A Homecoming

The most compelling thing I find about the Black Radical Tradition is the concept of a homecoming. A concept many of the thinkers we read spoke about, but none so much as Fanon. It was about how colonialism made you feel as if you never belonged, as if you were lesser because your skin colour darker. It made it so you saw your mother tongue and culture as secondary, inferior. And through the collective alienation of an entire people from their roots, colonization made you a stranger to yourself.

"I am my own foundation." - Fanon

What struck me the most was how all the thinkers we read about proceeded to begin their own kind of homecoming. The first journey of this homecoming they all took was deep into themselves. First they found themselves. They chose an identity for themselves (like we all must do), which gave them a root to build from. To restore themselves. To come home to themselves. To decolonize themselves.

"I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself." - Fanon

Fanon found home in struggle, Mohantry found a home in integrated discourse, Hartman and Suzanne found their home in recognition of loss, among others.

“And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in.” Anzaldua, Borderlands

To me, this has meant everything. As someone who has shifted to different countries often, I always struggled to find a home. Coming back to Pakistan was daunting because all I longed for was to live among my own people but I did not know if I would be accepted after being away for so long. The Black Radical Tradition taught me how to find myself again. And that most importantly, as Saidiya Hartman (in better words than I could ever string together) told us about her grandfather (the words I would cling to long after I read them):

“My grandfather never said Africa was our home because he didn’t need it to be. As a polyglot and a sailor, he thought of the world as his home... My grandfather discovered years back that the only home he would ever know was the imagined country, the promised land of the heart, the territory of dreams."

I have learnt, the world is my home.