christianity | Opal Palmer Adisa

It is not the first time that I have felt this hollow. I have asked myself, where do I belong? Do I have a tribe? I have sat chewing on my tongue, hearing a group speak of things that I do not believe, and then trying to find a space, or take the space gently, respectfully, to say what I believe.

And I think about the injustices of slavery, which my people underwent and some are still undergoing. I think about the Jews and Africans being exterminated by the Hitler regime. I think about South Africa and apartheid. I think about Gaza and Palestine, about the Congo and the deliberate starvation being perpetrated there and ai think about all the people who wanted to speak up but didn’t, because of fear, because of not wanting to be isolated, because of thinking maybe they were wrong, maybe they weren’t wrong, but why go against so many people?

Tonight, I was among good people, people I like, people who are decent, people who have been generous to me in many ways. But their interpretation of God and the Bible and Christianity is different from mine. And inasmuch as they loudly and frequently expose their notion about God, and say they like me, I know that if I were to present my view of God, they would probably be shocked. As I was shocked tonight by their homophobia, their narrow and limited interpretation of what they claim to be “God’s Words,” So I find myself folding inside myself.

I sat there with this hollow feeling, and I thought, I have to speak up. There are too many gay friends that I have who need me to speak up, too many who believe that Jamaica has a language that is erroneously called patois that should be defended. But it brought back again this feeling of not belonging. You know where do I go? Why do I go against the grain? Why am I frequently perceived as a rebel?

Do I give up all my earthly possessions and find a forest and learn to live alone, listening to the birds and the other forest creatures, and howling, with the only thing that comes back to me being the echo of my own voice?

I want a tribe. I want community. But so often I don’t feel as if I fit into any of these places, with any of these people, where I can speak without chewing my tongue off. And it is a hollow, empty aloneness that I really don’t want, because I do want to be in community. I do want companionship. I do want meaningful engagement. But I also want to be with people that I can share my ideas with. They might not agree, but they listen and are open.

People who believe in justice, not just for themselves, but for everybody else.

I try to make the analogy: okay, you might not be gay, you might not believe in same-sex marriage, and you might not think it is right that they shut down a man’s shop because a gay couple wanted two men, and the person said they weren’t going to do it because they are against gay people. I offer this scenario as a point of comparison. I go to a cake shop and the owner happens to be a white supremacist, I request a Black couple—a man and a woman, on my cake because we are Black, and he says, I’m not going to do it because I don’t believe in Black love. Should that shop be shut down too? And if yes, then what is the difference? Justice have had to legislated to end slavery Jim Crow, apartheid, sexism, gender-based violence, child abuse… People’s rights cannot be denied just because they are the minority.

And don’t bring God into the difference, because God created all of us, Africans, Asians, Europeans, heterosexual/GLBT, Christian, Muslins, Buddhist, etc…We are all children of God, different but equal, and if we truly believe in equity and peace, we must not condemn and judge.

Often, I feel so alone, and I’m tired of being alone. I want to be here, because I love being here. But I want a community, an open inclusive community. I don’t want to always have to chew off my tongue.

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I have never been exiled from Jamaica, though I have lived most of my life away from her shores. Jamaica has always been my root, my anchor, the marrow of who I am. I never felt cut off, never felt she was beyond my reach. Jamaica is not a distant place I visit; it is the pulse that shapes me, the rhythm in my walk, the breath in my speech. My Jamaicanness is not a badge nor a flag — it is seamless, both my imagined self and my lived reality.

Paul Gilroy speaks of “the dialectics of diasporic identification,” reminding us that it is never the same for everyone, yet always returns to the dialogue of homeland and home. Can home be carried with you? Is it in the yellow, green, and black, in the taste of ackee and saltfish — even from a can — in the cane you bite into, juice running down your chin, in the childhood lessons of duppies so that when a shadow looms, you wonder if it is this or more?

Perhaps it is as Gilroy insists: “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” The “where” being body and mind, geography and imagination. Home becomes memory you carry like a favorite dress, a figurine, a faded photo of first love, the friends whose lives moved on without you as yours moved on without them. Yet it always circles back to origin. Like the time I walked into the faculty parking lot in California and found a note on my windshield: Go back to where you come from. Perhaps because I demanded a place for Black people and people of color. Perhaps because I was a woman. Perhaps simply because it was known that I was not from there — not California, not Oakland, not America. To them, I was Africa, a presence they never wished to claim except for her resources. Go back where you come from.

But it is never that easy when you live where you are not “from.” They remind you constantly, even if you wanted to forget, even if you could. It is always: Where are your people from? Where was your navel string buried? What soil stains your soles, veins your blood, whispers your names?

Gilroy says, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at,” but the deportee knows better. For those who fled poverty or were exiled into unfamiliar streets, home is neither here nor there. Stories told of home were mostly lies meant to soothe — to suggest a place that would welcome us — but home did not. Could not. Not for the deportees. Not for those who built new nations out of necessity. For them, home became nowhere: not in the Diaspora, not in the unfamiliar land of exile.

And yet, sometimes home is that uncanny space — familiar and foreign all at once. Like Half-Way Tree in Marcia Douglas’s Marvelous Equations of the Dread, where Marley returns disguised as a madman searching for himself. Home is recognition denied, a hostile space where you may be chased, ridiculed, shunned. It does not always yield answers. At times it feels strange, unfamiliar, as if you are experiencing the Diaspora within home itself. Still, even when hostile, home holds memory, bloodlines, visceral connections. Home teaches, as it teaches Duppy Marley before he drifts into the other realm.

But not so for the madman in Jennifer Rahim’s Curfew Chronicles. He wanted only to speak truth to power, to explain the injustice he witnessed. He was home, known — and yet not recognized. Recognition would mean being heard, and being heard would demand change. It would unravel the order, blur color and class boundaries, disrupt the hierarchy. So he was silenced, thrown down, his words trampled, his identity erased. At times, home itself robs you of belonging, of dignity, of safety. Home, too, imposes curfews.

James Clifford asks: “How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement and replacement of homes away from home?” A valid question. Yet it must also be asked of home itself. How does the twelve-year-old boy who fails common entrance confront displacement at home? His identity hinges on a single act. For my Danny in Love’s Promise, the shame of home propels him outward, to anonymity in the Diaspora, to find voice and self where he is not known. Sometimes the weight of home stifles growth.

And sometimes, being away is the very condition for growth. Absence shifts the gaze from lamenting displacement to embracing the fertile ground of possibility. The Diaspora becomes a field where seeds of reinvention take root, allowing home to be reframed — not as loss, not as exile, but as promise. Between Gilroy and Clifford, home becomes a moving force, fashioned and refashioned, alive in memory, radiant in imagination — at once paradise, at once euphoria.