Calle Autumn
@autumncalle7479
14 days ago

My grandmother’s hands were maps of a country I’d never seen. The lines of her palms weren’t just lifelines; they were the dirt roads of a village I’d only heard about at night, when the generator hummed and the air smelled of kerosene and jollof rice that had been simmering for hours. She’d trace patterns on my arm, telling me stories of the mango tree in her father’s compound, the one that dropped fruit so sweet it made your teeth ache. I was born in Brooklyn, raised on the smell of subway grates and the sound of sirens blurring into a lullaby. For years, I thought my art was broken because it didn’t fit neatly into her world or mine. It wasn’t broken. It was honest.

The diaspora experience is a constant negotiation. I’m not fully Nigerian the way my cousins in Lagos are, but I’m not fully American the way my white classmates were. I exist in the hyphen. And that hyphen is a brutal teacher. It taught me that home is a verb, not a place. It taught me that memory is a muscle you have to exercise daily, or it atrophies into nostalgia. When I write, I can’t pretend I’m writing from one stable center. I’m writing from the edge of two worlds, where the ground is loose and every step is a risk. That’s where the honesty lives.

I remember sitting at a family reunion in Maryland, a sprawling potluck of aunties and uncles who all had the same surname but wildly different accents. My cousin who grew up in Johannesburg was laughing about something his Zulu grandmother used to say. My aunt from London rolled her eyes, sipping her ginger beer while complaining about the weather. And there I was, the quiet one in the corner, trying to hold all these versions of my family in my head without dropping them. That night, I wrote a poem about a single yam traveling from a farm in Benue State to a supermarket in Harlem, getting sliced and diced and fried into plantain chips, sweet and salty, never quite the same as the original but still nourishing. That poem was more honest than anything I’d ever written because it didn’t try to be one thing. It embraced the fragmentation.

Being an artist in the diaspora means you can’t afford the luxury of a single narrative. You have to hold three truths at once: the beauty of your heritage, the pain of displacement, and the awkwardness of not quite belonging anywhere. That discomfort is fuel. It makes you check your own biases. It makes you question whose story you’re telling and why. When I write a scene set in Lagos, I’m writing from a place of memory, research, and longing. I’m not pretending to be an expert. I’m a student of a language I barely speak, a guest at a table I was invited to but didn’t set. That humility keeps my work honest. I can’t fake the details because the details are what I’m chasing.

My latest story is about a woman who runs a food truck in Atlanta that serves suya and soul food. She’s not trying to reconcile the two cuisines; she’s just trying to pay her rent and honor her mother’s recipes. That tension, that quiet refusal to pick a side, is the most truthful thing I know. It’s not about being torn. It’s about being whole in a way that only makes sense to people who have had to carry multiple homes in their chests. The diaspora doesn’t make you less of an artist. It makes you more of a witness. And the best art is always witness.

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