Mmm, linoleum floors, my favorite, I think.
It’s 7:30 am, according to the analog clock on the wall,
and I’m officially pissed at being up this early
for my driver’s license exam.
“Window 10 is OPEN!” an older lady screeches, and I lung forward.
She wears glasses that hang
from a cord of beads around her neck.
Stepping up to the window,
I cram my application under the glass divider.
“What’s your name, sweetie?” she asks,
vigorously shuffling through the paper.
“This your first driving exam?”
She beckons for me to stick my hand under the divider,
and she presses down for a fingerprint.
Thumb, index finger, wow she’s pressing hard.
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from LA, actually,” I say, finally getting a word in.
She sticks a card reader under the divider and says,
“Application fee increased, it’s $50.”
Once the card reader is on her side of the counter, she continues,
“Where are your parents from?”
I respond, “My mom’s from Nigeria,
but she moved to the UK in her twenties before moving to the US.”
Mid-keystroke, the lady stops.
She cranes her head around her monitor, and puts on her glasses.
“Does your mom own a Nigerian restaurant in Hayward?”
My brows furrow. I cock my head and offer a confused smile.
“It’s just—you said your mom immigrated from Nigeria to London
before coming to the US,” the woman explains eagerly,
“and the woman who owns the restaurant told me the exact. Same. Shit!”
“Best food of my life, by the way!”
She goes back to typing.
Huh. That could be my mom.
That could be anyone’s mom…
the woman who owns the restaurant in Hayward.
Huh.
***
On the Collective Wisdom of Flight: Artist Process and Meta-Writing
I was walking around earlier and trying to figure this poem out. The point of this poem is to convey a moment of realization that the unique is also mundane, is also pervasive. Whereas, I had thought immigrating to England to be a particular, pivotal part of my mom’s life (ancestral microhistory), the restaurant question from the woman at the DMV and ensuing conversation made me starkly aware of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Nigerian women who must have immigrated to London from Nigeria, then to the US. These Black women, Black folk, are the swallows in flight, and I am pleased to say that they have landed.
My mom was not special in that migratory path, but also I insist that she is special because I was born to her, I grew up with her, not with any of the other women who went where she had gone. On the other hand, there is solace in the thought that any of these other women could have been my mother, and my mother could have been any one of these women. It’s like being at the optometrist’s office and the doctor holds up two lenses. “Which one looks clearer? Lens number one *chu-chink* or lens number two? One or two?” And the difference in clarity is one almost taken for granted.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that my mom’s experience was not singular, but it was specific.
***
What is the relationship between unique and universal?
****
I think the point of this poem (the conversation and my internal reflection) are more important than who I’m talking with or where. That said, I do want to zoom people in to a particular moment, and particularity correlates with detail. Further, these details are important insofar as fundamental questions around who and where might prevent the reader from getting to the realization with me, the what.
In editing this poem to add in that detail, though, I (re-re-)realized something. A lot of my writing recently has been poems that were actually meant to be essays. I’m an essayist, man. Poetry has its limits when what I’m trying to give you, the reader, is a video and not a series of pictures.
There’s maybe one more thing to unpack here. The woman, in asking if my mom owned the restaurant, was trying to find out how her story intersects with mine/my mom’s. I’m trying to do that, too, I just don’t have all of the information. But what would it mean to look at (im)migration as a form of ancestral foresight?
The curators might hate me for this, but I thought the title of this show was excessive at first. A lot of syllables. After taking time to unpack the symbolism, and to see how it aligns so completely with this poem (which was written a year ago), I have come to the conclusion that it’s actually exactly right.
In my research, I learned that many birds migrate to the same general location year after year. The reason they’re able to do this is because they can follow an internal map and compass of sorts, and rely on instinctive navigation. They can use celestial cues, like the sun and stars in addition to the Earth’s magnetic field, to navigate. Talk about ancestral knowledge!
Recently, I’ve been thinking about going to Nigeria to learn my parents’ native language. This show has me reading into that thought–in all its hope and uncertainty–in a new way. This is not just about language learning, it is about learning language that encodes forms of intelligence and ways of being which remain as an inheritance from my ancestors. I am from a womb that was from a womb, and Princeton had me running around like I didn’t belong to all of this. So this is my loud and chaotic movement forward. This is my homecoming. I am completing the migratory circuit.