Free Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page A

against—love and love’s loss, a wide and rising ocean, an unexpected attachment to the high plains of the Rocky Mountains—between my childhood and now to have left me with much of a sense of certainty about anything. “Do you consider yourself African?” someone asked during the Q and A , as someone almost always does.
    I thought about giving my usual accident-of-biology-and-geography answer. I thought about explaining that identity is fluid; it is not only the color of my skin, or my mother tongue, or where I was raised, or even a combination of all those things that makes me who I am, it’s more complicated than that. I thought about appropriating a line from ex–South African president Thabo Mbeki’s famous “I Am an African” speech: “I come from those . . . who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign.” But that seemed willfully naïve. Most Africans violently reject the label of foreign, and for good reason: not only are they usually several generations into a place, but it can also be unpleasant, even life-threatening, to be identified as (for example) Malawian in Zambia, Zimbabwean in South Africa, or British almost anywhere.
    I thought about explaining that, technically speaking, in terms of passports and birthrights, I had only ever been African in the loosest sense of the word and even then for only a fraction of my life. For a few years in the 1970s, we had become Rhodesians, but the Rhodesia of those days was a pariah nation, an illegal republic unrecognized by the rest of the world. The Rhodesia of my blue passport embossed with two rampant sable antelope was a country at war with itself, out of step with social progress, and at vehement odds with prevailing global attitudes toward civil rights, racial equality, and black African independence.
    And when my family could have become legitimate Africans, at the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980, my parents relinquished our claims to Zimbabwean passports and opted to revert British. Thereafter, we continued to live in southern Africa as expatriates; “Poms,” we were scornfully dubbed, as in “Prisoners of Mother England,” or “soutpiel,” as in one foot in Britain, one foot in southern Africa, and a salty penis in the sea between. And by the time Mum and Dad embraced the obvious fact that they could never be anything but Zambian, it turned out to be easier said than done.
    It took scores of visits to the immigration office, mountains of paperwork, and years of waiting for the correct authority to recover from malaria or to return from a funeral and then to find the correct rubber stamp for Mum and Dad to be granted permanent residency in Zambia. But by that time, I had long since married Charlie, moved to Wyoming, and sworn allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. The fact that I felt more at home in southern Africa than I did anywhere else on earth, and that I missed the countries of my youth with a physical ache, didn’t make me a legitimate citizen of Zimbabwe or Zambia any more than an amputee’s cruel sensation of a missing limb renders them whole again.
    Did I consider myself African? The truth is, I longed to say, “Yes,” as I had years ago. Even, defensively, “Of course, yes.” I longed to have an identity so solid, so obvious, and so unassailable that I, or anyone else, could dig all the way back into it for generations and generations and find nothing but more and further proof of the bedrock of my Africanness. I wanted to be like my fellow speaker. No one would have asked her if she considered herself African, because she looked and sounded exactly as anyone might imagine an African should. Although maybe, if challenged, she would have rejected the label of African, and instead insisted on her identity as Nigerian, or more specifically as Igbo, or less particularly as a citizen of the whole world, or more broadly as a feminist. Perhaps she would have said she was none of the above. But we would never