last year I went on my first book tour in 13 months I flew to 14 countries and gave some hundred docs every talk in every country began with an introduction and every introduction began alas with a lie ty Selassie comes from Ghana and Nigeria or thai Selassie comes from England and the States whenever I heard this opening sentence no matter the country that concluded it England America Ghana Nigeria I thought but that's not true yes i was born in england and grew up in the united states my mom born in england and raised in nigeria
currently lives in ghana my father was born in gold coast a british colony raised in ghana and has lived for over 30 years in the kingdom of saudi arabia for this reason my introducers also called me multinational but nike is multinational i thought i'm a human being then one fine day mid tour I went to Louisiana a museum and Denmark where I shared the stage with the writer colum mccann we were discussing the role of locality in writing when suddenly it hit me I'm not multinational I'm not a national at all how could i come
from a nation how can a human being come from a concept it's a question that had been bothering me for going on two decades from newspapers textbooks conversations I'd learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal singular naturally occurring things but I wondered to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute some fixed point in place in time a constant thing but was it in my lifetime countries had disappeared Czechoslovakia appeared timor-leste failed Somalia my parents came from countries that didn't exist when they were born to me
a country this thing that could be born die expand contract hardly seemed the basis for understanding a human being and so it came as a huge relief to discover the sovereign state what we call countries are actually various expressions of sovereign statehood an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago when I learned this beginning my master's degree in international relations I felt a sort of surge of relief it was as I had suspected history was real cultures reveal but countries were invented for the next ten years I sought to reor undefined myself my
world my work my experience beyond the logic of the state in 2005 I wrote an essay what is an afro politan sketching out an identity that privileged culture / country it was thrilling how many people could relate to my experience and instructional how many others didn't buy my sense of self how can Selassie claim to come from Ghana one such critic asked when she's never known the indignities of traveling abroad on agony and passport now if I'm honest I knew just what she meant I've got a friend named leila who was born and raised in
ghana her parents are third-generation Ghanians of Lebanese descent Leila who speaks fluent she knows a crawl like the back of her hand but when we first met years ago I thought she's not from Ghana in my mind she came from Lebanon despite the patent fact that all her formative experience took place in suburban Accra I like my critics was imagining some Ghana where all get Ian's had brown skin or none held UK passports I'd fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets the privileges of a fiction the singular country over
reality human experience speaking with colum mccann that day the penny finally dropped all experience is local he said all identity is experience I thought I'm not a national i proclaimed on stage I'm a local I'm multi local sea thai Selassie comes from the United States isn't the truth I have no relationship with the United States all 50 of them not really my relationship is with Brooklyn the town where I grew up we're New York's with New York City where I started work with lawrenceville where I spend Thanksgiving what makes America home for me is not
my passport or accent but these very particular experiences and the places they occur despite my pride in FA culture the Black Stars and my love of Ghanian food I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana writ large my relationship is with a craw where my mother lives where I go each year with a little garden and Joel Lou or my father and I talked for hours these are the places that shaped my experience my experience is where I'm from what if we asked instead of where are you from where are you a local
this would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are tell me you're from France and I see what a set of cliches adichie's dangerous single-story the myths of the nation of France tell me you're a local of Fez and Paris better yet good door and I see a set of experiences our experience is where we're from so where are you a local I propose a three-step test I call these the 3 R's rituals relationships restrictions first think of your daily rituals whatever they may be making your coffee driving to work harvesting
your crops saying your prayers what kind of rituals are these where do they occur in what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face as a child I carried out fairly standard suburban rituals in Boston with adjustments made for the rituals my mother brought from London and Legos we took off our shoes in the house we were unfailingly polite with our elders we ate slow-cooked spicy food in snowy North America hours were rituals of the global south the first time I went to Delhi or to southern parts of Italy I was shocked
by how at home I felt the rituals were familiar our number one rituals now think of your relationships at the people who shape your days to whom do you speak at least once a week be it face to face or on FaceTime be reasonable in your assessment i'm not talking about your facebook friends I'm speaking of the people who shape your weekly emotional experience my mother in Accra my twin sister in Boston my best friends in New York these relationships are home for me our number two relationships we're local where we carry out our rituals
and relationships but how we experience our locality depends in part on our restrictions but restrictions I mean where are you able to live what passport do you hold are you restricted by say racism from feeling fully at home where you live by Civil War dysfunctional governance economic inflation from living in the locality where you had your rituals as a child this is the least sexy of the arse less lyrics and rituals and relationships but the question takes us pass where are you now to why aren't you there and why rituals relationships restrict take a piece
of paper and put those three words on top of three columns then try to fill those columns as honestly as you can a very different picture of your life in local context of your identity as a set of experiences may emerge so let's try it I have a friend named olu he's 35 years old his parents born in Nigeria came to Germany on scholarships ola was born in Nuremberg and lived there till age 10 when his family moved to Lagos he studied in London then came to Berlin he loves going to Nigeria the weather the
food the friends but hates the political corruption there where is olu from I have another friend named judo he's also 35 years old udah was born in cordova in Northwest Argentina where his grandparents migrated from Germany what is now Poland after the war Udo studied in Buenos Aires and nine years ago came to Berlin he loves going to aventine a-- the weather the food the friends but hates the economic corruption there where is pseudo from with his blonde hair and blue eyes Udo could pass for German but holds an Argentinean passport so needs a visa
to live in Berlin that oodles from Argentina has largely to do with history that he's a local of Buenos Aires and Berlin that has to do with life olu who looks Nigerian needs a visa to visit Nigeria he speaks Yoruba with an English accent and English with the German one to claim that he's not really Nigerian though denies his experience in Lagos the rituals he practiced growing up his relationship with family and friends meanwhile the Lagos is undoubtedly one of his homes olu always feels restricted they're not least by the fact that he's gay both
he and Udo are restricted by the political conditions of their parents countries from living were some of their most meaningful rituals and relationships occur to say Ola was from Nigeria and Udo from Argentina distracts from their common experience the rituals their relationships and their restrictions are the same of course when we ask where are you from we're using a kind of shorthand it's quicker to say Nigeria than Lagos and Berlin and as with google maps we can always zoom in closer from country to city to neighborhood but that's not quite the point the difference between
where are you from and where are you a local isn't the specificity of the answer it's the intention of the question replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs even that most glorious expression of country hood the world cup gives us national teams comprised mostly of multi local players as a unit of measurement for human experience the country doesn't quite work that's why olu says I'm German but my parents come from Nigeria the but in that sentence belies the inflexibility of the units
one fixed and fictional entity bumping up against another I'm a local of Lagos and Berlin suggests overlapping experiences layers that merge together that can't be denied or removed you can take away my passport but you can't take away my experience that I carry within me where I'm from comes wherever I go to be clear I'm not suggesting that we do away with countries there's much to be said for a national history more for the sovereign state culture exists in community and community exists in context geography tradition collective memory these things are important what I'm questioning
is primacy all of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was what are we really seeking though when we ask where someone comes from and what are we really seeing when we hear an answer here's one possibility basically countries represent power where are you from Mexico Poland Bangladesh less power America Germany Japan more power China Russia ambiguous it's it's possible that without realizing it we're playing a power game especially in the context of multi-ethnic countries as any recent immigrant knows
the question where are you from or where are you really from is often code for why are you here then we have the scholar William to resurrect writing of elite American colleges quote students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers end quote I'm with him to call one student American another Pakistani then triumphantly claimed student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same Millia the same holds true on the other end of
the economic spectrum a Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions the nationality implies perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them I'm often asked if I plan to go back to Ghana I go to a cry every year but I can't go back to Ghana it's not because I wasn't born there my father can't go back go back either the country in which he was born that country no longer exists we can never go
back to a place and find it exactly where we left it something somewhere will always have changed most of all ourselves people finally what we're talking about is human experience is notoriously and gloriously disorderly affair in creative writing locality bespeaks humanity the more we know about where a story is set the more local color and texture the more human the characters start to feel the more relatable not less the myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories in fact all of us are multi multi
local multi-layered to begin our conversations with an acknowledgement of this complexity brings us closer together I think not further apart so the next time that I've introduced I'd love to hear the truth taissa lassie is a human being like everybody here she isn't a citizen of the world but a citizen of worlds she is a local of New York Rome and okra thank you
