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stone mims personal essay october 2025

“and neither of them ever/

said what they meant/

and i guess nobody ever does”

  • Nikki Giovanni

“Sometimes you gotta’ take a stand. You can’t let people do what they do—you don’t have any representation anywhere. Don’t nobody in Baton Rouge give a flip about you…If you don’t take a stand, that means that you are giving consent for people to do what they do.”

  • Samuel E. Mims



12/15/2024 – 11:00 PM

To Samuel Earl Mims, my Paw Paw:

I don’t know if people are conscious of their last moments when they go; I will always remember yours. You were lying next to my father, watching the Packers trounce the Seahawks. The hospice nurse had just informed you—precisely and clinically—that you had very little time left. But while we were all reckoning with disbelief, you seemed devoid of panic; you chose to spend the rest of your life with your son and your wife and all the other people who mattered to you the most. You were always decisive that way. I got to call you briefly before you went quiet for the last time. I used that brief window of time to tell you all the things that I should have said to you when you weren’t standing in such intimate proximity to death.


I know now, after the fact, that I should have called you more, but calling you, every time, meant confronting the fact that you were leaving. The evidence of that passing showed itself in the thinning of your bones and the weariness behind your steps. Death loomed over you in such a way that I could not help but avert my gaze, to look anywhere and at anything other than reality; but in those short moments of courage in which I was able to confront death (and therefore see you),  I noticed a brilliant irony: you were stronger than ever. Even with your hollowed-out muscles and wobbling limbs, you beat death back from you with such intensity and determination. You were the immovable object standing in the way of the unstoppable force that comes, eventually, for us all.


Last summer, another white nurse in a white lab coat told us that you would not make it through the fall, and yet here you were, on the phone with me, still fighting, in the middle of December. I recognize now that you were the type of Black man who lived his entire life defying the condemnations and expectations of white people; it only made sense that your death would be a similar demonstration of that old John Henryism. Still, regret seized my heart and mind; it occurred to me, as I was confessing to you the things that needed to be said between us, that we Black men have nurtured a counter-intuitive, and perhaps violent, tradition.

 
Why is it that we only share the most necessary words when we are hanging so perilously close to a precipice? It also occurred to me that, because you couldn’t reply in your condition, this might be the only conversation we ever have where I get the last word. It may be the only conversation you’ve ever had where someone else procured the last word. And then you slipped; that’s the best way I can articulate it. One moment you were here moaning and groaning, caught in that invisible struggle against time, and then you were gone; silence and death rushed in to fill you up—all the spaces that had, only moments ago, been saturated with love, wisdom, and strength. And as your body emptied itself of you, I felt something dense, firm, and perfectly unnamable fill my own. I suspect that I may spend my entire life trying to define this sense of transference, but in trying to define this new weight, I have been forced to reflect on your life and, therefore, my own.


You were raised in Louisiana; I was raised in Georgia. From a young age, we both witnessed what is undoubtedly a genocide ferociously nipping at the heels of Black children. The great orators of the Sorrow Songs, folks like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone, gave form to the reality of this genocide in their songs and wailings. Every American has seen, in all its horrible glory, the strange fruit—the bleeding, broken body of a Black child taken too early. And with each bloody rendition of this American archetype, that festering rot that we call injustice grows ever more pervasive, embittering the air all around us.

 
Everyone can see the fruit, but few are cognizant of the roots, the seeds, or even the stems of the issue. The branches of the massacre tree run its fingers through the prisons, where 1.1 million men who look like us remain enslaved under a caveat of the 13th Amendment, and through White America’s obsession with guns, the same ones that fire disproportionately through the streets of Atlanta, Chicago, and Shreveport. A long and verdant field of white supremacy nurtures these violent realities, maintained only by the phenomena described so eloquently by Ralph Ellison. The modern American has rendered himself selectively mute, blind, and deaf to his history; he refuses to see that he has constructed his democracy atop the bones of an entire people!

Still, the roots of the problem, the source of that willful disability, undoubtedly begin in the classroom. You know as well as I do that Fred Hampton does not exist in Southern history books, and Angela Davis’s testimonies have similarly been obliterated from the curriculum. The classrooms of Georgia Public Schools consistently fail to mention the lives of Baldwin, Cleaver, and Giovanni.

The only images of Black excellence my classmates and I received were the vague silhouette of Martin Luther King Jr., intentionally watered down, and perhaps a (hyperbolically propagandized) caricature of X. I did not discover those other heroes until I went to college; instead, every February, for seventeen long years, we were told that we descended from slaves and that King was the sole Black participant in American history—an eloquent accident of the white man’s burden. Anyone could see how a student who was told that he emerged from a culture without value would struggle to even dream of self-esteem under these conditions. To make matters worse, the reality taught in the classrooms, of Black people in bondage, is corroborated by the news networks in the homes; thus, many of my friends and associates viewed the prisons as an inevitable destination on the horizon. This is the deathly pedagogy that instructs its darker-hued students to march dutifully, unquestionably towards death.


I grew up under this system, but I did not struggle, like so many do, to develop a sense of self-worth. I’ve never imagined myself in chains, and I have, for the most part, always assumed that some relative success would come my way. And I managed this without Baldwin or Giovanni or Du Bois; I managed to construct a dream for myself out of nothing. But what I now realize is that the only reason I was able to escape the mental trap of the not-so-far-from-Jim-Crow South is that I had the privilege of watching you do it first. In a state known for having the highest incarceration rate for Black men, you went to college. Not only that, but you did it only ten years after the country began to, legally, move towards integration.

You went on to join the US Military in 1969, where you served in Germany and Korea and attained the rank of colonel, after finishing your bachelor’s degree, and you only allowed yourself the relief of retirement after thirty long years of commendable service. That was in ‘99, two years after I emerged into this world. By then, you’d shifted your focus to activism. You’ve facilitated peaceful protests between the Minden Police Department and local citizens. Later, you went on to adorn the uniform yourself as a school resource officer, hoping to intervene in the lives of young people before they were swallowed up in our world of narratives.

As a leader in the Concerned Citizens Campaign, you helped advocate for the safe disposal and removal of fifteen million pounds of explosives at Camp Minden and the prevention of “open burn”, ultimately preserving the environment of the area to this day. But I think the work that you were most proud of was that which you did as a religious leader. After spending eleven years serving as a minister at Galilee Ministry Baptist Church, you built your own church, the Shepherd’s Hut, which has donated thousands of dollars to local public schools throughout Webster Parish.

I have realized, growing up, that to many members of our community, you are some strange amalgamation of folklore hero and legend, but to me, you’ve always just been my grandfather. That is not to say that I did not realize that you were a great man. On the contrary, you always made exceptionalism and greatness seem so natural; it emanated from you in such a way that success seemed as inexorable, for you, as the tide’s coming and going. Now that you have passed, I can admit to myself that there have been times when I have wondered if I could ever live up to the standard you set before me. I now realize that your example was never meant to be a shadow from which I should emerge; rather, your legacy has served as a shield, protecting me from the fate that has overcome so many of my friends and associates, the children of the world who wear skin painted so much like my own. In a time and place carefully constructed to ensure your failure, you have managed to navigate the world with integrity. And so, once again, even though I did not stumble upon the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement or the Black Power concept until many later years, I never had to wonder what type of man or person I wanted to be in this world. I always had you to model that for me. Your example has unhindered me from many of the challenges that I could have all too easily faced. 


Last year, when this all began, before you were diagnosed, but after the pain started to needle at your heart, we snuck out of the house while my grandmother was busy, loaded ourselves into your pickup truck, and absconded with some meat pies from the local gas station. GG had just put you on what you called a “vegan diet,” —which was really just a diet with slightly less salt, and you asked me to help you cheat the warden. After we had our pies, you wiped the grease off your stained overalls and said to me, “You watch a baby grow up into a man and then a man regress right into a baby.” It occurred to me then that you’d impossibly waged war against Jim Crow for your entire life to maintain your dignity, and you feared that death would rob you of it. As I said before, I don’t know if people are conscious of their final moments, but I can assure you that you left this world with the same grace and dignity with which you lived. And for me, a child who has grown up as a grim spectator to the slaughters of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, and so many others, I cannot tell you enough how much I needed you to show me that it is possible to live beyond the terms set forth by the historical record. You spent twenty-seven years teaching me how to live in this world with integrity; you have now shown me, like a gilded north star, how to die with it intact. Throughout this week, I have felt your passing in waves of terrible anaphora; the grief truly comes and goes. But one thing that has stayed with me all my life is pride in being your grandson.

I want you to know, wherever you are now, I will not allow time to end your sermons. Your words will continue on through my voice and actions, and in every single word I write from this point forward. My father, uncle, sister, and I carry your initials; this Christmas, you gifted us each with the weight of your legacy.

Rest easy, Paw Paw. We will carry it from here.

–Your Grandson,


Stone Erickson Mims


Stone Mims is a writer and educator based in Northern Michigan. His work, both in the classroom and on the page, examines the complexities of Black life. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and a BA from Bard College. Mims has been a writer-in-residence at Château d’Orquevaux and attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. His memoir-in-essays, Just Another Native Son, was a category winner in the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books from Memoir Magazine. His writing has appeared in Politics/Letters Live and Ignatian Literary Magazine. He is currently represented by Midnight Literary Agency. You can find him on Instagram.

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gemini wahhaj creative nonfiction august 2025

When my daughter was in daycare, I wanted to let everyone know about Eid. I bought dates, teamed up with another mom, asked to go to a class and share what Eid was with the class. I read a Bengali folk tale for children from a children’s book.  Then, we lit candles, and the smoke alarm went off. It was her third year in daycare — a time when my daughter was falling off the end of the world. In her first year, she was happy. At first, she didn’t know the language, so she would wait the whole day until she saw me, then run towards me and burst into tears.

 But the third year, it was the bullying. She wanted to be white. She drew herself white with blonde, straight hair and blue eyes. When a friend bleached his hair white, she kept asking him questions. Another friend and I locked eyes. We both knew what was going on in her mind. At that time, I asked many friends what to do. I asked my classmates who then referred me to other moms who also spoke to me about what children of color face in school at a young age and how to deal with it. So much figuring out, how to fit in, how to make things better for my daughter — a child growing up in America. 

“I sacrifice so much for her. Why doesn’t she understand how loved she is?” I said to my husband. “I don’t even brush my hair!”

“Why don’t you brush your hair? Why do you look like that? Maybe if you dressed nicely, she would look up to you.”

In the end, this was the strategy I chose, which seems strange to me now. I’m not the same person. I dressed up in shalwar kamiz with the gold earrings my mother had given me. I also wore a teep on my forehead.

 I went to pick up my daughter.

“What’s that on your head?” a child asked, pointing.

“Hush,” the teacher said, as if what I had on my head was something shameful.

I brought teeps for all the girls as gifts. I went to Bangladesh in the summer, and I brought back bangles and little cloth dolls to give away. We watched Hindi movies on a VCR, and I dressed my daughter in gaudy dresses, jewelry, teep, so she would have her own standard of beauty, her own role models, her own cheap, cheesy way of being feminine. 

The atmosphere among girls at that age in America is toxic. Girls watch Disney movies and dress and think of themselves as Disney princesses. She didn’t watch TV. She didn’t know anything the other girls were talking about, so they excluded her. But also, the clownish racist exclusion of someone with dark skin and curly hair, and adoration of another girl with white skin seems outlandish to even write about. The teacher said, “There is no racism here.” Of course. So, we watched these movies so my daughter would be able to join in the conversation and fit in. My professor explained that at this age, girls are arranged in hierarchies according to the status of the moms — like a hive around the queen bee. I scheduled playdates, threw parties, positioned us as a family in the hive.

Another dad with a daughter in an older class suggested bending the princess trope, introducing her to other versions of fairy tales, so we read The Paper Bag Princess and watched Kiki’s Delivery Service at his recommendation. (I really admired a lot of these fractured, fairy tale picture books and still love them.)

I surrounded myself with allies and we survived.

I don’t do that anymore. I don’t want to share, to be known, accepted. I write fiction rather than essays because what I have to say is not welcome. Even in my stories, I want to establish a faraway voice at a remove. It seems so long ago, the earnestness, the frenzy of wanting to be known, to explain. I would be embarrassed by the me of that time.

I don’t enjoy being in these spaces or the ways in which I have to compromise, grovel, demean myself to be in the room. In 2014, Obama had iftar in the White House. Many Muslims attended, gleeful, while Gaza was being bombed, with full support from Obama and the Senate. I asked one of them online why they would go to such an event, and they mumbled something about making space for Muslims. During the Ramadan one year while I was a student at Princeton, Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq. All the years that I have lived in the US — first as an international student, then as a mom, and an employee — have left me wandering the halls alone during Ramadan and Eid. I associate Ramadan and Eid now with silence, a complete erasure in our schools and places of work, with the added bonus of a bombing campaign somewhere.  

Now it is Eid again. My daughter is in college. Sick, I asked for leave from work. I asked to teach online. While negotiating, I realized it’s Eid. Every year, I either have to take the day off as a personal day, have my children miss school, or come to work, and just go about quietly pretending nothing is going on.

I am an atheist. 

I thought I would send an email out to everyone at work, wish them Eid Mubarak. Just to let them know. Then I asked myself, “Why? What does it matter when countries are being bombed?”


Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025) and the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13
Books, Fall 2023). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third
Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other magazines. You can find her at GeminiWahhaj.com.

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kimberly nao personal essay june 2025

I never had a crush on David Lee Roth, but he had a crush on me.  And, he sang a song about it. You remember the video. David dressed as a tour guide leading tourists through sunny California, dancing around bikini clad girls singing, “I wish they all could be California girls…” On the beach, at a movie studio, so many girls in bikinis and with big Aqua Net stiff hair teased up much higher than David’s golden locks. He just loves these California girls. And well, that’s me. But wait…

There are no brown-skinned girls in this video. Tan, yes. Brown? No. And my hair? My hair is actually too big to be teased up to look big. My hair is long almost down my back, but it’s thick and frizzy and more like Diana-Ross-Central-Park-in-the-rain concert hair than bikini-clad-blonde-on-Venice-Beach hair. So, am I a California girl?

In fact, it wasn’t David Lee Roth’s song anyway. It was the Beach Boys’ song. They’re the original ones who loved California girls. As long as they had blonde-bobs-on-the-beach hair. Yes, bikinis and tanned bods. Not the 80s, but women in the 60s doing the jerk while the band defines the quintessentially endless summer sound and California lifestyle. And there are no brown skinned girls.

There’s cute, perky surfer girl Gidget. Not Sally Field Gidget. But Sandra Dee Gidget. The one that personified the California vibe in the 60s. The one that made everyone who wasn’t a Californian want to move to California and buy a surfboard and live on a Malibu beach for the summer. And it was always summer. Blonde Gidget. Is it her? Is Gidget the culprit? Is she the one that made every media image of a California girl thereafter blonde, tan, and bikini clad?

Seriously there are so many California blondes. Not just any blondes but the ones that defined the “California girl.” The Bionic Woman. I did not have a crush on David Lee Roth, but I did have a crush on the Bionic Woman. She was blonde and beautiful and could rip the yellow pages in half. And she had a bionic ear that could hear across long distances. I mean miles. She would push a blonde lock behind her ear and listen.  Apparently bionic ears can hear for miles, but they cannot hear through hair. I couldn’t push a lock of hair behind my ear. Well, I could but it wouldn’t stay there. My hair was not tame. It was wild and did what it wanted to do. The Bionic Woman was indeed a California girl. She lived in Ojai. You can’t get more California than that. Unless, of course, you lived in Malibu.

The Bionic Woman’s boyfriend was the Six Million Dollar Man. The Ken to Jamie Somers’s Barbie. The Six Million Dollar Man was played by Lee Majors who was married to the very blonde Farrah Fawcett. Another quintessentially California girl (even though she was from Texas).  Fawcett was Jill Monroe — the blonde on Charlie’s Angels with feathered hair bouncing in the wind as she chased down criminals. She ran the way boys run when their peers say, “You run like a girl.” Farrah was the breakout star of that show. And yes, you can find pics of the ultra-feminine Fawcett trying to look like a tomboy skateboarding Dogtown style down the street. But more importantly, there is the poster — Farrah, sitting in front of a striped Mexican blanket wearing a red bikini, one knee up, one leg down, head cocked back in a smile that shows all of her white, perfectly straight teeth. It is very California, and it is said to be the best-selling poster ever. I did not look like Farrah Fawcett. I tried to cut and feather my own bangs and ended up with an afro on my forehead.

Maybe that’s when I stopped trying to be the California girl. Yeah, I was born and raised in L.A. and went to school so close to the beach that the boys would surf every morning before making their way to class. I said “grody” and “gag me with a spoon” and “groovy.” But I wasn’t Gidget, or Farrah Fawcett or Lindsay Wagner. I wasn’t Pamela Anderson in another red bathing suit saving lives on a Malibu Beach. I wasn’t Angelyne or Malibu Barbie. I wasn’t even Bo Derek, hair adorned in cornrows, running in slow motion on a misty seashore.

I was the brown-skinned, frizzy-haired girl. Born of a Japanese American mother and Black father. My Japanese grandmother was Nissei, first generation born in San Francisco, California in 1913. My paternal grandparents came to California from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My parents met in the Bay Area, and I was born and raised by my single mom in L.A. We did not live near the beach. We did not live in a sprawling, ranch-style home like all those blonde Brady girls. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood both affectionately and derisively called the Jungle. With its grassy lawns and abundant foliage, it was the perfect playground for bike riding, hula hooping, sock ball, and tree climbing. But the crack-laden 80s and 90s made it resemble more the urban hellscape of Boyz in the Hood than the dreamy paradise of The Endless Summer.

But this, too, is a California story. Better than the glossy, glamorized image projected on television, this California is real. It’s brown-skinned and frizzy-haired, and mixed-race, and multicultural, and queer, and it’s me. I’m it. California is after all named after me. Not as if  David Lee Roth had a crush on me but instead, where the name comes from. According to the book, California Place Names, “[t]he term originally referred to a mythical land of Amazons, ruled by the beautiful black queen Calafia, as described in the Spanish novel, Las Sergas de Esplandian.” It’s me!

The city of my birth, Los Angeles, was inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and was founded by a band of 44 pobladores who settled the area in the 1700s. These pobladores were of Spanish, Indigenous, and African origin. Brown-skinned. Pio Pico, the first governor of California under Mexican rule, designated Los Angeles the state’s capital. Yes, the Pico that the boulevard is named for, and he was mestizo, mixed with African, Indigenous, and Spanish ancestry. Brown-skinned.

The bouncy, blonde surfer girl version of California leaves out the Chinese immigrants who worked in the Gold Rush, the Japanese farmers who were later interned in concentration camps, the Mexicans and Native Americans who were here before the state was annexed to the U.S. The African Americans who brought jazz and soul and hip hop to waft along the Santa Ana winds with the Beach Boys and Van Halen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It left out the non-blondes who made the state what it was and is today. And by the way, surfing was invented by brown-skinned Polynesians, and Malibu is a Chumash word meaning “it’s loud over there” in reference to the waves of the unruly sea. Wild like my untamed hair.

I want to take a black crayon to plain white paper and draw a thickly bordered square. Above it, I want to draw a triangle and give the square a roof to make a house I never lived in. I want to take a brick red crayon and draw a rectangle for a chimney. And a gray crayon to draw a curlicue of smoke coming from the chimney I never had. I want to take a yellow crayon and draw a circle for the sun and a sky-blue crayon to outline perfectly fluffy clouds. It will be the home I never had but for some reason the one I always drew at school when my teachers asked me to draw a house. I imagine it on a perfectly manicured California street. Under it, I want to  pick up a black marker like a French teacher and write “Ceci n’est pas une maison.” This is not a house. Like that painting of a very realistic, very idealized pipe under which Magritte wrote “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Because it wasn’t a pipe, it was a painting of a pipe. And this drawing wasn’t my house. And that California was not California at all.


Kimberly Nao was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she works as a professor of education at Mount Saint Mary’s University. She is the founder of Nao & Associates, a DEI and antiracism consulting agency. Her current projects include integrating contemplative practices in education, helping organizations engage in antiracist practices, and researching the historical landscape of Black Los Angeles. As a certified yoga and mindfulness facilitator, Kimberly believes that self-awareness and compassion for others leads to social transformation.

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ewa gerald onyebuchi personal essay january 2024

November 2023: Trans-ekulu, Enugu.

All my life I have viewed death at arm’s length, through the lens of a stranger. Even the death of other family relatives smelled differently, almost like a faraway thing. But when I think about my parents, I wonder the colour grief would assume when they exit this earth. When it finally strikes home, would death take on a smell too putrid for catharsis? Would grief succeed in stealing the rooms in my body, becoming too intimate to eject?

*

A light rain patters down the roof of our house while I thumb through an old album of pictures. I am sitting in one of the four black sofas, tucked in a rectangular ring. I don’t know if this is my mother’s favourite chair, but she never fails to plop down on it whenever she strolls into the living room. I believe when someone does something or uses a thing, unconsciously, over time, that action or thing becomes a vital part of them. Just like this sofa has become a repository of my mother’s body, imbibing her scent and warmth. The sofa sits on the left, beside a glass center table, directly opposite the TV plastered to the wall. It’s a privilege to take my mother’s seat, to rock my body against the spaces she’s been. At this point, I stop fiddling with the pages, and close my eyes. Instead of me, I imagine her on this chair, and train my ears to the gentle tap of her hands on the arms of the chair. On most evenings after a shower, my mother wears a faded blue and black patterned wrapper. Even now, I picture the wrapper flung around her body and inhale the dry muskiness that speaks of age.

Mama, a retrenched bursar, is not dead. She’s in Abuja, with my father, who works with the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development. My parents are both alive but sometimes I fear that one day, the thread holding their existence in place would snap and all that would remain are memories heaped on history’s back. My father is 5.8 feet, taller than my mother, and he wears a dark skin, while my mother is the colour of ripe pawpaw. Both have fairly large noses to accommodate their round faces; unlike Papa, Mama has a pair of beautiful bright eyes. But sadly, these features are slowly eroding with the passage of time. My mother’s hair is now glazed with specks of white, and unlike her, my father wears a cleanshaven head and beard, as if he’s determined to make a case against nature, a demand for his youth. In the pictures, my parents’ bodies have witnessed a series of metamorphoses. There’s a picture of them, taken when their eyes were full of light and ardor. A time when they wore their afros with style, thick and glossy, and grinned. Against a black and white background, Papa can be seen sporting an afro, a craggy beard and a pair of bootcut trousers. He poses in front of a tree, his arm resting on the shoulder of another man in afro. There’s a tenderness to my mother’s pose: the tilt of her head to one side, the smile on her face, the graceful arch of her back as she plants a hand on her waist, her knee-length gown devoid of pleats. In today’s world, their pose could be tagged prosaic and their clothes too simple to meet the new wave of high fashion taste.

There are other pictures of my parents taken at different places and events. Some of them make me laugh, smile and cry at intervals. I hold a picture against the light and blink back hot tears. It was probably taken in 2013, but the memories are fresh as dew. Somewhere in Kogi State, we are standing in front of a church building, posing before a camera: our parents and three brothers, my sister and I dressed in white beside the Bishop clad in a purple vestment. We have just been confirmed, newly conscripted soldiers of Christ, and everyone else is radiant with smiles except me. I don’t know how to smile before a camera and each time I force it, my face comes out squeezed. I remember that day, the sun boiling over our heads, the sweat dribbling down my face as the photographer urged me to smile a little, and my parents glaring at me.

Years later, I wish I had smiled. I wish I wasn’t a mimosa plant, always shutting myself out of the world, away from my parents each time they stepped into my space. Growing up, love was measured in small dosages and passed around. When we greeted our parents, we added sir or ma, thanked them after every meal, chanted“Daddy welcome, Mummy welcome”, following their return from work or the market. There were no hugs. It wasn’t a taboo to hug our parents or siblings, but it could be viewed as perfunctory, too elastic to be real. Our parents were the adults I was first introduced to early in life, and without the strings of cordiality properly binding us together, I saw them only as parents—people who had decided to be married, have children, protect them and provide their needs. I didn’t fully understand the reason for the chasm between my parents and me or my sudden withdrawal each time they tried to reach out, to show affection. Perhaps, it had something to do with the countless times they fought in our presence without a speck of regard for us, their children, our feelings. Or the moments Papa launched vile words at Mama from the quiver of his mouth that ran like a faulty tap, unashamedly, even while we pleaded with him to stop. Maybe I couldn’t comprehend how two individuals, living under one roof, could become depositories of distinct attributes. How they could so easily morph from the sweet-loving couple they had been moments ago into ravenous wolves determined to tear each other to smithereens.

Still, one thing stood out among us: our love for the mundane. Like telling stories or spending the whole weekend huddled in front of the screen, watching Africa Magic or Telemundo (despite my love for both gradually fading away). My parents, especially Mama, fed us with stories of people, places and moments in their past life. She told us about the Biafran war, how some people fled their homes in terror, and those who could not escape the onslaught ended up as dead bodies lining the streets of Okigwe. How a mother had flung her crying baby into the bush to escape being seen by the soldiers and returned hours later to find the spot where she had thrown the child empty. The baby was gone.

My growing up was bushwhacked by bouts of illnesses that ate into my time for school and house chores. Yet, I remember being struck by malaria and fever at the same time. It was so profound that I was confined to my bed for days, only wriggling off to the toilet to vomit. I thought I was going to die. One evening, the door squealed open, and my father walked in.“Imeriagha?” he said. “How is your body?”I could barely nod or open my mouth. His eyes were laced with fear as he asked if I had vomited again, and I nodded my response. He leaned in and touched my head and said my body was too hot. It felt awkward, his hand on my body, his outright display of warmth and affection, the way he said “ndo.” I was so used to my mother’s touch—her hand running down my body, as if trying to massage the hotness away, her measure of love—that his felt alien.

*

Over the years, the gulf between my parents and me has congealed into walls; so, I’m making a deliberate effort to break through them. I am 27 and still living with my mother. As a teacher working at a private school, it’s almost suicidal to plant my hope on monthly salary. After school, I scuttle from house to house for home lessons, because I’m trying to make ends meet. Because I’m so passionate about being successful, and because I want to be available for my parents. To help oil their path towards senescence, to support them financially just as they’ve done for me.

Despite all these, I try to carve out time to be with my family; and although it’s difficult to fully comprehend my parents when they talk, I provide a listening ear. Where needed, I humour their dry jokes, cringe at the death of an old friend, stifle the urge to lash back at my father when he insults me. I don’t blame them when they fail to recall what I told them some days ago. Neither do I remind them of the staleness of their stories. On second thought, who gets tired of old wine?

Maybe everything happening to my parents—the sudden loss of memory, the stories they tell that sound like songs on repeat—is all part of the ageing process. But I’m scared of losing them. In the pictures, I compare their lives from whence they started to where they are, and I feel so hog-tied at the hapless reality of their slipping away. I scroll through my phone’s gallery and pause at a photo of them standing beside my younger brother, dressed in a convocation gown. This picture is the most recent I have of my parents, and I can’t help but imagine how stilted they look from those wrinkled lines, how fragile the smiles on their faces appear, the exhaustion on my mother’s face. It’s mentally tiring to picture a moment when their smiles, faces and voices would become bags of memories I’d have to carry throughout my life.

*

Two months ago, Mum slipped off a flight of stairs at the back of the house and twisted an ankle. Whenever I remember this incident, how I had been absent from home when it occurred, my heart hammers against my chest. Sometimes I imagine a different scenario: what if her head had landed heavily against the block of cement and not her hands? What if she lay on the ground, still, her eyes wide with tears, blood oozing out of a gash in her skull, the world moving on without her?

The X-ray showed that she sustained a fracture, and the doctor suggested a bed rest. Still, Mama has a resilient spirit. “I’m healed in Jesus name, no need for any bed rest. That doctor thinks I’m going to return to that hospital. God forbid!”she says each time I beg her to take it easy on herself. Then, my father calls to complain about his sight failing him, perhaps cataract, and he wants to go under the knife. I don’t tell him that I hope he doesn’t have the surgery, that I’m scared of losing him. Instead, I pray for him to be healed so he doesn’t have to go under the knife.

Nowadays, I know I have no control over anything: my parents’ complaints, the fear of losing them to the cold grip of death before I finally find my balance in this shifting world.

In “The Slipping Away,”Chinonso Nzeh concludes his essay on a brighter note, stating his resolution to live in the moment that includes his parents.“I want to enjoy the now with them. Every moment with them holds meaning for me. I count one to ten when they provoke me; it cools the burning fury in me. I ask them if they need water or food. I call them to check up on them.”

Just like Chinonso, I do my best to live in the moment with my parents. I don’t wait for birthdays or any such precious occasions in their lives to gift them presents; I do it before, when the means unfurl. I strive to make them laugh while I continue to fill my head with the possibility of having them alive for many years. I choose to bask in the euphoria of their joy, laughter and tears.


Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is an Igbo storyteller from Nigeria. He writes short stories, essays and poems with deep interest in feminism, sexuality, queerness and religion. His works have been published in Isele, Afritondo, Uncanny, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. He was long listed for the Abubakar Gimba Prize for Creative Nonfiction 2023 and the Brigitte Poirson Short Story Prize 2023 amongst others. 

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ali motamedi personal essay november 2023

The airport officer opened my passport on his desk and looked at my photo. He put the boarding pass on top of it and held his pen. But he didn’t mark it right away. Instead, he stared at my eyes. I tried to act normal, just being myself. Four and a half seconds passed, and I started to worry. Had I doubted myself? He finally took his eyes off me and drew a half circle on the boarding pass. Then he handed me my passport, and I took it back. I started walking toward the airport inspection point which was crowded. One of the officers was guiding people forward. Behind me, people were waiting. I just wanted to pass through quickly. My passport had been issued less than a year ago. Have I changed so much?

For as long as I can remember, I have always liked the photo on my passport; but that was never true for my driver’s license and ID photo. The picture on my very first driver’s license was a little black-and-white photo attached to a corner of an opaque white card – imagine a guy with black hair and thick brows staring out into the world from a low-res photo wrapped in plastic, featuring a small hole. There is nothing in his eyes that I could say is attractive. He doesn’t seem bold or smart. And why is he so low-spirited? Why does it seem he doesn’t have anything to offer? No, it’s not like me. I don’t like it. I have never liked it.

As the airport officer stared into my eyes, I wanted to help him out. I wanted to say, “Come on, don’t bother, man. I pinky promise that it’s me!”

Like everyone else, I like some of my photos better than others. Perhaps the ones that were taken at a specific angle. Those taken from down and a bit to the left or maybe kitty-cornered or from some special angle! I don’t know. Those photos that reflect Ali. Those that are similar to me. In those moments when you want to be yourself in a photograph, which self do you refer to exactly?

In the photo of my very first passport, I wore a green T-shirt. I was a young pal with a pair of glossy eyes staring out of the frame. It’s like I wanted to get out of that two-by-three quadrangle. You can see the fearlessness, the soul in my eyes. “I want to go . . .” “I fear nothing . . .” It’s like I was whispering something like that to myself. Why not wear more formal clothes? Who takes his passport picture with a T-shirt on? The funny thing is, I used the same picture for my l-20 letter and also for the American Embassy. I didn’t care if the officer asked what kind of picture it was. Maybe that was the reason I could take my visa sooner than others. The photo was taken ten years ago. It’s Ali during those years, those days when I wanted to prove the freedom in life, with that round neck and green T-shirt! With that uncombed gelled hair! Could all of this be compressed into just a few thousand pixels? In those few inches of paper? Maybe that’s what photographs are made for — an attempt to fit all of life into a color or black-and-white image.

I put my shoes, bag, and coat in a plastic basket and left it on the conveyor to pass through the X-ray device. In front of me, there was a huge cylindrical scanner. There was a person before me, standing in the middle of it with his hands up, staring straight, waiting for it to take his nude photo!

I have never taken a nude photo before. A full-body nude picture! Well, I have seen myself in the steamy mirror of my bathroom, of course. Or when I change my clothes at home. But even those images are half-naked in my head. Not fully. Fully naked photos are frightening. Being naked is frightening. It was my turn. I took a few steps forward. I stood inside the big cylinder and put my hands up. The device turned, and a light passed through my eyes rapidly. Electromagnetic waves record your naked picture, whether you have your clothes on or not. It doesn’t matter if you’re smiling or not. If you’re beautiful or . . . I never heard that anyone would ever want to know how his photo in the airport inspection device would actually look.

The officer pointed with his hand, meaning that I could pass. I came out of the big cylinder and stood aside. I was standing with my arms folded, looking as the conveyor was pushing the plastic baskets forward one by one. My coat, bag, passport, and shoes were closing in, inside a big plastic basket.

Why did it take so long? Was it me that had changed so much, or was it the photo that was so different from me? I reasoned that if airport officers worked eight hours a day, and took ten seconds to match a person’s face with their passport photo, it would be three thousand people a day, sixty thousand a month, and more than six hundred thousand people a year. What in the world do they see in people’s faces? Fear of going, doubt of coming. Hope of getting back? If she won’t let me go. If he won’t let me come. Hope she doesn’t notice that I have changed. Is it actually possible to put all of these in a single photo? How much can a photo tell about someone anyway? They say you should not use a photo taken more than six months ago. Six months? No, not even that long, let’s assume six weeks, six days, or even just six minutes ago! Am I the same me, even right after the photographer pushed the shutter button?

I’m thinking about the airport’s scanners. Maybe those huge cylinders might be able to take a beautiful photo of you without even trying to do so. Even without your favorite clothes. Even without a smile on your face. Without shadows and highlights and without fear. That flawless art of nudity.

I like my passport photos best. My ID card and driver’s license are nothing to me but official certificates of identification. But my passports are permits. Permits for leaving! I know this by experience that any permit to leave is a blessing to me. Its photo is closer to the Ali that I know. Whether or not it’s colorful or black-and-white, it’s bright. It’s alive. It has color! And I don’t mean “color” literally, as in a “color photograph.” I mean that it is the perception of the world I create and give in my photos. I have seen black-and-white photos of myself that had more color than the colorful ones and vice versa. My passports have always been colorful, but my certificates of identification . . . not so much.

I took my things from the basket, put on my shoes, and walked to the gate. The hallway was crowded. People were carrying their suitcases. The airport-speaker was announcing the flights one by one. On the way, I was constantly looking around. I wanted to find a mirror.


Ali Motamedi, artist and educator, explores themes of travel, immigration,
and identity. His essays and short stories, published in literary magazines in Farsi and English, intricately weave these themes. Holding a PhD in civil engineering and having studied fine
arts at the City University of New York, he seamlessly combines his
engineering background with artistic vision. Additionally, his photography graces group and solo exhibitions in Iran and the US. Since 2014, he has led students in engineering, critical
thinking, and creativity courses nationally and internationally. He can be found on twitter and instagram.