Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
I am Moses and Victoria’s first child — their only boy — born in the winter of 1989 at George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C.
The question “Where are you from?” feels straightforward enough, an excuse to talk about your city or country of origin with some mixture of pride and dismissiveness. But the real answer is that you come from your mother; she just happened to be wherever it is that you were born. The place to which you so often ascribe your personality, your mannerisms, your slang, and your outlook is, frankly, a matter of happenstance.
If my mother had had me a few years earlier, it might have been in London, where she lived while my father tried to make something of himself in America, a country he didn’t know, where he had no immediate family. Even earlier and she might have had me in Nigeria, where her mother had her, and where my father’s mother had him. But as it stands, I was welcomed to the world via Washington, D.C. Six months later, my parents began the transition to a warmer (and “less active”) life in Tallahassee, Florida.
My parents came to America from Nigeria for the same reason most foreigners do: the belief in the Brand of America. “The American dream,” the kind of dream you see in commercials for Publishers Clearing House, promises that opportunity and success are just a knock on the door away. Neither my father nor my mother have changed the world or achieved any great measure of wealth, but they worked toward a feat that was almost impossible “back home”: stability in a quiet suburb. In exchange for this, they found themselves with the unexpected task of raising four American children.
Courtesy of Israel Daramola
I was born to Yoruba parents, but the first time I went to Lagos as a young child, I was a visitor. It could never truly be my home — and I was reminded of this when I was at home, too. As a teenager, I attended a Nigerian Independence Day party at the local Elk’s Lodge in town. When I referred to myself as Nigerian in a conversation, the woman with whom I’d been speaking promptly responded, “Were you born there?” I replied that I wasn’t. She gave me a dismissive side-eye and a condescending smile before gently telling me, “You’re not really Nigerian, then.”
My only response was a quiet embarrassment. For all the pride and tradition instilled in me by my relatives, I could never feel like a member of this exclusive club — just an honorary guest. Being a first-generation child is like calling myself an '80s baby because I was born in 1989: I have no firm grasp of associations I’m expected to understand, but I’m tied to the label anyway. My parents and my cousins' parents and the parents of other first-generation Nigerian kids I knew did their best to immerse us in their culture. Afrobeat music played in houses and in cars, men and boys wore agbadas to weddings and parties, while women and girls wore a gele around their heads. Everyone’s house smelled like pepper soup, leather, and a musk so specific that it defies the pallid medium of language — you’d have to go to a Nigerian household to understand.
Beyond those sensory signals, though, there’s not much tying us to the country. We could speak the native tongue and eat the food and wear the traditional clothes every day, but ultimately we are being asked to embrace a place and a culture that we ourselves had no direct connection to, that could never truly live within us.
When I see Florida on TV or in movies, it is as unfamiliar to me as Nigeria. Tallahassee doesn't feel like Florida, or at least the beaches-and-Disney World idea of it that people have in their minds. North Florida is its own strange planet, like the child Florida and Georgia had before they divorced. Tallahassee is the first city you hit when you enter from Georgia. The city hides inside a jungle; the further you stray from downtown, the darker, quieter and more rugged its landscape gets.
Camouflage is a fashion statement here, and people drive big trucks. Whether rich or poor, we're all “country.” It feels, in many ways, like the stereotypical Deep South: full of y’alls, tobacco chewing, deer hunting, and grilling in empty parking lots on Saturday afternoons. To ge