Abdelmahmoud, E. (2022, May 17). Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces. Ballantine Books.
Epigraph
Elsewhere.
I am a student of Migration Stories. I am pulled toward accounts of lives rearranged by the journey from one place to another. If you tell me you are an immigrant or a child of immigrants, we are going to spend some time together because I will want to hear of the ways you’ve had to stretch yourself to find your footing.
Your story might include yearning for a home you haven’t seen in some time (if ever); it might also feature the hard work of adjusting to new expectations. But neither the yearning nor the adjusting are the point. Instead, I’m interested in the constant calculus of how much of yourself to allot to each homeland and how you navigate the anguish that comes with giving one of them less.
This is Elsewhere.
Elsewhere is a sharp contrast between the here and the there.
Elsewhere is when you are compelled to note the differences in weather and temperament and attitude and air between a once home and a now home just because you walked past burning incense that reminded you of another world.
Elsewhere is not a vast land but rather a sharp edge you inhabit. It’s identity as a volcano: Elsewhere is the hot frothing outcome of two tectonic plates constantly crashing into each other. There is violence in this – two lands trying to outdo one another. But in the fissure there is also order; yes, there are earthquakes and tremors, but frequently there is a brief truce. Fragile compromise. When neither is raging for attention, you might find yourself teetering but steady, perhaps even recognizing the patterns of your sway.
Perhaps you pitch a tent in the dislocation.
Perhaps you begin to recognize, then eventually categorize, what triggers feelings of insufficiency.
Perhaps you take Hindi classes at night, or have a tattoo of a word you can’t say in a language you don’t speak. Elsewhere is an orientation, an emotional frequency, a chaotic compass that waits until you take a step in one direction that immediately points in the direction behind you.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, Epigraph
As a child born in Canada from parents that immigrated from Switzerland in Europe and the Philippines in Asia, I’ve both struggled and basked in the complex notions of my own identity and where “I am from”. This epigraph from the memoir spoke to me in ways that feel like I am not alone in inhabiting the land of elsewhere. I too have tattoos on my body, a quote from a Swiss German writer on my right ribs and a watercolour of the Philippine islands cascading from my axilla to my pelvis. These are representations of both integration and the duality of myself at the centre of these two worlds.
Son of elsewhere
Learning the Filipino anthem but not knowing what the sounds I was making actually meant
“America” as a sense of pride
Export of Filipinos as a commodity
Highlighted Passages
One of Salih’s greatest triumphs in Season is his success in pushing colonialism beyond a simplistic good/bad binary. And he does this by showing us the turbulent inner worlds that come with being colonized.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 21
There’s a name for this: “hybridity.” The living in-between. It’s a central concept to postcolonial studies, one developed by scholars like Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Hybridity creates something entirely new—neither colonizer nor colonized, but eternally suspended, living in the liminal.
Through Chantel, and through a conversation about race so loud I couldn’t tune it out, I learned that you can create a world so white, you cannot even see how white you’ve made it.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 25
The ailment is being colonized, and being convinced you like it. When you go too far in mimicry and can no longer tell what’s true and what’s just a lie for survival. The injury to the psyche comes when a colonizer creates criteria with which you can gain favour, and you don’t just play by those rules, you believe in them. Hurt people hurt people and colonized people colonize people, and I was no different.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 26
African and Arab melodies have echoed through Sudan’s history for thousands of years, but white people needed categories of who ruled over whom, and who should be the subject and who should be the ruler. This is the legacy of colonialism: it leaves you warring with yourself.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 29
What I am trying to say is: it is possible to reform your idea of yourself. It’s the only real inner work there is—going back and revisiting your horrors, and holding yourself accountable and moving forward.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 29
It is not your choice if your mind is colonized. But it is your choice to confront it. My diasporic wound is that I am still feeling my way around Blackness. Internalized white supremacy is not the n-word and the pointy hats; it’s the wobble in your step, the doubt in the back of your mind.
I do not see with one eye. I do not speak with one tongue. It took two stopovers and nineteen hours of flying time for me to become Black. It took a years-long war with myself to realize I’ve never been anything else.
You cannot banish the ghosts from your past, but you can turn from them, flailing, and limping toward redemption.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 29
And when I looked out the window, I saw the contours of a new home, and studied the lines of its face. I didn’t have to think about the totality of the nation all at once. That would be an incomprehensible reality. I could just focus on these stretches that rushed by me. Love always begins in the specifics.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 36
Where I grew up, people talk about moving to America like they might talk about moving to heaven. Those who manage to move, their families talk about them with indescribable pride: “He’s in Amreeka now,” they say, and then let the silence speak volumes.
That’s because Amreeka means a problem has been resolved. Amreeka is an all-encompassing answer. Amreeka doesn’t describe a place; it describes having made it. Made it where? The next part is never spoken out loud, but the answer is anywhere that’s Not Here.Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 43
Not Here is, of course, a magical notion. It’s what you need it to be. It’s where life is sacred and not fragile, where the price of bread is not subject to the whims of a dictator, where electricity is bountiful and continuous. Where they obey traffic laws, and there’s never been a penicillin shortage. Not Here, where they have answers to every question.
America occupied such a large place in the imagination of the people I grew up around that there was hardly any room for any other nation. Cousins plotted and planned—“One day, when I win the lottery and go to America, I’ll bring the whole family. And I’ll send two hundred dollars every month until I can bring you,” they’d promise. There was a sense that America could complete you. Almost as if to say—if you were going to leave home, why bother going anywhere else but The Place?
This is not at odds with living under threat from America—it’s the other side of the same coin. If America has the capacity to destroy whenever it feels like it, logically the place that’s safest from America’s wrath is America.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 44
America is, ultimately, this dislocation. It’s a vague idea, occasionally rendered comprehensible by the feelings it evokes. It has to be vague, because if you stare too long, the fractures become apparent and the feeling is lost. Up close, the fault lines appear. From afar, it’s almost heaven.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 45
Flying is robbing yourself of a journey—you merely apparate to your destination. A road trip forces you to fill in the blanks, and confront the spaces you can ignore from 20,000 feet.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 48
Immigrant Parents aren’t born that way. They’re created by the battle they wage against the forces lined up at their door, threatening to take what they hold dearest.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 153
I regretted the superiority I felt entitled to, and fully inhabited, when I said I wanted to break free, not knowing that to them it read as I want to break free from everything that you are. I regretted the unthinking cruelty, the time I spent waging war instead of cultivating diplomacy or laying down a soil of tenderness. I regretted every moment I’d let them think that what I wanted was distance from them. I regretted not recognizing sooner that they were doing the best they could with the tools they had.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 153
Love is a practice, a trail you carve out by travelling the same path over and over and over until it becomes familiar, until it lights the way home.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 154
History weighs on us most when we are its sole custodians—when we are the ones who have to tell it to the next generation. This is often forced, not chosen. By coming to Canada, Mama and Baba no longer had a whole village of people that remembered their twists and turns, the peculiarities of their biography. They had me. One thorny and stubborn branch, while the rest of the tree grew elsewhere. I grew up in an ocean of their stories, with every family member a wellspring watering me. But now I was the sole headwater, passing on their complexities. This can feel heavy.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 154
At the risk of over-ascribing intention to a four-year-old’s questions, her aim seems clear: she is trying to figure out just how much room in her life she has to make for the part of her history that’s from another place. It’s the birth of her very own Elsewhere —a nebula of negotiation gathering a gravitational pull.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 157
Elsewhere is a volcano, but it is one you walk into willingly. Elsewhere is a choice, and can only be a choice—you must care enough to bear the weight of the heaviness to which your heart is tethered. This is to say, you have agency in shifting your gaze from a once-home to a now-home. Elsewhere is for the middle children of diaspora, those who have definitely left but haven’t exactly arrived.
You have to let yourself be reminded that a part of you is rooted in another place; face what is missing, the empty crevices that once contained what you now lack—an old way of greeting, a pronunciation of your name that is at best an approximation of the real thing—and say thank you, for it is because of this deficit that you know yourself. Elsewhere is a conscious choice to remain in the incomplete. Your Elsewhere is like no one else’s, but it’s the same in its fragile liminality. We live on a suspension bridge, and some days are windier than others.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere, p. 157