I am an immigrant.
"This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate."
In Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the sentence refers to its opening words: "Marley was dead, to begin with."
I am not writing about the dead and ghosts, although, as an immigrant, I have felt that I have been both. And we are in that week between Christmas and the New Year when time is fluid, and memories, such as Ebenezer Scrooge's costumed Ali Baba traversing a country road in his childhood, are as real as the nose on your face.
In the past, I have described myself as a traveler, not in the British sense as a counterculture person living outside of the arm of a governmental council but as someone who lived in and appreciated different cultures. However, after 30 years living outside of my country of birth, "traveler" is too weak a word.
There is so much ink being spent on immigrants in Portugal, which I have called home for a dozen years, in the United Kingdom, where I lived 14 years and the United States, the country of my birth. At a time, when many Americans have fled the politics of discomfort for other borders, and many black Americans seek security outside of their country, I thought it was time for me, a black American, to declare myself an immigrant.
After Donald Trump's presidential re-election in November, a black American journalist, friend and former colleague asked me about emigrating to Belize as she could easily visit family in Texas, and neighboring states. Social media was besieged by inquiries from Americans about potential emigration locations. When Trump first won the U.S. presidency in November 2016, a black American journalist, friend and former colleague in Sacramento, California, asked me whether I recommended living in Portugal and living abroad.
I did not answer her. Her question was a big one. The answer will be different for everyone. I am happy living in tranquil Portugal. One thing is certain: there has to be as strong a pull to a place as there is a push from another. Emigration is difficult. The immigrant has to learn a new way of being in the world, throw out assumptions and become different. It is harder in the beginning, but the work does not end there. I always am aware that I am an immigrant, observing how people act in different situations. As the child of immigrants, I have been observing cultural cues all my life.
Like President-elect Trump, I was born in Queens, New York. I am the daughter of Belizean immigrants who met in New York. My parents often had conversations about their adopted home, figuring out the culture. I was often their cultural translator.
30 Years an Immigrant
Thirty years ago, I left San Francisco and the States for love. When the feelings atrophied after 20 years, it never occurred to me to return to the U.S.
Why not return to a place where my words and gestures would be understood without clarification? Where I would not have to explain jokes or have them explained to me? Where my shoulders surely would drop without the burden of being an outsider?
Because I belonged here.
And, as with aging, no matter where you are, social references eventually become historical references, which are understood only by peers and have to be explained to everyone else. In a way, you become a ghost of the past.
Also, I recognized that my son, who was 9 when we moved from rural England to rural Portugal and, therefore, does not understand the physical danger of racism in the United States, was safe here.
When I first left the States, I lived in the village of Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema (1948), Aci Trezza, Catania, Sicily, for one year. The apartment overlooked the Mediterranean Sea, with protruding rocks thrown by the Cyclops at Ulysses and his ships. The food, arguably the most important aspect of culture, was beautiful and fresh. My favorite dish was a simple pasta with tomato and basil. Mouth-watering!
While walking through Aci Castello, a neighboring village, at her stone doorway, a woman, with a wizened face and dressed in black, asked me: Who do you belong to?
In Belize As a Child
A poignant question. I told her that I was from New York. However, her question has stuck in my mind. She was asking for my village. If you and your parents never left home, it is easy to answer the question. A more accurate answer would have been the Astoria, Queens, housing projects in New York and in Belize, then British Honduras, Belize City and Bermuda Landing. Before I started kindergarten in New York, my mother, who was terribly homesick, an emotional longing that should not be downplayed, took my baby brother and me home.
In the capital, I fed the chickens under my father's sister's house and cleaned the rice. In the country village of my mother, from my grandmother's house, I walked behind a woman who killed a huge snake on our path and dared Mami's horse, Diablo, to kick me by standing behind it, while everyone shouted that I should move away.
I attended school in both places. Looking back, I think that Mami was considering going back home or, at least, fantasizing about it. Our stay there reinforced in me my parents' Belizean values of community and Mami's Creole (Speak like the nuns at school, she would tell me in New York).
I remember squeezing my feet, my toes accustomed to waggling without any encumbrance, into my American shoes for the flight to New York. I remember thinking that life in the United States would be similar to this.
It Clicked in Oliveira do Hospital
When I first moved to my village in Oliveira do Hospital and spotted a woman carrying a bucket on her head, it took me back to Bermuda Landing, where I learned how to carry water from the well. The daily scene created an immediate affinity with Portugal.
I felt at home.
Settling into a new country is emotional. Most times, I feel settled. Other times, I still do feel out of place, especially around U.S. holidays such as Thanksgiving, when I have had to improvise by celebrating on the weekend and explaining the ritual to others. I am acutely aware that I am the only American with whom many have socialized and am, in effect, an ambassador of a country which propagates vivid stereotypes through film, television and other media.
The research done before emigration can only establish the cost of living, not an emotional connection.
"We Own the World"
It breaks my heart when African Americans say that racism toward us exists everywhere when it just is not true.
"We own the world," writer James Baldwin told a full house at Howard University's theater in Washington, D.C., around 1980, explaining that people of color compose the majority of the world. I opened one of my first news stories with this quote.
Baldwin (1924-1987) could see the chains that still hamstrung black folks. A sensitive man, he would have seen this before he left for France. After emigrating, the iron links would have been painful to observe in his people at home.
Conflicted Emigration Decision
So, now in 2024, many black Americans have left or are considering leaving the country. It is not the first time nor was 2016. However, in the past, the impetus came from slaveholders. For African Americans, the decision to emigrate has been a conflicted one. Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), national leader of the abolitionist movement, virulently opposed emigration.
There were several places proposed for emigration of free black people: to land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase, creating a black reservation, and to Linconia, which is Chiriqui, Panama, today, and was President Abraham Lincoln’s plan at one time.
Belize also was a contender.
In July 1863, months after U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, John Willis Menard boarded a small ship for Belize City, then the capital of British Honduras. Later to become the first African American elected to the House of Representatives, Menard represented Lincoln in his journey to determine whether the British colony was suitable for freed Americans.
Menard announced his support. However, the long-time supporter of Liberian migration conceded that he was torn between resettlement abroad and working to improve the lot of blacks at home.
Years earlier, in 1821, Liberia began as a settlement of The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, commonly known as the American Colonization Society, whose purpose was to repatriate black people outside of the United States.
The American Colonization Society faced much opposition from African Americans, many of whose families had been in the United States for generations. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, commented on colonization:
“Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here, have lived here, have a right to live here and mean to live here.”
W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), scholar and political organizer, Pan-Africanist and co-founder of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, spent the final two years of his life in the newly independent Ghana of Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. Both W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, acquired citizenship of Ghana. W.E.B. Du Bois died there at age 95. The native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, is buried outside Castle Osu, a former holding area for slaves bound for America.
Three years later, after Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup, Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), moved to Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, where she became a citizen, and then Cairo, where she was gracious enough to invite me and my friend, an African American scholar of Arab studies, to her apartment. It was around 1974, when there were not many of us living in Egypt.
A writer and an accomplished musician, she had studied composition at the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris. Her husband, who had received a B.A. cum laude, an M.A. and a Ph.D from Harvard University, also had written a doctoral thesis on the history of U.S. southern agriculture at the Friedrich-Wilhelm III Universitat, then commonly referred to as the University of Berlin. When his fellowship ended, he could not meet Germany's residency requirements, which would have enabled him formerly to stand for a doctorate in economics.
All this to say that both began experiencing the world at a young age.
Shirley Du Bois produced a movie in China called Women of the New China n 1984. She died in Beijing, where she is buried in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
From 1952 to 1958, W.E.B. and Shirley Du Bois had been denied passports to travel abroad. Their decision to emigrate to Ghana, the first of Britain's African colonies to gain independence, followed a welcomed invitation from Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. Both the push from the States and the pull to Ghana would have been strong.
Out of Your Control
Sometimes political actions, out of your control, make emigration tricky for you. When I moved to Portugal as a subject of the United Kingdom, Britain was a member of the European Union as is Portugal. Then, the British voted in a referendum to opt out of the EU. Thus followed a period of confusion. Brexit was out of my control.
Attitude toward immigration is another example.
The two types of legislation which constantly change are laws on taxation and immigration. Both Portugal and the United States are wrestling with immigration, a common ruse used to divert citizens' focus from genuine structural and other problems.
A Stranger
I am an immigrant.
I am living the life of a foreigner, which in the Romance languages, is the word for stranger, an outsider: estrangeira in Portuguese, straniera in Italian, extranjera in Spanish.
Even if you stay at home, you also shift your perspective, but one of time. The old are at home in the world of their youth and their memories. The young are at home in the world of their future and their dreams. Time has robbed them both of total comfort.
Identity is like a pair of shoes. Everyone feels the pinch now and again.
In A Christmas Carol, after the visit of the four ghosts, Scrooge became a different person, which is what happens after emigration. You are out of control of the changes.
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