Butterfly in Exile
Words by Ozoz Sokoh
Illustration by Rumbidzai Savanhu
“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
– James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956)
Warri. Port Harcourt. Liverpool. Lagos. Mississauga. I learned how to make some decisions late because joy is having someone else decide your happiness for you, right? Till you hit thirty-six and realize you’re your own to do with you as you please. And you say, enough is enough. That you want to ditch geology and become a chef. Or a food writer. You vacillate between them and forty meets you there—still.
One day you decide—this time I'm going. You’re halfway across the world before you understand who you are.
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Expatriate: a person who lives outside their native country.
Immigrant: a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
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Food is how I wade through the murky waters of self and adulthood, difference and self-worth, race, heritage and most importantly, my purpose on this earth of ours. And I can’t lie, I thank God I’ve found the thing that gives me joy from the belly up. There are not many things I know. There are times I can’t decide what to wear or how to respond to an email but on the subject of finding meaning in food, there is no question.
Ever.
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My first concept of home was tied to Nigerian soil, to a place. Home didn’t exist until I stood in it, bathed in tropical heat.
But homesickness shows you how and changes your mind.
I was twenty-one and I made a choice—to go abroad, to university in Liverpool, leaving three years of a degree in Urban & Regional Planning and frequent academic union strikes at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Untethered, anchors broken, twenty-one left me open to the vagaries of the world and I learned that home too was belonging. It was finding the familiar and so I cooked comfort food.
I was thirty-three, in the Netherlands, when food became more than eating. Discovering Brazilian Acarajé in 2009 made me realise that it was possible to carry home with me, to wrap it up in newspapers like Nigerian Akara and go. Before then, heritage and identity had no place on my plate. It shocked me that I knew so little of my history and that scared me smack in the midst of my existential crisis—who was I? What was I here for? All I wanted to do was find it, and enjoy.
I was thirty-six when I decided I was tired of geology and I wanted to go back to school. I couldn’t decide—chef or professor. And that’s the short story of how I got here, to a 21st-floor kitchen in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, spending the forty-fourth June of my life, baking cakes and pies because I’m Nigerian and summer’s heat had nothing on me.
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This time—this move—I was prepared, I thought—Phase 2 of my life had to happen, pepper soup and banga spice in tow. But Lord knows it’s been hard. I’m not homesick homesick but something in the centre of me is cracked wide open and sometimes it feels like there’s a gulf in my chest I need to swim across.
Because Black Lives Matter.
I’ve spent the last few months immersed in a project, Coast to Coast—From West Africa to The American South, the Caribbean and Brazil through the TransAtlantic slavetrade and it has left me stunned, broken. All I can say is, the past is the key to the present.
And so I’ve cooked and cooked and cooked. I’ve never cooked this much in my whole entire life, never needed the therapy of a hot stove and a spoon to stir, to find and steady myself. I have only ever found myself in the shapeshifting way that causes chasms and divisions, separation and awakening.
Sometimes I say to my children ‘I want my mummy’, with real hot tears and laughter. I don’t want to make all the decisions that I have to. And then I do. One by one, step by step. I say to myself, ‘all you have to do is this one task and it’ll be better’.
So it is that in this place all I want is to unearth the history of Black excellence because what is progress for us if we don’t know where we’re coming from? And even though I don’t know when I’ll go back for good, I don’t think of leaving Nigeria as leaving leaving, you know. I think of being on holiday, of temporarily finding home in a new, albeit colder place, all my spices in tow.
