Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local by Taiye Selasi c/o TED

Overview

When someone asks you where you're from … do you sometimes not know how to answer? Writer Taiye Selasi speaks on behalf of "multi-local" people, who feel at home in the town where they grew up, the city they live now and maybe another place or two. "How can I come from a country?" she asks. "How can a human being come from a concept?"

Key Takeaways

On the fiction of nationality within modern human experience:

I like my critics was imagining some Ghana where all Ghanians had brown skin or none held UK passports. I’d fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets. The privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience.

Speaking with Colum McCann that day, the penny finally drooped. “All experience is local,” he said. “All identity is experience,” I thought. I’m not a national,” I proclaimed on stage. “I’m a local. I’m multi-local.”

On prioritizing culture over country when defining home:

Culture exists in community, and community exists in context. Geography, tradition, collective memory: these things are important. What I’m questioning is primacy. All of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation, as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was. What are we really seeking, though, when we ask where someone comes from? What are we really seeing when we hear an answer?

On class informing locality more than nationality or race:

Then we have the scholar William Deresiewicz’s writing of elite American colleges. “Student’s think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan — never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.” I’m with him. To call one student American, another Pakastini, then triumphantly claim student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. 

The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeep in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than nationality implies.

On adaptive beings and impermanent places:

Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them. I’m often asked if I plan to “go back” to Ghana. I go to Accra every year but I can’t “go back” to Ghana. It’s not because I wasn’t born there. My father cannot go back either. The country in which he was born, that country no longer exists. We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. Something, somewhere will always have changed, most of all, ourselves.