes don’t have to form into a hypostatic union, I’ll leave the mystery of that miracle to my Savior and trust that my trifurcation, albeit difficult, can still belong in the care of One who calls me beloved and in community with those I’ve come to love from different places and races (so cheesy, ugh, might delete later lol).
None of this acceptance takes away from the national violence that has and still punishes the multitudes in all of us, but it does signal an invitation to life lived in fullness and not fear. Most of what kept my belonging a mirage was fear.
My ignorance and differences made me feel inferior and unworthy. My frustration that I couldn’t mix it all into one super specimen of kindness and self-assurance has led me into relationships that expose the mirages I’m tempted to settle for. Recently, people I never expected would be part of my life have helped me embrace the hidden parts of me and loved me, even the shame I carry, into belonging.
As I journey, I’m loving that the mirage doesn’t have to last forever.
Seeing through the mirage may not be easy but it’s possible. You belong.
Luh y’all big time,
Ru. :)
Phew!
Love this, Zeru! Thank you for sharing.