American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  Although I embraced my Nigerian self at home and on the weekends, I still struggled with being different at school. Like most kids, I preferred to blend in. I used to hate the prominent gap between my top front teeth. Of course, kids made fun of me for it, calling my two front teeth Chiclets. My mother was always asking me to smile when she took photos, but I never wanted to open my mouth enough for the gap to show. As soon as all my friends at school began getting braces, I begged my mother over and over again to get me braces to help close the gap. She never entertained this idea, but I wouldn’t let up. She finally grew tired of my persistence and sat me down to explain.

  “Uzo, I will not get you braces and here’s why. You have an Anyaoku gap.”

  She went on to tell me the history of her family—a lineage of Anyaokus people who were known and revered for this gap. She told me that it pained her to see me embarrassed by it, because it was actually considered a sign of beauty and intelligence to her people. Parents would pray their children would be born with it. People want it. She looked me deep in the eyes and with her lovely, thick accent proclaimed:

  “Uzo, you have history in your mouth.”

  And then she revealed to me that she had been sad all her life that she had not been born with the gap. After this revelation, I didn’t immediately begin loving my teeth. I didn’t even stop asking for braces. But it did blow my mind to imagine my mother as sad or desperate about anything. It was hard to picture her as anything less than the serious and indomitable force she always presented. I knew she had endured a great deal in her life, but these hardships only made her seem even more otherworldly. For example, I knew she had survived polio as a child, which caused her to develop “K leg.” Her lower leg was extremely thin and slanted, making it impossible for one of her heels to properly touch the ground. And yet, she insisted on running track and playing tennis as a teenager. When the headmaster of her boarding school called my grandmother and urged her to force her daughter to accept the fact that she was “a cripple,” my grandmother wasn’t having it. She told the headmaster that her daughter could do anything she wanted if she worked hard enough. Sounds like the same thing I always heard as a kid. And sure enough, my mother kept at it and ended up a college champion in tennis. It almost made sense to me that one of her heels didn’t properly touch the ground. Neither one of her feet touched the ground in my imagination. She could probably do anything she wanted if she set her mind to it.

  Like her mother before her, she was an unbreakable statue-of-a-woman to me. She and my grandmother had even lived through war and displacement in Nigeria, but it still never registered what that really meant, or what effect it had on me.

  I didn’t get the chance to know my grandmother very well before she died. The first memory I have of her is kneeling to bathe my newborn baby sister, Chi-Chi, in our bathroom. I was only three years old at the time, but I can still picture the smile on her face and the colorful sweater she was wearing to shield her from the balmy eighty-degree weather that August in Massachusetts.

  She lived in Nigeria all her life, but she was staying with us for several months as part of the Igbo tradition called omugwo in which a grandmother comes to help her daughter in the months after a new baby is born. Even though my mother was an experienced parent by the time Chi-Chi was born, omugwo honors the idea that it truly does take a village to raise a child. Or five children in my mom’s case. Women in Igbo culture are not left all alone with the demands of a newborn baby. The grandmother sometimes stays a full year to help with childcare, keeping house, and cooking nourishing foods for the breastfeeding mother. My mother told me that she never once saw or even heard of postpartum depression in Nigeria, perhaps because the community of support for mothers is part and parcel of the childbirth and mothering experience.

  After my grandmother’s stay for omugwo, I didn’t see her again until my first trip to Nigeria when I was eight years old. My grandmother had asked that her entire family gather in Nigeria to visit her. She had children all over the world—in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia—and she was insisting she see all of them and all of her grandchildren this year. Most of the family was going for Christmas, but my mother had just gone the previous year with my infant baby brother. It was a big schlep with a baby and all her children, and since she had just recently visited, the decision was made that she would skip the trip. Chi-Chi and I would go with my father the following August.

  I was very excited to travel to the place my parents came from. It would be my first time on an airplane, and that alone was thrilling. I didn’t have a strong grasp of geography, but I knew I would be crossing an ocean and that all those people we always talked to on the phone would be on the other side of it. I couldn’t wait to meet my cousins. I had no idea what I was walking into, but I can still remember the unforgettable feeling of stepping out of the air-conditioned Pan Am plane into that heat. That heat. It washed over me. It felt like opening an oven door. It was sensory overload for me, because there is almost nowhere in the United States like that. There was an overwhelming and sometimes unforgivable smell there. The smell of heat, yes, but also the smell of burning wood, fire, work, and soil. The earth there was a surprising shade of bright red that I hadn’t ever seen in nature.

  And color was all around us in Nigeria. Everyone spoke the language. Everyone ate the Nigerian food that tasted so much better than it did when we tried to re-create it back home, having to substitute ingredients. My eight-year-old brain was hit with the strange reality that all of this—the food, the language, the clothing—was a real way of life here. This is a real place where people move through the world this way all the time. These people weren’t dropped out of the sky—like me, coming in from an airplane across the world. This was my mother’s home. She grew up getting to be here and live this way every. Single. Day.

  And this was my home too.

  I was wildly aware that my thoughts were moving quickly. I was feeling myself connecting with something new. I journaled very diligently at this time in my life, and it was almost too much for my young self to be able to write fast enough to keep up with my racing thoughts.

  On the day we went to visit my grandmother where she was staying at my aunt’s house, my father brought our video camera. In Nigeria, electricity isn’t reliable, and it happened to be completely out the day we visited. As the sun set, we arrived at my aunt’s house and surrounded my grandmother at her bedside. We spoke by the dim lights of kerosene lanterns. As chance would have it, the light on our camcorder also wasn’t working, so when the room grew darker, the footage my father shot wasn’t visible. He captured mainly just darkness and audio recordings of our conversation. But I still remember what I saw. My grandma was very old. She was diabetic and very tired—but she still had an energy and intensity that came through. She had a scarf tied around her head, and her hands looked so worn. So weathered. The lines and wrinkles in her hands told stories of her life that I wanted to know. She didn’t feel real to me. I was in awe.

  We were the last of all her grandchildren to come home to visit her. They sat her up, and she began speaking to Chi-Chi and me in Igbo.

  “I’m your grandmother. You look so good.”

  We may have smiled in the dark room, or maybe just widened our eyes.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked.

  “She’s good,” we managed to say.

  “Are you being good for her?”

  “Yes,” we said.

  “Good. Continue to be good to her. Tell her that her mommy loves her. And that I miss her.”

  As these words came out of her mouth, I remember being astonished. Floored. This is my mother’s mommy. Somehow it hadn’t ever occurred to me to imagine my solid-as-a-rock mother as a child—who had a mom. As far as I was concerned, my mother’s life had begun at the age of twenty-five, when she came to America. I had never seen photos of her as a little girl—or any evidence whatsoever of her childhood. I never had the experience of going through
artifacts of her life the way you often do when you visit a grandparent. Most of their personal keepsakes, papers, photos, and heirlooms had been lost over the years due to the circumstances of war. My grandparents had fled from the north back to the southeast, where Igbos are from. They lived in a time and place where people were oppressed by war, homes burned down, family members killed or slowly starved out of entire regions.

  That night, when I went back to the place we were staying, I journaled about the entire experience. It felt so special and important to me. I wrote about what it felt like to see my grandmother, what she was wearing, what she said to me and Chi-Chi, how my thoughts turned to my mom when I saw her. The next morning, we drove to visit my cousin Ijay, and when she opened the door, we were greeted with shock. My grandmother had died that morning.

  It was Chi-Chi’s birthday, and we had to say goodbye to the woman who had bathed her as an infant, the woman who had bathed our mother as an infant. I thought about these things carefully on the plane ride home.

  I don’t remember how my mother was told that her mother had passed away. I don’t know what her exact response was or how she handled the fact that she had missed one last chance to say goodbye. But I know it must have been hard for her to bear that kind of regret for not going to Nigeria with us. We gave her the videotape—which was heartbreakingly just an audiotape—of my grandmother, and I showed her my journal entries. These were the last accounts she had of my grandmother. She placed them in a safe-deposit box along with other items dating no earlier than her twenty-fifth birthday.

  Chi-Chi’s birthday party was to take place the weekend after we returned. One day, she and I were playing when Mom called Chi-Chi into the kitchen, where she was cooking. We ran in to our mother and saw her standing in front of the stove. She had her eyes closed for a moment and she breathed deeply, as if to gain composure.

  “Chi-Chi.” She paused.

  “Would it be okay if we don’t have your birthday party this year?” Another pause.

  “Mommy’s really sad.”

  She looked so broken. All of the sudden my immovable, fierce mother was just a human. A daughter. A little girl who had lost her mom.

  When you are the child of an immigrant, as I am, you never experience the youth of your parents. You never see them as kids who are in the sweeter side of a parent-child relationship. You can lose this window into their humanity. They are the saviors, the dreamers, and the sacrificers. Not the innocent or vulnerable people.

  Several years later, when I was older, my mother unexpectedly recovered a few of her old family photos from a relative. I finally got to see a black-and-white photo of her as a child. In the photo she is four years old, sitting for a formal portrait with six of her siblings. Their faces are all stoic—the way you had to be in those times when you were being photographed by a professional. Her two sisters’ dresses match hers, and her tiny little arm is wrapped protectively around the baby seated to her right, my godfather Ifeanyi. Even as a baby, she looked like a strong, protective little mama. I felt as though I was looking at someone I knew so well, and yet meeting a very important part of her for the very first time.

  My mother was also able to show me a few other items she’d recovered—an old report card that was of course full of A’s, and one of her championship tennis trophies. There was something about seeing her name engraved on the little silver plate at the base of the trophy. This simple tarnished artifact helped me believe details about her life that had formerly seemed like legends or tall tales. And even today, I am still constantly recalibrating my tenderness for my mother, seeing her as a person and not just the strong, brave, and unchangeable force who raised me.

  I am grateful to know her as a whole person now, one who has had pain and youth and fault. And in fact, this only deepens my delight in worshipping her for the royalty that she is. I still relish the act of mimicking her beautiful accent (which I do often) and seeking her approval for my adult goals and accomplishments. I can see my mother in myself all the time. We butt heads, sure, but we are so much alike. “We’re of the same rib,” she used to always say to me, when I was young and didn’t understand this phrase. But I see this now more than ever. Not only do we look exactly alike—I am constantly approached at parties and told “You must be Noyem’s daughter”—but we understand each other so well. And people we are close to tend to relate to us the same way—as trusted and valued listeners. It is not an understatement to say that my mother and I are the same person. And it is because of her that I have even a fraction of the strength she has. It is because of her that I am proud of my Nigerian heritage. Many people know my name now. It flashes across TV screens, and no one questions it. Because I don’t. It is because of my mother that I am no longer embarrassed of the gap between my teeth. I will always be honored to share her history—our history—with my smile.

  My mother may not have a lot of remnants from her childhood—or many keepsakes to pass down to me. But she has given me a greater inheritance—my soul, my spirit, my strength, and my Nigerian pride.

  When I was a senior in high school, I was asked to give a speech at my graduation ceremony. My parents were so proud that I was living up to all they had worked for. They planned a huge graduation party for me where we would invite all of my classmates, and their parents—as well as all our family and friends, many of whom are Nigerian.

  When my mother asked what kind of food I wanted to serve at the party, I surprised her by choosing Nigerian dishes like jollof rice, egusi soup, moi moi, and coconut rice instead of hamburgers and hot dogs. When my mother asked me where I would like to buy my graduation dress for the ceremony and party, I surprised her again.

  “Mommy, I want to wear traditional clothes. And I want all our family and Nigerian friends to come dressed in Nigerian clothes too.”

  “Why?” she asked. Probably masking her excitement, because she is an expert at masking any hasty or sudden emotion.

  “I want all my friends to see us. I want them to know exactly who we are and where we’re from. And I want us to stand proud in that,” I said.

  On the day of the ceremony, I remember standing at the podium, looking out into the audience and spotting that Nigerian cluster of vibrant greens, purples, reds, and yellows among the sea of my school colors—white and blue. After, at the party, my school friends were in awe of my Nigerian guests, who walked around proud as peacocks in their traditional clothing. They had seen Coming to America maybe, but never real Africans up close and personal. I remember my friends telling me how gorgeous and regal we looked. I was proud to be the one to show them the beauty and richness of our culture.

  It was a wonderful, fun party. I was walking on air because I had made my mother proud in more ways than one. I remember seeing her gliding around the party, her feet barely touching the ground as she tended to guests and food, wearing her white lace ashoke with a jewel-green ichafu, positively beaming from the inside out. It was my big day, of course, but she was the queen of that party.

  Linda Sarsour is an award-winning racial justice and civil rights activist, seasoned community organizer, and mother of three. She is most known for her intersectional coalition work and for building bridges across issues and racial, ethnic, and faith communities.

  Linda Sarsour

  I WAS BORN INTO a community of radical love. It echoed through my home and down the streets of my neighborhood. Sunset Park was a noisy, happy place, filled with Palestinian, Dominican, Mexican, Ecuadoran, and Honduran families. A place where families and neighbors were one in the same. You did for your neighbor just as you would for an immediate family member. You knew their names, what they liked to eat, what music they listened to, and who they prayed to. Your block was your home. Your hood was your village. I didn’t know at the time that this kind of love could be considered radical. Unusual. Powerful.

  I am a Palestinian-American Muslim woman who wears a hijab. So I’ve been made painfully aware that some people ruffle when I use the word radica
l. But when I describe the loving place I grew up in, it is a word that truly applies. Brooklyn is a place I love like a human being. It is the place where I learned the meaning of radical love.

  I was my mother’s first child, born in a hospital in Brooklyn, delivered by a Muslim Palestinian immigrant, Dr. Ahmad Jaber, who whispered in my ear the call to prayer just moments after I was born. Like all Muslim babies, the first sounds I heard upon entering the world were words of love. I was welcomed into life, into my neighborhood, into my family with great enthusiasm. Even though my parents should have been disappointed to have a baby girl instead of a boy, they were overjoyed at my arrival. In Arab culture, everyone wants a son first and foremost, because boys can carry on the family name. It is customary to hope aloud that your first child will be a boy. People in my culture do not shrug and say, “Oh, we don’t care about the gender—as long as the baby’s healthy!” No. They pray openly and unabashedly for a son. But my parents had a girl, and my name was to be Linda. Inspired by a pop song that was very popular all over the Middle East at the time about a man who loved a girl named Linda.

  My dad was also a man who loved a girl named Linda. As his oldest child, I was his pride and joy. His love was so vocal that for several years into my childhood, people in the neighborhood used to call him Abu Linda (the father of Linda). This nickname made his eyes twinkle, his spirit shine. He loved nothing more than his children. In a span of ten years, my mother gave birth to five daughters and two sons. The five daughters came first—one after the other, five of us in a row. Every time my mother would have another daughter, people would say, “Poor lady, inshallah [God willing] next time it will be a boy.” Not my dad. He would be so elated every time my mother had a daughter that when he would come home from the hospital acting so giddy, our neighbors and family would rise up from their seats thinking surely Dad’s glee meant that this time it was a boy. Then my dad would tell them my mother had given birth to another girl, and it always left them puzzled.