I am a Kenyan, an African, someone from the ‘global south.’ It is my job to prove I deserve to travel. It doesn’t matter how talented or smart or wealthy I or others like me are; we need a good passport.
As a child of many cultures, I wasn’t sure I could lay claim to one. But I learned that identity can grow and stretch, widen and encompass more than a single country or language.
There will always be liars in the focus group, but Fred was never one of them.
It’s happened for the past three days now. A three-day streak definitely qualifies it as A capitalized Thing.
In France, universal (or socialized) health care is half-NASA, half-MacGyver. And it works. I have to suspect the main objection to adopting the best healthcare system on the planet is just that it’s French.
We were three single Americans with a whiskey handle. What reception would we wake to if we fall asleep on the wrong sand?
There is a special gesture in the analog, in putting love to paper, when everything is in code.
Miraci is being the one thing blackness has always been forced to be even when unwilling—political.
Moving home to Newark has been a surreal experience because I have had to mourn places that once were, but are no longer.
There are rules to who gets to live the American dream, and who doesn’t.
As a child growing up in a landlocked state, I’d imagined the flock of gulls as a cloud of wings, calls sounding like laughter. Now I was struggling to grasp all that we’d lost.
“I console myself regularly with the fact that the problem is not unique to me, that young people everywhere are trying to figure it out.”
The magic of the Bandikui church is that it stays, rests, and remains, despite the world moving on and away from it.
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.
In Hindi, you don’t say ‘sorry;’ you ask for forgiveness. So, growing up, I made the mistake of apologizing for who I am.
“Nobody will stop a young blond girl, that’s the truth,” you said. This was when I grew angry with you, when I wanted to scrap our week-old friendship.
“I felt as if the world was coming to an end.”
The roadside cross is a jarring balance of the emotional poles, internal and external, surely an action by and for the remaining soul—not the one who has departed.
For me, loss of faith was hollowing. Can you believe in miracles without believing in God?
