My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

Ghana, America, England, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda—I could not lay claim to any of those places in an incontestable way. It has always been difficult for me to say the word home with any conviction. When I was a child, I often felt like an outsider among my own family. Between me and them were borders—geographic, spiritual, cultural, linguistic. And no sooner had we arrived in a place than we had to prepare to leave it.

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

But from where I stood, it didn’t seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.