By Elijah Jagne

It is a strange thing, to come home to a place you’ve never been.

Before landing in Accra a few days ago, I had never set foot on the continent of Africa. That sentence is harder to write out than I initially expected. In one sense, it’s tangled in shame. In another sense, in questions of identity and the complicated family history I’ve spent years trying to suppress or make peace with. I’ve traveled across the world, thirteen countries by my last count, but never to the continent my blood remembers. I am ashamed at how long it took me to come.

I am Gambian-American. My father was born and raised in The Gambia, one of the smallest and poorest countries in mainland Africa. But I’ve never been. And for most of my life, I wasn’t entirely sure if I really wanted to.

My father and I have a complicated relationship.

I love him, but there is distance. Physical. Emotional. Generational. Growing up, I was raised almost entirely by my mother, a woman of deep strength and selflessness, who worked tirelessly to give me a stable life. My father, though present at times, was fractured, and very flawed in ways that shaped my childhood and the way I viewed the part of me that came from him.

And so, for a long time, I kept Africa at arm’s length.

When people asked about my heritage, I would pivot. I would say I was just Black or just “from Portland.” I wasn’t ashamed of being Gambian, but I was disconnected from it. It felt abstract. Distant. A place I didn’t know, tied to a man I didn’t fully understand.

But then I came here. Not to The Gambia, but to Ghana, and something cracked open.

It’s been difficult. Joyous in some ways. But very very difficult in others.

From the moment I stepped off the plane, I felt something. Not clarity, no. Far, far from it actually. It was something more tender. A sort of stirring. A feeling that I couldn’t name, but that I’ve since come to believe was a kind of recognition. Like a part of me was whispering, “Oh. Here we are. Not home exactly, but close.” In just a few days, I’ve felt more than I can fully process. There’s joy, but there’s also grief. A sense of shame that, while I am finally in Africa, I am in the wrong part of it. So close. Just two countries away is my Grandmother, my cousins, my aunties and uncles. But I won’t be able to see them during this trip, and that hurts.

I spoke with my Grandma yesterday. She speaks very little English and I speak very little Wolof. Our conversation was, as always, shallow, our communication obstructed by language barriers. But she’s always so happy to hear my voice, to see me, always passing the phone around to those around her just to show her grandson.

She’s not long for this world, and I can see it in her face. I am so very afraid that she will never get to meet me in our homeland. That breaks my heart. But it’s not an inevitability.

There is a possibility here, for the start of a process. Beginning the slow, imperfect work of reconnecting.

To my roots. To myself. To my name, Elijah Babucarr Jagne.