There’s No Place Like ‘Home’

The Black Atlantic is our newest column for nuanced, human stories about the Black experience around the world. Send your story.

London, United Kingdom

On 10 August 2007, I arrived in the United Kingdom with my parents and four sisters. The English sun burned less intensely than the sun in Lagos, where we departed from hours earlier, but it was a warm day and the queue in the arrival hall of London’s Heathrow airport was excruciating. Each step towards the row of Border Force officers was slow but oddly comforting; it reassured me that fresh air was within reach, beyond the airport’s poorly ventilated hall. Once we finally approached a Border Force officer with our travel documents, my family was inundated with questions. The officer wanted to know why the Nigerian man standing before him had decided to emigrate to the UK with a woman and five children as dependants. His questions, heavy with hostility, made me feel distraught and unwelcome, but I too wondered why we were there. Why had my parents decided to deracinate our family, leaving what, to me, was a comfortable life in Lagos? This question, along with the feelings of disorientation sparked by the immigration officer’s queries, re-emerged at different points during my life in the UK. They stalked me as I struggled to settle into an environment that alienated me, forcing me to reinvent myself.

Why had my parents decided to deracinate our family, leaving what, to me, was a comfortable life in Lagos?

While migration can be an active ingredient in the realization of dreams, it can also cause a disturbance, a pang of loss. Until reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s collection of poems, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, I had not considered that parallels existed between migration and horticulture. Both are delicate processes involving risk and (the art of) survival. In Philip’s collection, she offers an instruction from The Practical Guide to Gardening: ‘When transplanting, you may notice a gently ripping sound as the roots are torn away from the soil. This is to be expected: for the plant, transplanting is always a painful process.’ My emigration to the UK was a realization of my parents’ dream—a subsidiary of the Nigerian dream, which is to leave the country that manages to find new ways of inflicting deeper pain each day, so that one might have a chance at a decent life.