Coming Home?

“You need to write about this,” says Joseph, the friend I’ve carried with me—often at arm’s length—for thirteen years. Joseph is quite Canadian despite his best efforts, and I am quite not. I look on, projecting my most serene gaze in the wake of my sudden divulgement. Unable to think of a response, I simply nod. The divulgement is over after all, and I figure that’s that. Joseph can talk on and on, while uncertainties (many of them) inhibit my tongue. He imbues the scene with a sort of unassuming confidence; his frank, unaffected manner makes him at ease in various spaces. There’s a maturity to the way he observes everything, self-assured and never imposing, as though he’s aware of the subtleties others miss but chooses not to intervene. The scene is a Moroccan eatery, and the thing he suggests I write about is the very thing I am darkening the page with now. You see, it’s that precious moment of early summer, and we’re on a downtown Toronto patio of a Michelin-starred restaurant. The thing—that thing—is that I am here, finally in Canada, fully realized in the margins: visible, but unnoticed. The waitstaff glide past me as though I am not quite there, their attention orbiting around Joe, whose mere presence commands service without a word. It’s a familiar feeling, and the revisiting is familiar too when I fix my mouth to say the words and do the telling. The disclosures these days just come tumbling out for one so notoriously evasive, but what can you do? I’ve been a-spotting patterns a while now, and Joe is always down for a good unpacking, so I tell him. The pattern is always the same, says I; an unspoken but undeniable contrast in how we are seen and treated. It’s Joseph this time but it  could have been my partner Craig, who, like Joe, is white Canadian. The scene isn’t limited to just posh restaurants either. It’s been other places, other times…

I arrived in O Canada on November 5,  2021. My final destination was Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose scenic maritime beauty I’d heard substantial tales about and therefore readily presumed would greet me that way. In reality, it was dimly lit sky-wise and unwelcomingly cold. It served as a stark reminder that expectations were not aligned with what stood before me. I remember how the chill searched me and found me right to the bone each day I ventured out of the motel room; how my head felt strapped to my body but couldn’t be reached for insights; and how the quarantine—still in effect—carried over its unreality all these miles from Kenya. I had no concept of time those first three or four or five days, having never flown this far. I felt like an unsuspecting alien, aloof yet observant, eagerly awaiting a single datum to process. I was open and receptive. Still, even in that dislocation, some part of me wondered if this persisting newness could one day become familiar enough to call home. Yes, this bed felt strange and the food was weird, but this was rare Canadian air, and I’d come a long way for it.  The idea of home was already beginning to loosen, stretch and reshape itself inside me. 

“You’re not staying in Halifax,” says Joseph rather definitively, over the phone. He’s in Montreal and I am, of course, in the motel, quarantining like a champ. The course of days has broken me in and I am right with the time and right with the climes. I feel something like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari who upon pondering “What makes a home?”, swiftly realizes he must “rise up now and go to all the public places, blowing the horn of patriotic service.” Joe regales me with the possibilities. We work out a plan; as soon as my quarantine is done, he will drive down with a friend and we’ll leave Halifax behind. I am free to live wherever I want, I remind him. All I have to do is tell the case worker that’s been aimlessly bantering with me every now and then that I won’t be Nova Scotian after all. Ecstatic every time I’m finished chatting it up with Joe, I can’t restrain myself; I tell my next-door motel neighbours–an Iranian gay couple and fellow former refugees–of my imminent departure. They’re restless too and while they’ve been looking at houses, they don’t seem too happy about staying here either. We feel caught between cities that feel more like ideas than places and our conversations circle around the question neither of us can name: where will we truly feel at home? They land on Calgary, Alberta as their ultimate destination for its lower taxes that speak to their frugal ways.  

I am not permitted to fly out of Halifax until I am doubly vaccinated against COVID-19, and taking a bus to Toronto feels like an awful prospect for a newbie, so Joe and two others drive down and pick me up. We spend a day and take in the sights. I meet them all for the first time—Joseph in the flesh is as he has been online all these years: long-maned, way too attentive, and unconcerned with propriety. His commie buddies Luc and Samy become my buddies and we’re all just too determined to buddy it up. There’s a charming lack of earnestness in our interactions that I deeply appreciate, more so now, thinking back. A thing required doing and so we’re doing it. We plow through the rest of Nova Scotia and into snow-heavy bits of New Brunswick. There we bear witness to a pizza guy suffering an undeserved scolding (in French) from an irate customer Samy aptly dubs “the Karen of Acadia”. We move on through southern Quebec into a Rimouski motel, where Luc talks to me about Godard (more French) and suggests we watch La Chinoise . We don’t.  Instead, we sleep in the reassurance of friendship and the reliability of the motel industry.

I arrived in Toronto on December 15, 2021, taking the bus down from Montreal. Hal, one of Joseph’s friends in the city, opened their home to me, offering a kindness that was pretty astounding. It was knit from that same practice over theory ethos that Joseph embodied. A thing required doing and so it was done. Hal’s generosity, like Joe’s, wasn’t about making a show of solidarity: it was about acting if you cared for another. They lived right next to a cemetery whose wintry charm was not lost on me. I had this intense sense of freedom in the cold and it anchored my unexpressed desire to finally make this my home. I recall being underdressed for the weather on a walk with Hal through the vast cemetery, urging the cold to be my friend, extolling its virtues of making me feel present and alive. Oh, lovely frigid chill, will you be my home? I think so, don’t you? Those early days were spent indulging in the novelty of legal cannabis and talking about metal music, which had first bound me to Joseph and now bound me to Hal. The latter days I spent with Ellery, Hal’s partner, who mixed and matched easy ebullience with canny thoughtfulness. She had the most delightful laugh and such presence. Ellery showed me Toronto: “Now you’ve seen St. Lawrence Market, now you’ve seen the Beach, and so may your days be many here and your friends all over and in-between.” 

I also took to wandering on my own, but the trips grew progressively more inward and I wasn’t registering much outside after a while. The worries were already formed, albeit vaguely, and now they slithered and voiced their disquiet. Please let this be my home, let them accept me, let me be free and happy—at least somewhat, in Jesus’ name we once prayed, amen. It’s funny the times old Christian hands fasten around your neck and probe your noggin until you vomit the formula of making peace with thyself that they taught you via prayer. I was often high on Canadian bud, stung out of my senses and miserably arriving at painful conclusions. I still hadn’t spoken to a single soul in my family to share my glee at having outwitted the Ugandan government’s homophobic edicts, having skirted every available pit of sorrow my identity afforded me there and made it out, scarred on the inside sure, but brilliantly together where it mattered. Some of them shared the government’s sentiments and approved the edicts but what about the rest? Cousin Mark was queer too! Except he lived in Germany and didn’t grow up around them. Let’s give him a call, shall we? Eventually, I did. There was easy laughter reminiscent of our childhood and genuine concern but there was a gulf too broad even my monumental update couldn’t adequately circumvent. 

“Are you settling in well? It’s not easy living abroad as you shall soon find out.”

“Haha, goodbye cousin Mark, I got this.” 

And yet, anxiety crept in, that nagging fear about being able to maintain all this. When Craig and I became partners, I once confessed an old fear of not being consistent, of being formless and not maintaining of the important stuff. I think he laughed, but I digress. 

I was in that “vague field of imagination,” the essayist Montaigne cautioned against when writing “On Idleness”. Slowly and surely contemplating and approaching formlessness. It’s not like all I was had been stripped away once I landed in Canada, but I was weary of who I’d been.  In Kenya, the idea of home had already begun to fracture in ways I couldn’t yet name. There was the morning of a home invasion–someone was shot in front of me. No space was made for the shock, the grief, the confusion. I simply moved on, or tried to. Towards the end of my stay there, plainclothes police raided our house. One of them pointed a gun at me. Said they were looking for suspects. After that, I startled easily, flinched at sudden sounds. Home no longer felt like shelter–it felt like exposure and so my friend Aron in Sweden (another binding, courtesy of metal music) arranged for me to live in welcome solitude in a fuss-free neighbourhood. Still, the mind was a terrible thing to excavate once the fear receded and so the solitude became desperately peopled with hookups and aimless gossip. Anything unimportant to take the pain away. The pain being the lack of realization and the punishment being forgetting the dreams and sinking into abstraction. I was a refugee in Kenya with limited opportunities and a shaky status and unguaranteed future, what can I tell you? 

Ellery gave me a book, a tome really, with the heavy title, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” I was learning the language of  PTSD and all it entailed and I could imagine myself being healthier in the long run. I was moving into my own place, after all; a room in a house right in the downtown core. Ellery and Hal were easy to talk to but I found it highly inappropriate to plumb depths within just a month of knowing each other. The leakage was there nonetheless; it showed in a newfound furtiveness and a stifling always-present nervousness. I would shout in my dreams and oversleep, skip meals and wander around for hours registering nothing. 

In the silence of my small room, some old grief sat beside me like a shadow I couldn’t shake. My family’s absence was louder than any noise this city could make and Kenya was either just yesterday or eight years ago. Every now and then I’d lapse into a specific memory of my childhood home and find it lacking in the warmth I’d expected it to carry. It unsettled me and led me into ruminating on whether I’d ever belonged there in the first place. My mind was doing a magic dissociative trick and rearranging my thoughts, drawing the phantasms closer and exposing my frailties to this new world. I felt closer to attaining some sense of place that had been out of my reach for so long but as soon as I’d get closer, my mind would draw it further away; the small room would get smaller still and while I’d inhabited smaller rooms in Kenya, they seemed larger in comparison and filled with an elusive sense of succor of those enduring hardship together. Overcome with nostalgia, I’d ring up my friend Brian in Nairobi, and as we laughed about nothing, I realized just how much I missed him, and how much I longed for the comfort of those old bonds. It could get oppressively silent here save for the heavy tread against the floorboards of my immediate roommate’s work boots. Even then, in the quiet of those Toronto days, the sense of unreality lingered, hovering at the edge of everything.

What does it mean to start over in a country that sees me first as an immigrant, then as a stranger? Perhaps I underestimated how much of my past I would need to reckon with to survive here. Language is not a barrier I have to leap over, but I have to work a bit harder with tone and inflection to make myself understood sometimes. I reflect on the ease with which mispronunciations were formerly received and grapple, as always, with the implications of mastering this tongue of the oppressor. Uganda, unlike Kenya, centered official and educational matters around English and did not take on Swahili as the lingua franca. I recall classmates being severely punished, usually with beatings, for flouting the strict rules around speaking English at school. My mother, having been a teacher, I had early access to authors such as Enid Blyton and Beatrix Porter and learned to love reading from an early age. Later, I would gravitate towards books too advanced for my age. But as my taste for foreign things became more wilfully obscure, my place in Ugandan society steadily diminished. The metal music I was favoring was preposterous, the unconventional choice of career as an artist was plain upsetting, and the sexuality that was deemed the ultimate mark of deviance was the last straw. Uganda was not my home, or at least it couldn’t be for the foreseeable future. I became a stranger there during what they call my “formative years.” The separation from family was violent and final, and friendships from school were tenuous when held against the weight of my truth. In 2014, the Ugandan president signed the anti-homosexuality bill into law. The bill initially proposed the death penalty for those guilty of same-sex relations but was later amended to life imprisonment. This legislation prompted a mass exodus of LGBTQ youth to neighbouring Kenya, marking a turning point for many of us. It was there that I encountered a sense of community for the first time in my life. For the first time, I began to reconsider what “home” might mean for me—not just as a physical space, but as a state of mind. 

“You need to write about this” Joseph had said, and he wasn’t the only one. Others I had confided in about my passion for writing echoed the same sentiment. It felt as though my entire being demanded I expunge what was buried deep within me—pour it out through some artistic medium. Music had once provided a temporary escape, but I had reached a point where I needed more than escape. Coming home, after all, was not just landing somewhere but as I was continuing to discover, finding community or a few like-minded individuals to while the hours away with. 

First, I had to face myself; reassess who I was and what “home” meant, especially now that the troubled parts of my past were dimming into the rearview. Yet, the remnants of my time in the temporary homes of my birth and exile lingered. They didn’t haunt me, but they reshaped themselves into new fears and obstacles. Relationships became laboured, and interactions that should have been simple often felt burdensome. That subtle alienation I had often reflected on morphed into a palpable sense of otherness. If I wasn’t being ignored, I stood out too harshly. I had become too self-aware, but it worked against me. I felt lost, even though I had finally arrived. As Kendrick Lamar put it, “Seems like I point the finger nowadays just to make a point.” What did my internalizing of grief and injustice actually serve me? I needed to write. It was the only way to process the alienation, the sorrow of losing family, the ostracization, and the nagging doubts about my worth. Discovering this helped me tremendously. Reading African-American, African, immigrant, and Indigenous voices pulled me out of my stagnation. I feared that Canada, too, might not be home after all. I couldn’t ignore how my understanding of the world linked my African home to North America’s extractive, neocolonial culture. Back in Uganda, people endured squalor and worked for a pittance, their expended energy building industries here. But it wasn’t one story or one truth. Indigenous people in Canada were at the forefront of resisting pipeline projects, protecting land, and challenging the extractive economy. That realization helped me reconnect to my own resistance. I felt the gaps in my education and experience more profoundly when stacked up against others I regarded as more accomplished. Could I only write about what I’d been through? I had a deeper well of imagination to mine. James Baldwin, in one of his ominously truthful moments, wrote: “You cannot describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.” I would have to pull it out of myself—pulling no punches in the process. But that could be monumentally terrifying, if not humbling. Samuel Delany, another idol of mine, wrote: “Use what you do know to write more believably about what you can only imagine.” Armed with these thoughts and theories that seeped into my own, I realized that coming home for me meant coming back to the page. 

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Delany, Samuel R. About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.

Lamar, Kendrick. “PRIDE.” DAMN. Aftermath Entertainment, 2017.

Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Idleness.” In The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame, Everyman’s Library, 2003.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Matigari. London: Heinemann, 1986.

“O Canada,” National Anthem of Canada.