all that I ask of you is to stay past the pain for the pleasure.” – Goapele and Dwele – “You”

 

I remember this today, as I wind down from my full day of classes, 2 presentations, and a mandatory seminar. All week I have been fretting about these two presentations, because I am not the best public speaker. My knees shake, my voice trembles, throat dries up, my thoughts are all jumbled, I’m a Black girl in a predominantly white institution, carrying lots of immigrant baggage: A recipe for disaster.

I try to make my words sound like the white students in my class.

Remember to enunciate, Rita.

Don’t talk too fast.

Avoid contractions.

Take the Rexdale out of your speech.

Take the T-dot blackgirlswag out of your body posture and facial expressions.

Make eye contact.

Smile often.

Repeat.

This is my daily struggle with each week in graduate school. You see, my imposter syndrome is coloured with all the layers of being Black and African and female and immigrant in a pale world. Despite years of “integration”, as one fellow Ghanaian student put it today, I still get nervous in a room full of white folks. And that is a hard confession. This same Ghanaian friend thinks that my many years of living in Canada should have helped with my “acculturation process” (-forgive him, he’s a sociologist). But in fact, every day I am fighting for dear life in this white supremacist system. I have to work at decolonizing every damn day. It’s a struggle to re-member what I never had has always been fragmented, while surviving in a country that never really wanted me -merely paid lip service to cultural diversity and multiculturalism. With all the Black feminist work I’ve read, all the sister circle reasoning sessions, all the decolonizing and deconstructing I’ve had to and have done over the better part of a decade, I still find myself questioning if I’m good enough supposed to be here. And the higher up I go, the fewer brown faces I see. The deeper the demand for “academic rigor”, the deeper the lactification. Every time a student uses a word I have not encountered, I think “Shit, how come I didn’t know that? Elmbank Middle School didn’t teach me that. Does everyone else know what she’s talking about?”

I have shame about talking about my immigrant baggage. My entire life I’ve tried to avoid those “Dangerous Minds” moments. Well-meaning white female teacher wants to know my struggle. Connect with me. Hear my sob immigrant story. I don’t need white people to repeat that stuff. Use my name in outside conversations. A model of the immigrant par excellence. Confirm their racist, sexist and classist biases about coloured girls. Nope. Not me. I am not the one. Never have been. Most of these students have no idea what it means for me to be here. Last-born child, first PhD in my immediate family. The tremendous pride and weight of it all.

Add to this that my work is firmly rooted in critical race consciousness and theory. I am literally thinking about race ALL. DAMN. DAY. My interior life is defined by this work. It’s hard not to see how it plays out in every day interactions, and even harder not to be demoralized by it.

So, in these moments, I have to remember why I am here. And no, not the direct justifications that led me here like hating my 9-5 non-profit, a shoddy labour market and my two year-long ongoing quarter-life crisis. But the real reason -the reason that is at the bottom of my gut. The core of my being.

I care about Black people.

I owe everything to the communities that raised me. I have a responsibility to Ghana, to Africa. I am trying to reclaim the cultures and traditions that were lost in my parents’ migration, but also honour the perspective that was gained in settlement. The type of perspective that only a second-generation Ghanaian-Canadian queer-identified feminist kaakyire* could offer. I desire to cultivate an intellectual life. It is the only way I know how to be in this world. I hold on to these things when grad school gets too tough, when I am suffocated by whiteness.

I have a story to tell. We all have stories to tell. And no one can tell our stories for us. We owe it to those that made it possible for us to be here. For those that will come after us.

 

*kaakyire means last born in Twi

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Rita Nketiah is a Doctoral Student at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where she is currently studying in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research. Her research interests include Second-Generation African-Canadian identity, gender and sexuality, and the role of Diasporas in (African) Development. She is committed to ongoing conversations as a site of change, social transformation, and healing.