Aged five, my mother takes me to a Matisse exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay. A few months later, I am given an album by Zap Mama called Adventures in Afropea. I listen to it obsessively until I know it by heart, every croon, whoop and grunt. My mother picks up the case one day and observing the five young women on the front, remarks that the band is very métissé. They are all a different shade of brown. Suddenly, it dawns on me. I turn to her triumphantly and proclaim, “Je suis Matisse!”

For the next two years, I share this information proudly with anyone who’ll listen. I have proof. “Ma Maman, elle est café, mon Papa, il est lait et moi, je suis café au lait.” It’s a neat little theory. For now, the world makes sense, I’ve got it all under control.

I’m about seven when the school calls my mother in for a meeting. There’s a problem with the inscription form; she’s left the ‘Race’ section blank.

Yes, we understand that the child is of mixed origin, but you have to pick one of the boxes, they say. Is she Black or is she White?  

My mother finds the whole thing absurd, she raises her voice. 

Nonetheless, when we leave the Principal’s office, I am Black. The proof is right there on paper. An angry tick in a little box. 

A year later, we leave the States and move to Cambridge. My new classmates make fun of me for having an American accent. I quickly make amends. 

Adapt or die, isn’t that the nature of evolution?

I’m eighteen when I return to Cameroon for the second time. I step off the plane into the thick heat. The colours in the airport are muted, the pigment stripped away by time and dust. Humidity hangs heavy on everything, causing faces to droop and clothes to crumple. 

My aunt Jeanette is waiting for us at the gate. She smiles toothily, an extreme version of my mother’s smile. 

Outside, resistance is futile. The evening air saturates all of my senses at once. I’ve been here before but in another country, maybe India. Traffic, people, smells, sounds, everything is dialed up on loud. Looking around, I notice that there isn’t a single right angle. 

We wait for a taxi to appear. Those who pass by close enough to notice us stare at me unabashedly, shielded by their anonymity. Apparently, I’m not fooling anyone. A few of them feel compelled to say something. Something, something, “la blanche”. There is no aggression, just the naked element of novelty. 

Here, strangers pick a box for you. 

My aunt Albertine and my mother sit in my living room, talking. I say talking, I mean gossiping. Africa has an oral tradition. They’re storytelling. 

An endless stream of dialectal babble fills my ears, punctuated now and again by a staccato interjection of surprise or disbelief, but mostly commiserative cooing at what the other is saying. The bamileke thrive on empathy. 

I don’t speak dschang, so I spectate mutely from the sidelines feeling like an honorary member of a secret society. I listen to their music, its distinctive melody, its rhythm. The first, second and third act. 

From time to time, a French word makes a guest appearance, giving meaning to a half-finished sentence. 

More proof that we all got to where we are via somewhere else. 

The third act has reached its cathartic climax; both women are now shaking their heads in the aftermath of the exchange. After a while, my aunt turns to ask me, when am I planning on having children? For the bamileke, being childless is a downright tragedy. 

I tell her sometime next week, depends on my schedule. She knows I’m teasing and smiles. 

She is the second of seven and has eight kids.

One day we’re invited to church by a woman my mother has recently met. She’s a black… African-American lady, who works for a charity that helps to create after-school activities for inner city kids. My mother is a dance teacher and she wants to get her involved. The church is in Harlem and it takes us the whole morning on the train to get there from Princeton. Inside, it’s more like an auditorium than a church and I vaguely feel as if we’re about to take our seats for a concert. I’m not entirely wrong. For the next three hours, the congregation writhes, mutters, shrieks, dances. Hands are flung up to the skies in gratitude or in supplication for mercy, handkerchiefs are produced, the tears are a’flowing; Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, Amen. 

My mother has a headache by the time we leave. Later, I hear her in hysterics on the phone to her sister. 

My mother calls me on a weeknight with good news. One of her cousins’ eldest daughters has passed her final year exams.  She is particularly fond of the girl and is overjoyed by her success. 

I remember that I met the girl’s father when we visited them in Yaoundé; a self-proclaimed preacher of sorts and my uncle by marriage.  Five minutes into our first encounter, he began to ask me what I knew of Satan and his diabolical ways. Did I know that he hides himself if the lyrics of rock music, lurks between the pages of books which aren’t the Holy Bible, always ready and waiting to lead me into temptation? I did not know, I say. 

Mr. Uncle asserts himself in the world by talking loudly in order to drown out reason and logic. He blinds himself with his faith in order to avoid the embarrassment of having to look his failings in the eye. Engaging in activities of government corruption is a trifling matter when you’re a god-fearing man. 

Absolution through prayer will save us all. 

“So, where are you from?”, a banal question, but one that still makes me falter and one to which I have no concise answer. “You want the short version or the long version?” Sometimes, I get people to guess. Indian, Brazilian, Moroccan, Samoan, Chinese, Mongolian, Spanish, Algerian. For every wrong answer, they have to buy me a shot.

I’m certainly not short of options. Or drinks for that matter.

Parts of my mother’s Africa reside in her veins and her tongue, others in whitewashed memories. Sometimes it appears in the form of an urge that leads her straight to Brixton market in search of dried fish and plantain, or in the absent-minded whistling of some childhood song taught to her by the nuns at school. Roman Catholicism is a recurrent theme for her. It comes and goes in her family, always in varying degrees of dilution, but ever present. She has embraced a million other cultures since then and their deep, rich juices have seeped through, stained her heart purple. Some of her Africa belongs to my father, his stories and his knowledge, the way they became intertwined with hers to form a new truth.  

At times she is merciless with her country as one can only be with the ones they love. But her pride runs deeper than can be told and I ride pillion behind it in contented silence.