In this world, my mother can weave back together her grandparentsā dreams that unraveled in Turkey. She wonāt work in factories like they did. She will write and paint. She will sing the lyrics of her grandparentsā songs to music of her own invention. She will teach her daughters to sing too. She will show them that anything is possible. Perhaps dreams can be passed from mother to child through blood, or through whispering to womb, or through the sheer power of faith that can cross oceans and mountains and estrangements, because my motherās dreams have always been my dreams: to create beauty from ink and thin air.
In this world, my father can carry his fatherās dashed hopes of an academic life across continents. In his late forties, my grandfather got the university degree colonization had denied him. He studied literature. My father got a PhD in his twenties. He dreamed he would return home with his knowledge and use it to help build the Africa the generation before him had fought so long and hard for. As a child, I watched him do this. As an adult, I believe it might have killed himāthe heartbreak from all of the suffering he could not end. Yet his dream, like my motherās, was in me too.