A Lifelong Journey for Belonging

“…roots are lacking. We must begin with that” — Edouard Glissant

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

It’s a story I’ve told many times and written for multiple college essays, and it’s one that I carry as part of my own autobiography:

My grandmother immigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad in the early 1970s. She was later followed by her three children (my mother, aunt, and uncle). My father immigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad not long after. As the decades passed, my great-aunt and her children left Trinidad for the U.S. and found new homes throughout the country. Although I grew up close to my immediate family, for many decades, I had sporadic contact with extended family.

I grew up claiming Caribbean culture while feeling quite separate from it. It would be almost 35 years before I would step foot in the Caribbean for the first time. I was born in the U.S. and claimed aspects of American culture as well. However, its food, music, and history was foreign to the one ingrained in the majority of my family.

Living Between Two Nations

If you are a child of immigrants, you might be familiar with this sense of displacement.

In my specific case, I asked myself that since my family had no ancestral ties to the U.S. through enslaved or free(d) Black ancestors, could I really call myself African-American? Could I honestly claim I was Caribbean-American if I hadn’t been to any part of the Caribbean throughout my childhood and early adulthood?

I had gone to predominately white private schools all my life and tried to be accepted by my white peers in order to feel like I belonged. But I was always nagged by the reality that I was different from them as well in both racial and class status.

While wealthy in knowledge and love, my family lived paycheck to paycheck. We lived in apartments, not houses. My uncle dropped me off in used cars bought at auctions, not new cars purchased off the lot. I feared that I was and would always be secretly ostracized. Because of these differences and many others, I learned it was better to keep everyone else at a distance.

A History that Runs through Our Veins

Questions about my cultural identity drew me toward shows like Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ PBS show “Finding Your Roots” and TLC’s “Who Do You Think You Are” that have effectively romanticized turning the fragments of family personal histories into totalizing, overarching family narratives.

Instead of albums filled with family photos, I have inherited stories I was told as a child and narratives created to fill in the gaps of our family history. With family photos lost or left in Trinidad when my grandmother immigrated to the U.S., I grew up with folklore, old rumors, and tales about people I’d never met in a land I had never visited. I wondered if there was a tangible, definitive family tree that could provide a sense of history and belonging.

To help solve the mysteries that surrounded my family history, I ordered a DNA test kit from Ancestry.com. According to my “Ethnicity Estimate,” 89% of my ancestry is comes from Africa (predominately from Nigeria and Benin & Toga), with the remaining 11% as European and Indigenous to South America. While the results of that test encourage me to dig more into my African ancestry, I still had more questions. If I want a more concrete understanding of my family history, I will have to continue my search for names, faces and historical records. Questions remain, and the answers often feel difficult to grasp.

What to do with so much still Unknown?

There will always be silences and elements of the unknown, especially for people like me descended from African enslaved people in the West.

If you are reading this and are on the path to self-discovery, I can only say that perhaps that search never ends. There is always doubt, an unknown, and a mystery about our family history and our relationship to the cultures of our ancestors. And while these mysteries are born of enslavement and violence, there may be a way to heal that past through even embracing questions without answers.

For, as Martiniquan-born French theorist and author/poet Edouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation (1997), “The experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange…we know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone” (8-9).

Work Cited

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. The University of Michigan Press, 1997.