mosiac

I am drowning. I can feel the floor sway beneath my feet and I run. I burst into my room and sink into the plush carpet so it swallows me whole. The dark shapes in my room warp as steely words bounce around my skull like a pinball machine. Creative writing as a career? We didn’t come to America for you to be a starving artist. When will you not disappoint us in this America? Don’t you see all we’ve sacrificed?

My life is a graveyard of perfect dreams and hopes. I now realize that my dreams, no matter how flawed they seem to my parents, are perfectly valid. From when I was small, I was raised to be the product of my parents’ aspirations. I’m their proof that the American Dream can be obtained. I was to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a disgrace. Years from now, I will be used as the blueprint for the Perfect African Child™ to impose those same lofty expectations on my younger siblings. Heavy expectations weigh me down, shackling me into an endless cycle of feeling like I’m not enough. I struggled emotionally for so long feeling indebted to my parents for giving me the greatest gift, but also feeling resentment.

Instead of launching into the lengthy Coming to America tearjerker, I’ll spare most of the details. As my parents looked out at the starry Lomé sky and at the tantalizing outskirts of the village they thought, there’s something out there. Not here, where it is rife with corruption. Not here, where family and friends go “missing” in the blink of an eye. Leaving Togo behind, my parents found a new home in America, the land of opportunity.

My African is in the almond squint of my brown eyes and the way I’ll take coconut curry over pizza any day. My American is in the fickleness between my English and my mother tongue and the way I believe love is love and Black lives matter. I was always told to be not too much of one and not too much of the other. When I was younger, I would smother the Togolese and wear the American like my favorite pair of jeans. I couldn’t stand not fitting in, being othered. All my efforts achieved was making me feel more of an imposter than ever. But now I wonder: why couldn’t I be both?

However, people see me as a black woman first. I see my peers look at me with distaste, convinced I’ll steal their spot in that Ivy, the words “affirmative-action” bubbling under their tongues. I see adults eye me with pity, saying that I have “potential” and not to fall in with the “wrong crowd” which apparently are kids that look like me. Being black is a double-edged sword at times: I am given unique opportunities but I constantly must prove that I belong and must justify my place far more. I am never allowed to take up too much space. So after waiting time and time again to be invited to the table, I pulled up my own seat because no one else was going to do it for me.

My identity is an eclectic mosaic: the mystical superstitions of my Togolese that I won’t let go of, the new beliefs that stem from the American in me, and the tenuous battles I fight with my anxiety and depression. What I wish is for all these parts of me to be seen, not erased. In true Togolese fashion, I know that my ancestors are with me every step I take to forge my own path; they are in my heart, my soul, my very being. More than ever, I know that the ghosts of who I was before are so proud of the person I am becoming.