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True story

I was on the phone with this FOB

(by the way, ‘fresh off the boat’ is not an insult, it’s honestly just true)

Anyway, I do this thing where I float in and out of what I believe to be my Nigerian accent

Not on purpose, it’s honestly just true

Well, he asks me if I would ever consider enlisting in some kind of armed force here

I say “Chineke ekwele ihe ojo”

I learned that from my mother

It means ‘God forbid bad thing’

To me, it just seems like laying down your life for what does not love you

Or will ever belong to you

He said “why do you say it like that?

You know that language doesn’t belong to you”

I paused, naturally

Then acted like there was some sort of static on the phone and hung up

To me, it felt like the last time I force assimilation into a culture that was supposed to be mine

Felt like grasping onto an airborne thing

Like reaching out to hold a bubble

It will always die in my hands

My mothers language will always be foreign on my tongue

But it will frequently try to crawl its way out from the back of my throat

Only to emerge to find itself minority

Find that it does not belong here

My identity is a mix between ‘on my way home’ and ‘never actually making it’

I see myself like puzzle piece on chessboard

Like flat sheet among fitted ones

Like I work out just fine until you touch me and I unravel

And you find that I never really fit in the first place

That I was just struggling to hold on

I am too Nigerian for here

Too American for there

Both times, I am the wrong type of black

Abum ihe na-efe nelu adighi emetu ukwu n’ala

Translation: I am just a floating thing that never actually touches the ground

I am a citizen of two countries that’ll never fully claim me as their own

That’ll never really love me back

I hold a blue passport, that makes me American

It reads ‘Birthplace: Warri, Delta State, Southern Nigeria’

I have an accent everywhere I have been

And it’s never really the right one

I mean to say, I do not know what to call home

You come here a foreigner

And America will do what it does with every foreign thing

Either kill it or steal it

And somehow those are the same thing

In igbo, we say, “m huru gi n’anya”

Meaning “I love you”

But in a more literal translation, “I hold you in my eye”

So you love what you choose to see or what you hold close

I believe ‘home’ and ‘love’ are synonymous

I believe you find them in the same place

Or sometimes you do not find them at all

I mean to say, you are what you love and not always what loves you back

So, if you ask me where I am from

I will tell you ‘Nigeria’

But quite honestly, a lot of me got lost in that translation

And I will never fully make sense