Diaspora Daughters: First Generation

A circle for first-generation African and Caribbean women in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Born here. Of there. Carrying both. The phrase is short and the experience behind it is long. We are mothers' daughters and fathers' daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters and we are also the women whose passports list the country we grew up in, and the two facts coexist in every part of our lives.

Membership includes women whose parents migrated and women who themselves migrated young (before age twelve, generally) and now experience themselves as first-generation in their adopted country. The 1.5 generation and the 2.0 generation. Across African and Caribbean parental origins — Nigerian, Ghanaian, Sierra Leonean, Senegalese, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, South African, Zimbabwean, Caribbean nations across the English-speaking, French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, Dutch-speaking, and Creole-speaking traditions.

What we talk about. The two languages. The home language we speak imperfectly. The home language we cannot teach our own children because our own command is shaky. The home language our parents have stopped insisting on. The way we hear it spoken and want to belong to it more fully than our actual speaking ability allows. The slow project of formal study in adulthood. The decisions about whether to give our children language lessons.

The two job markets. The work assumptions our parents brought from their original country and the work assumptions in our adopted country. The pressure toward specific careers — medicine, law, engineering — that our parents wanted for us, often with good reason given their migration calculus. The negotiation of career paths our parents did not initially understand. The slow winning-over of parents who came around once they saw what we had built.

The relatives we are still sending money to. The remittance structure and the running monthly amount and the holiday surcharges and the emergencies. The siblings and cousins who are in school on our support. The home-country property our family is building. The aunts and uncles for whom we are now the senior earning member of the family. The slow renegotiation of those obligations as our own lives shift.

The visits. The trips home that have been formative. The trips home that have been disappointing. The trips home that did not happen because of cost, time, work obligations, or visa complications. The grandparent-funeral travel and the parent-wedding travel and the cousin-graduation travel. The growing awareness that our parents are aging and that we will need to travel more often, and the financial planning for that.

The naming work. The names our parents gave us and what they mean. The Americanized or Anglicized versions we have used in school and work, and the decision to use our full names or not. The way our children's names are negotiated with our parents and with our partners. The names we wish we had been given and what we are giving our children instead.

The marriage conversation. The expectation (from our parents, from extended family, from community) about whom we should marry. The decision to marry within our home-country ethnic group. The decision to marry outside it. The interethnic African and African-Caribbean marriages between members. The Black American interactions and the way our families have received them. The white-partner and Asian-partner and Latino-partner relationships and the cultural negotiations involved.

The identity work. The way we are read in our adopted country — as Black, as African specifically, as Caribbean specifically, as immigrant. The way we are read in our parents' country, where we are often read as foreign in our own way. The slow project of being at home in both places, even imperfectly. The slow project of being at home in ourselves.

The Black American conversation. The relationship between first-generation African and Caribbean women and Black American women, with all its specificities, including the tensions that have sometimes been there and the deep solidarity that has more often been there. The shared work across the broader Black community while honoring the specific histories.

The parenting work. Raising children who are second-generation or third-generation in our adopted country. The decisions about what to teach them about the country we left. The language-instruction decisions. The food. The holidays. The summer visits. The relationships with grandparents who are still in the home country.

The grief work. The relatives who have died in the home country while we were here. The funerals we did and did not get to. The guilt and the resolution. The slow accumulation of family loss across the distance, and the way we have built rituals to mark it from afar.

Cadence: a weekly thread, often conversational about specific current events in our home countries that we want to discuss. A monthly long-form thread on one theme. A quarterly virtual gathering. Regional in-person meetups in major diaspora cities. Subgroups by country or region of origin, for the more specific conversations.

Rules. Respect across countries of origin. No ranking of African or Caribbean nations against each other. We learn from each other's specificities. Confidentiality on family and remittance details. No screenshotting.

What we are: the circle for women whose lives have been negotiated across two cultures since the beginning. We are not the same as either of our parents' generation or our home-country peers; we are also not the same as our adopted-country peers without our migration history. We are something specific. Here is the room where the specificity gets recognized.