For the most part I often feel very small, tucked into a minor corner of the universe, hoping to find something solid to hook myself onto, a small piece of real estate where I might know fully and be fully known. But the corners have always been shifting and reshaping themselves, before I can know them well enough, before I might really burrow in and get comfortable and be held. Being asked where I’m from, where I claim, where claims me, often evokes some degree of negative feeling on my part. It is almost always a reminder that nowhere I’ve lived has ever really held me.
I take some comfort in knowing that I’m not alone in this. Migration is perhaps one of the defining features of our humanness. That is, to take up our beds and walk, to leave home and found it anew. If biological determinism is needed as a justification – we are bipedal, we have opposable thumbs. Of course, the world as we know it has been so arranged that some groups of people find themselves privileged to stay in one place, often for many generations, perhaps leading them to forget that someone before them also had to migrate, that their being from a given place is conditional upon someone, an ancestor most likely, having left the place they once called home. Global patterns reveal that none of this is happenstance, especially in more recent years, as migration trends from rural areas to cities, from underdeveloped to developed countries (and because this is no accident of geography, I avoid euphemizing terms like “global south and north.”) I say all this because while the question “where are you from” carries an othering tenor, I believe that this othering stems from forgetfulness; if you look back far enough, you will find that no one is really from anywhere.
Migration is a key thread within the American fabric, in particular. While America calls itself a nation of immigrants (which a very weird oversight given the forced migration of Africans to the US or the decimation of its native American population) it seems that even among native-born and bred Americans, it’s more common to move around the US than it is for people in other Western countries, likely due to its size. I know this, authoritatively of course, because I went on a food tour in the Algarve in 2024 and our guide made a point to ask the American members of our group both where they lived and where they grew up, citing that he had observed that for the American tourists he met, these two places were often not the same. That observation did ring true for my particular experience (I’ve lived in at least four different US states and I know people who’ve moved across many more), and if there are suggestions I would offer for what to ask instead of “where are you from” I think the paired specificity of “where did you grow up” and “where do you live” is likely to provide a path to unambiguous communication between both speakers. But sometimes, often, I think people ask because they want a different kind of information entirely; that they’re actually inquiring about my cultural origin.
As direct as the question “where are you from” may seem, it actually lands as being a bit imprecise; does someone want to know where I was born, where I grew up, where I currently live, what my ethnic background is, or how I culturally identify? I suspect that I’m asked this question more often than most. I haven’t run a randomized controlled trial; this is just an intuitive hunch. It’s at least happened to me much more than I would like. While I’d like to think it’s because people take one look at my gorgeous cheekbones and immediately want to know their provenance, I suspect it’s because of the foreignness of my name, and perhaps the hint of something else in my diction. And this is fine, that something about me marks me as other within the context in which I live. But the skirting around my otherness in the form of a seemingly-innocuous question like “where are you from?” is where I take issue.
The last time it was notable, I was in Flatbush, and when I opened the door to my short-term rental and said good morning to the handyman, he replied in kind and then asked where I was from. I stuttered through a response (which should happen less often that it does, given how often I’m asked) and told him I was based in Atlanta, and he shrugged, “I thought you might have been from the Caribbean.” And then it dawned upon me that he was probably from the Caribbean himself. In America, greeting someone with “good morning” has (mindbogglingly) become formal, whereas in Caribbean or in West African countries, it is a most basic politeness. So here was an instance in which what marked me as other in an American context also perhaps marked me as familiar in an afro-diasporic context. And yet, the imprecision of his question left too much to interpretation (he might have asked, for example, “are you also Caribbean”? I would have said no, I even would have offered that I’m Nigerian) to provide a precise answer. An instance of possible connection, if not clarification, lost, due to indirectness.
A few years ago, I took a cooking class in Cartagena with a friend. On the rooftop of a hostel, with afrobeats music playing from the bar across the street, we chopped onions and garlic for the dishes we would be preparing that evening. Perhaps it was the familiarity of the music and the heat that led me to take the onion into my left palm and dice it the way my mother and aunt had taught me, sans cutting board. Annoyingly, the knife was too blunt. “Where are you from?” asked the chef’s assistant, translating from Spanish for the head chef. “I grew up outside New York, I live in Atlanta,” I replied, setting the half-onion back down on the board with defeat. She shook her head. “No, like where are you really from?” I stared back at her. Here was another Black woman, asking me that question. I knew it wasn’t an intended microaggression, though for the millions of Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans, it inadvertently can land that way, as though the inquirer is oblivious to the forced displacement that would lead someone to not be able to name where specifically in Africa they are from. Even as a first generation American, the question grates at me. “Where are you really from” sounds eerily like “what kind of Black are you?” I told her I was Nigerian, which satisfied her curiosity and perhaps the mystery behind my choice method of dicing onion. But as my friend and our tour group proceeded to prepare our patacones and shrimp boats, coconut rice and fish, and plantain chips, I kept mulling over her question. Because to claim being Nigerian outright also feels fraught to me, feels a bit like an oversimplification of my experience. As of writing this essay, I haven’t been to Nigeria in over a decade, and the last time I was there for more than two weeks, I was six years old. Everything I know about what it means to be Nigerian feels filtered through my mother and her social circles, through media like music and film. Can this constitute a valid identity?
That being said, I suppose I come from a people for whom people are more important than place. Last year, at an afrobeats party in Atlanta (yes, I am admittedly an afro-diaspora cliché), after taking a sit break because of my high heels, I returned to the dance floor, rejoining my group of friends and a newcomer, a man who asked me my name and then, upon discerning that it was Yoruba asked, “where are you from?” By now, you might anticipate how this conversation went. “I grew up on Long Island,” I said. “But where in Nigeria are you from?” he persisted. For a Yoruba person to ask where you are from, they are really asking about which people you belong to. Place seems to be a proxy for inquiries about kinship and lineage (we Yorubas are diverse). Apparently, you are from where your father is from, and if he is not from where he is from, then where his father is from. But what if you’re estranged from your biological father? What if the place he is from is a corner of the universe you have never set foot? Can you earnestly be said to be from there? Obligingly, in that moment, I told the man I was from Kabba in Kogi state, which felt. . . false. Not even like fiction, which bears the romance of intentional construction. More like an appropriation I did not want. What does it mean then if you do know where specifically in Africa, but it doesn’t feel like yours? It’s possible that I might have in that moment offered the explanation that my biological father is from Kogi state, but do you see how 1) that would have required an additional step of calculation on my part or that 2) such a response would have necessitated an inordinate degree of self-revelation a complete stranger? To date, I have yet to experience the scenario in which I am eager to discuss my particular experience with familial fragmentation and cultural dislocation with someone I just met.
Lately, I’ve noticed that it’s become commonplace for people to ask a new genre of this question. “Where’s home?” they inquire, often with a soft voice and a polite smile. And I can see how this iteration seems less abrasive than “where are you from?” “Where’s home?” certainly does feel less othering in nature, less objectifying (because that other question does at times make me feel like a misplaced packaged good). On the other hand, “home” can be so fraught for many. For example, I can hardly name any streets in the town where I grew up (having moved away when I was fifteen). Of all the places I’ve lived, the Atlanta suburb where I currently reside with family feels the least like home that I’ve ever been. One might suggest that home is less about a place than it is about a community, but what if, like me, your community is sprinkled across the different cities you have lived? To be asked where home is only evokes a sense of longing, for me, for a home I’ve not yet found. Because if anything about my life, place-wise, feels true, it is a strong sense of impermanence, often that finds me when I least want it to. Similarly, for many, the word home might suggest a sense of belonging they have yet to find. Really, the crux of things is that to be from somewhere is not simply a matter of individual choosing. Belongingness is collectively informed. I don’t feel anchored by any particular land mass or defined by my provenance from any one place. Why can’t I be from all the places which have shaped me? And does an answer to that question – small talk though it claims to be – really say much about me? I’m not sure that it does.
I think we ask one another where we are from because we seek commonality and connection, because we notice difference and want to know why it’s there, and sometimes, also because we want to alienate. But perhaps we can circumvent the awkwardness of this question by getting clear in ourselves about our motivations in asking, in being brave enough to be specific. In telling our truths, in naming our suspicions, in owning the exact nature of our curiosities, we can create the space for others to respond in kind. But if we aren’t willing to do this, then we ought not to demand it of others.
I would say the solution is for people to not ask me where I’m from. Unless, they intend to sit with me for a good five to ten minutes while I explain where I was born and where I grew up and where my parents came from and how one of them didn’t actually parent me but somebody else did and where I moved and where I went to school and where I went after and how where I live now is feels like the farthest from home I’ve ever been. Unless, of course, their intention is also to bear witness to the emotional waves that a comprehensive answer to this question will elicit; among them, confusion, estrangement, alienation, grief. Unless they have the time and space to hold these, to meet them in kind with a tantamount level of vulnerability, even if, for whoever’s asking, the answer to this question is a bit less complicated. Unless they are willing to brave these waters with me, and are prepared for the talk to neither be small nor light nor a mere chipping away at the ice.
