Thank you for reading my posts / Substack this year. If you have enjoyed my writings, I would appreciate your support to:
- Share my Work.
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- My short story collections-Identities, Ancestries, Destinies
- For yourself/friends and family interested in human stories of migration, identity and belonging.
- We Will Lead Africa book series
- For all looking for African leadership stories to inspire further leadership action.
- Transformation After Trauma: The Power of Resonance
- for the practitioners, scholars, professionals and leaders responsible for teaching and/or facilitating change and transformation where trauma is inherent and in psychosocial development spaces.
- Grey Zone Change
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- My short story collections-Identities, Ancestries, Destinies
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This weekend, I had one of those experiences when all the noise, anxiety and chasing stopped and I was dropped into the slow motion of seeing myself again through my own eyes. It was what I call a Resonance moment in my book, Transformation After Trauma: The Power of Resonance.
Resonance Moment: A single account of a resonance story through which a transformational awakening is realized and captured.
In a room full of immigrant women, I spoke on a panel on Bridging Worlds: Nourishing Your Worth and Empowering Your Voice. What a powerful conversation, what a time of remembering who I am and why I do what I do!
The questions and our conversations were underscored with the hopes, despairs, and contradictions of migration and life journeys, the criticality of claiming self-definition and the need to own space in the midst of destructive public narratives.
As immigrants (and forced migrants/refugees), we need to remember we are worthy of dignity, our human rights are not optional and we need not apologize for our identities.
The resonance in the room reminded me why these are the stories I write about, the moments I illuminate, the communities I love to serve.
In sum, I walked away, reminding myself and the room that through the trials of these times, our assignment is to write our own lives by simply being who we are and who we aspire to be. The systems around us may demand silence and sameness, our lives may be fraught with inner struggles, but we serve no one, especially ourselves, by trying to be what we are not. As Maya Angelou reminded us, we must first belong to ourselves before we can find our place in the world.
It was a roller coaster of emotions, with the highs and lows of migration journeys, past, present and generational, palpable in the room. There was gratitude for the blessings of these journeys. There were tears of despair at the roadblocks and ongoing obstacles. It was the mirror not only of life journeys but of this moment. This Christmas and holiday season comes with all its highs and lows. Peace and war. Joy and sorrow. Hope and despair. And ultimately, the choice of responding with love in spite of the hate and indifference so many marginalized communities face today. I left the circle of sisterhood, inspired as I often am in moments of resonance, to write this short piece to capture what immigrant life can be like, away from home, at a time like Christmas.
Tale of A Diaspora Christmas
She scrapped the food scraps into the organic waste bin and shuddered. This was more than scraps. It could be someone’s meal anywhere in the world. Involuntarily, she admonished the kids: “I’ve told you to stop wasting food! There are kids in warzones or refugee camps with no food today! Forget refugees, there are food insecure people in communities right here…”
“yes, yes, we know…” the girl said, dragging her brother away by the arm, clearly determined to drown out my familiar rant.
I sighed, remembering my own brother’s comment when we dropped him at the airport after his most recent visit.
“I’ve loved hanging out with my niece and nephew. They are growing up well. It’s good that they have a softer life than we did, right?”
I heard the question in his voice again now and flinched. I looked out my kitchen window as I finished washing up. It was Christmas. Sparkles and light and the smell of cinnamon in the air. I was supposed to be full of the peace, hope, joy and love of the Advent season. I shook my head as if to exorcise the gloom descending on it like a helmet.
“You ok, mom?”
I felt the warmth of a small hand on the back of my knee and turned to see my 5-year-old son looking up at me with the question lingering in his large oval eyes. I grinned and his face softened.
“Yes, I am,” I said, as I picked him up for a tickle before depositing him, wiggling and squealing to his sister who was setting up a snowflake craft station. I gathered their iPads off the floor on my way to switch on the TV. The news spewed more global doomsday and dystopian power and politics machinations. I switched to a Christmas romcom. My phone buzzed. It was a WhatsApp video message from my cousin in Freetown. My smile stretched to my ears as I hit play and watched my nieces dancing with the neighbourhood children to the classic Sierra Leone Christmas song: Api Christmas we nor die oh! [It’s a Happy Christmas because we didn’t die this year!]. Such joy and celebration as their little bodies pulsated to the clap and beat in gratitude for life. They lost their 45-year-old dad this year, supposedly to a tetanus infection. They already knew how needlessly fragile life could be there. But perhaps, they did not yet know it didn’t have to be that way. My eyes were misty as my phone beeped again. The message read:
“Cousin, please send us some money. Things are tough this Christmas. I just got laid off from the NGO. All our Western funding from abroad has been cut.”
These are challenging times, but this holiday and in the aftermaths of being with communities imbued with trials and triumphs, I offer this, whatever your stories are from this year and wherever you find yourself in this season.
- Peace: Find your peace and make a peace offering for those in wars. From writing to speaking to donating, to volunteering, to living the principles of nonviolence, find your way to be part of a world that centers peace over the human destruction of wars to resolve its conflicts. Your peace offering may start right where you are, by being the one to take action towards reconciliation in an unresolved conflict that needs resolution.
- Joy: In moments of sorrow, foreboding joy, and our endless social comparison in a social media age, self-flagellation and joy-denial does not serve anyone. It does not help you, or those on whose behalf you may feel guilty for the abundance/blessings that you do have. Instead, choose to engage in the things that give you joy and find a way to serve the needs that cause you sorrow.
- Hope: In moments of despair at the things beyond your control that seem to have humanity spiralling towards self-destruction, breath. Recognize the issues that cause you despair and choose active hope. Active hope is the capacity to exercise the agency you do have, by taking change actions within your sphere of influence. Do your part and trust that as a collective human system, we will find our way forward.
- Love: And more than anything, choose love. I believe in a theory of social change anchored in the human capacity for love. As I write in Transformation After Trauma (p.152):
I believe firmly in the ultimate power and antidote of love to transcend suffering and propel people and human systems to change and development. Like Martin Luther King Jr., I believe that love is the most durable and enduring power in the world and ascribe to his now famous quote that: “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” In the same sermon in which he says this as chronicled in Strength to Love, he writes that: “Modern Psychology recognizes what Jesus taught centuries ago: hate divides the personality, and love in an amazing and inexorable way unites it.” He described how this is true all round for the ones who suffer, as well as the ones who oppress and that love creates the foreground for forgiveness and transformation…
So this holiday season:
- What is your peace offering?
- How will you welcome Joy?
- How will you practice active hope?
- How will you love across divides for the sake of your own health, wellbeing and transformation?
Sending you peace, joy, hope and love in this season and for the year ahead as we usher in 2026!