yassira l. diggs

My Liberianness

“I don’t think you can ever leave home.  You take it with you.  It’s in the follicles, your hair follicles.  It’s in the bend of your knees, the arch of your foot.  Oh no, you can’t leave home.  You just take it and you rearrange it . . .”                             – Maya Angelou

I’ve wrestled with the idea of home from as far back as I can remember.  The short version of the story is that my mother is from Guinea, my father is from Liberia, and I was born in New York.  My family moved back home to Liberia when I was still a baby, and we stayed there until we were uprooted by Samuel Doe’s coup in 1980.  After spending a year living with an uncle in Senegal, I came to the States on vacation with my mother and sister during the summer of 1982.  I haven’t seen Africa since.  In America, I have found pockets of places with traces of home; places that have smelt like home, felt like home here; places that became home just because I lingered around long enough.  But in each place, for all that I have found, there has always been something missing.

I’m from Charlotte, NC, a place that held me through my teenage years and ushered me into my early twenties.  There I could show you my high school.  If we drove, I could warn you about the speed bumps on Selwyn, the road that leads to it.  I could show you Carpe Diem, The Pewter Rose and 300 East, three of my favorite places to eat.  I could show you where the Park Elevator nightclub used to be, the Pterodactyl, Freedom Park, and the University, all the way down highway 49, where I earned my Bachelor’s degree.  I could show you the Tryon House, where I signed my first lease as an adult.

Unlike my good friend Sky, one thing I will never be able to show you in Charlotte, is a tree I used to climb with my best friend who has known me for as long as I’ve had memory.  Sky and her best friend have always known each other.  Neither has ever moved out of North Carolina. Their mothers, still friends, carried their daughters at the same time and raised them side by side.  Nobody in Charlotte remembers me from second grade.

I’m from New York City.  I’ve lived here for the past eight years, first in Brooklyn and now Harlem.  I almost count as a real local here, and that’s usually enough to satisfy most people’s curiosity when the origins conversation happens.  It’s the bred that’s missing, leaving the born just hovering over everything like mere coincidence.  My father was working in New York for the Liberian government when I was born.  When we went back home, it was before memory had set in for me.  I didn’t see New York again until that summer vacation in 1982, a wide eyed first.

I’m from Liberia, and on most days, you wouldn’t know it.  I grew into America, so I blend in now, for the most part.  Sometimes my Liberianess sits so far in the background of my day to day, even those who know me forget it’s there.  Once, a friend who had known me for years asked flat out, “I’m sorry, is it Libya or Liberia? I keep getting confused.”

When I came to the United States, I was a scared 12-year old.  I didn’t show it but I remember the feeling now like it’s still there, in my throat.  I was afraid and I remember my fear never coming up in conversation.  How I felt was left completely out of how the grown folk around me dealt with the coup.  It took until my own adulthood, for me to reconcile with that, when my parents had fully, in my eyes, become human, fragile, fallible, real; kids who got older and had their own kids.  And to be fair, there is no What To Say To Your 10 Year Old About The Nightly Machine Gun Fire, The Sudden 6:00pm Curfew, The Drunk Soldiers, The Stench of A Mass Grave and, to top it all off,  The Divorce Within 6 Months of The Coup Manual.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be the grown up in that situation.  Being an adult has afforded me clearer vision, and a deeper respect for the sacrifices my parents made for me, not to mention the nerves of steel they displayed while their entire worlds shifted under their feet.  Maybe they didn’t sit me down and ask me how I felt but what they did do was make sure I was safe.  And if I landed in a place where I’ve had the luxury of learning concepts like self- actualization, it is, again, thanks to them.

My Liberianess started quieting down almost from the beginning of my stay in America.  An introverted child, I didn’t care for people’s fascination with how different I was from what they were used to.  And when you said Liberia, those who’d heard of it, knew of the barbaric things that had happened there.  I wasn’t proud.  I was young enough to adjust almost seamlessly into American society.  I dissolved into my surroundings.  I blend in now.  Sometimes, when I talk, people hear an accent, and other times they’re wowed by the lack of one.  It was never a conscious decision, this dissolution of mine, just how I ended up negotiating a string of moments, really.  Looking back now, I think what I wanted most of all was a sense of normalcy, and I found it where I could.  American English, clothing, music, all of it became me, pushing my Liberianess further and further backwards.

I’ve spent a lot of time negotiating my sense of identity.  From the beginning, it was clear that belonging in this new place, America, would only be to a certain extent.  To this day, when I meet someone new, the part right after I say my name to them is like a skip in that old record, the worn out one. It’s a record you’ve cleaned and dusted, but still, always in that one spot it skips, just for a few seconds and then, somehow, usually by the third time around, it plays on through the rest of the tune.

“Hi, my name is Yassira.”

“Um, excuse me?” sometimes accompanied by, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”

“Ya-ssi-ra,” I’ll say, a little slower.

In the next few seconds decisions are made by the person as to how they’re going to handle the situation.  Most just let it go with a “Nice to meet yoouuu,” leaning on and extending the “you” over the area my name would occupy, had they gotten it.  Some give it a whirl: “Spell it for me?” they’ll say, and then they’ll try sounding it out that way, most times pretty successfully.  Others go right into, “Do you have a nickname?” to which I am happy to calmly respond, “No.”

We tried the nickname thing, it just never stuck.  I think my father was trying to protect me from being an anomaly among strangers when he suggested, at my first American school, that I let the kids call me Lee, a shortened version of my middle name.  There it went, on every blank under “Nickname”, “Lee”.  In the beginning I answered to it when I remembered it was me they were talking to, mostly but really it felt like wearing something borrowed and not my size.  I think the whole trend faded within a matter of weeks.

At first nothing felt long term.  From the time war came, we started doing things—going to that school, living with these relatives, living in this campus housing—for the time being, until we could do a little better.  There was a sense of “for now” about everything during the first couple of years.  I attended two different intermediate schools and two different high schools, between North Carolina and Virginia, before my father found a little footing in Charlotte.

Time turned into 25 years, and along the way, my Liberianess grew more quiet.  It happened as easily as seconds become minutes.  There have been times when I wonder if Liberia is still mine to claim.  What do I know about Liberia today, besides what I hear on the news, like everyone else?  If peace exists there now, it’s not because of anything I did.  People have lost their lives over Liberia, while I’ve been carving a life for myself in America.

I grew up with the idea that Liberia was founded by freed slaves, period.  The official version often left out the parts of the story where settlers prospered on the backs of the indigenous people they’d found there, and the long standing consequences, which Liberia still deals with today.  When I was a child in Liberia, if I saw a grand home with tall columns, it was just a great big house.  It took growing up, and living in the southern part of the United States for me to understand that great big house, its architectural style, and how the idea for it had been brought.

When I learned some of the atrocities the indigenous people had suffered at the hands of settlers, I assumed that my ancestors were settlers, because my last name sounds American, and I remembered my family being well off financially in Liberia.  I remembered knowing the term house boy, and I felt shame.  What was I supposed to be claiming there?  If Liberia was still mine to claim, what kind of legacy was I supposed to continue, or break, there?  But then I was reminded that human beings are human beings:  The line between congoh peopoh and contray peopoh is blurrier now than the horizon on an overcast day.

There are accounts of contray peopoh who changed their last names to congoh ones, much like some Blacks in the United States chose to “pass” for white to escape the second-class citizenry of the era of forced labor.  People fell in love with each other, despite being on so-called opposite sides of society.  They got married and had children.  The term congoh peopoh itself was used to refer to the freed slaves who were dropped off in Liberia and Sierra Leone, after the slave ships they were illegally being transported on were intercepted, before these people had ever set foot in America.  Bottom line, contray or congoh, it’s hard to really know who is what anymore.  I find relief and hope for Liberia’s future in that.  We have a better chance now at living like the lines between us are no longer there, because in truth, they are not, and Liberia has suffered enough.

I tried to negotiate with the idea of home.  I thought I had been gone so long, there was no use looking back.  For the most part, I didn’t think about it because I didn’t know what to make of it.  Even today, as entrenched as my life is in America at this point, what am I willing to do for my Liberianess?

I am American.  I am African.  I live in New York, home of world renowned pieces of real estate, and Fresh Direct.  I’ve made friends here, built a small peaceful life here.  In New York, all of my physical needs can usually be met within walking distance from where I am, and I can’t imagine letting go of that kind of convenience.  But that feeling can change just like that, even if it’s only temporary. Where does my Liberianess begin?  Everyday, it starts a different way.

On a recent evening, my Liberianess was roused in a movie theater, during the screening of a documentary on the women of Liberia. Christian and Muslim, and tired of war, these women banded together, prayed and nonviolently forced a resolution during stalled government peace talks.  Dressed in white, they linked arms and sat down, blocking the door to the conference room where politicians negotiated, refusing to move until the men inside found their way to peace in Liberia.

I looked up at the screen, and found one of my aunts among them; the one whose fashion style I used to love, growing up;  the one who took me in for a year while my father figured out a plan D; one of my mothers.  I saw her face, stripped of makeup, adorned in conviction, gorgeous.  My Liberianess flooded me, filled me, and pulled me like an ebbing tide.  I felt slapped in the face and hugged at the same time, and then underlined.  I was reminded of what’s true, before everything else, whether I like it today or not; whether I think I deserve it, or not:  My Liberianess carries no expiration date, and needs neither passport, nor visa.

For the most part, even though I haven’t set foot in Liberia in over twenty years. I can walk into most Liberian functions and at least one stranger, usually someone of my parents’ generation, will speak to me in thick, juicy Liberian English that tickles the inside of my ears like nothing else.  They will say my mother’s or my father’s name, and ask me if I am their daughter.
“Ah say mah chah?  You Lah’fey Diggs daughtuh?”

“Ay yah…You Fatou baybay geh?”

These people will take my hand as if I were theirs, because in that moment, I am.  I forget that I technically do not know the person in front of me.  They’ll tell me how long they’ve known my parents, usually since before I was born.  Once, this lady told me about kissing my father behind some bushes as a young girl.  Sometimes the person talking looks familiar, or their child does, like maybe we shared a sandbox, decades ago.  I see stories written all over them.  These are the folks who were meant to be my neighbors today, the ones whose unlocked doors I was meant to be knocking on, whose front porches I was meant to be rocking on, while listening to an elderly aunt tell a scandalous family story from an uninterrupted past in our Liberia. Now, giving me a couple of sentences, whatever they can, unknowingly fills me in places I didn’t know were empty and waiting.

Copyright © 2008 yassira diggs