What It Means to Be From Somewhere

There is a difference between where you live and where you are from. One is an address; the other is an inheritance.

I grew up between Antigua and New York, moving between climates, languages, accents of feeling, and ways of seeing the world. My primary years were in Antigua. At twelve, I returned to Antigua, but the truth is, I never arrived in a single place again. Since then, I’ve carried a kind of double-orientation — always here, but also elsewhere. Always present, but also remembering. I remember a lot.

To be from somewhere, in the diaspora sense, is not nostalgia. It is maintenance, like you do for your car or your house. Preservation is vital.

I have an aunt in Leicester who listens to Antiguan politics on Radio Observer every day, as if distance were a minor inconvenience. She reads the Antigua newspapers and sends them to me on WhatsApp, usually once a month, for the whole month. When I call her, she relays all the politics of Antigua far more than she does England. I wonder if she even knows what's happening in England! We talk about making ducana and saltfish with chopup for Easter and compare recipes. My Uncle teases her to let me teach her. Home food is not a preference but an obligation. It is how a phrase, a rhythm, or a piece of music can pull you back across decades in an instant. I still wake up some mornings singing Swinging Engine from my favorite Antiguan band growing up—Burning Flames.

There is a cost to this. You miss things. You are absent for moments that matter. You learn to live with a quiet, persistent fracture — a sense that part of your life is always unfolding somewhere else without you. I am in a WhatsApp group with my college mates, but I can't keep up. I think I saw 700+ messages the last time I checked.

But there is also a return.

To carry a place inside you is to refuse erasure. It is to insist that your children inherit more than opportunity; they inherit memory, language, context, and belonging. Not as something fixed, but as something practiced. Something lived. It's why I share my past photos and those of old family members, even if they are dead, to show the next generation they are from somewhere, from their tribe, and we are magnificent.

For those of us from the Caribbean living abroad, culture is not decorative. It's more than Carnival. It's everything. It is structural. It shapes how we move, how we gather, and how we understand each other. "Ah wah a do?" Means, how are you?

And when we cannot go home, we reach for what remains: stories in newspapers, voices on the radio, rituals, and each other.

Being from somewhere means you never really leave, and you never fully arrive. It means you carry the place with you and, in doing so, keep it alive. Antigua and Barbuda strives here. ❤️