I went to India and it brought me back home

Beyond the Book: Why leaving the US helped me see that I needed to stay.

a photo of Ijeoma in Jaipur, in front of an historic fort, in a bright orange, ruffled Nigerian dress and a Yellow ruffled hat with matching yellow purse, and red shoes.

For months I had been longing to get out of the US. Just for a little while. It has been important for me in recent years to get out of the country at least once a year. It is exhausted being targeted by the country that you live in, and even more exhausting when it is your job to document and investigate that targeting every day.

After the bitterness and division of the most recent election, and the opening of the lightning-fast terror campaign the Trump administration has enacted against anyone with any vulnerability in the U.S. (it’s amazing, when leadership has been quietly weakening civil rights protections for years with little fuss or fanfare, how all it takes is a little audacity to push us into full fascism), I felt downright desperate to get out for a little while.

So when I was offered the opportunity to speak at the Jaipur Literary Festival in February, I jumped at the chance for a week out of the country.

My partner and I boarded the longest flight of our lives to land in India, a country we’d never been to before.

I’ve traveled a fair amount in recent years, but I was not prepared for India. I don’t think that it’s possible to be prepared to visit India for the first time.

Our trip to Jaipur was amazing. Amazing and overwhelming on every possible level. The crowds, the beauty, the ridiculously good food, the noise, the animals roaming absolutely everywhere (elephants and cows on the highways)! The festival itself was like Coachella for book nerds – I’ve never experienced anything like it before. People were genuinely kind and curious in a way that shocked my reserved Seattleite senses. It was a lot to fit in to such a short period of time and honestly, I’m still recovering.

For years now, I’ve comforted myself with the idea that in this hostile world, I could, if need be, go to a majority Black or brown place (provided that it was at least somewhat safe for queer folk) and be okay. Further, I was convinced that there was a deep, ancestral memory that would kick in for me and I’d be able slide right in to non-white society with a fair amount of ease.

But India really challenged that assumption. The festival had provided a taxi from the airport to the hotel. I was so happy to not have to figure out transportation right off the bat. The driver loaded our bags in the trunk and Gabriel and I climbed in the back seat. I pulled the seatbelt over my chest and tried to fasten it, but I couldn’t find the buckle. After about 30 seconds of searching and finding zero seatbelt buckles I asked the driver.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, rather emphatically.

I stared at my partner confused. How was I not supposed to worry about it?

I found out that I don’t know how to cross the street without cross-walks. Years of parenting, of grabbing little hands and saying “wait until it says “walk” and then look both ways” had programmed me to look for permission that is never granted on the streets of Jaipur. You basically wait until you have a few feet of opening and then you dash out and hope that drivers feel like swerving out of your way. If we were lucky, another group would be making a dash and you could add on to their bravery, becoming a bigger swarm of frantic street-crossers and increasing your overall chances of not being hit by drivers who honk constantly to say, “get out of my way,” but also “go ahead, I see you,” and, “do you see me, I’m also on the road,” and also I’m pretty sure, “hello! I hope you have a great day.”

After one particularly stressful walk to the park where we made a wrong turn and had to cross a busy street FOUR times, I sat on our hotel bed, completely drained. I started to think about the anxiety of the day and decided that I was likely looking at the whole transportation situation with privileged, Eurocentric lenses. I decided to google traffic and pedestrian safety and casualty rates in India and wow, hey, maybe we just shouldn’t google some things because it turns out that the accident and fatality rates pretty much match what you would expect with nonexistent traffic laws, no crosswalks, and cars where drivers routinely cut the seat belts out of cars in order to fit in more passengers.

Gabriel and I were two innocent babies on the friendly streets of Jaipur. Constantly at risk of toddling off into traffic or into a scam that most would likely be able to spot from a mile away.

A few days into our trip, we were walking around with my friend Aditi who had come down from Delhi to see us. Gabriel had voiced his hope to see monkeys during the trip, and with his somewhat sketchy eyesight, he was seeing a lot of things that could be monkeys but absolutely were not monkeys – much to his disappointment. But after having lunch in a market area with our friend, as we were walking back to our taxi, Gabriel spotted monkeys, real monkeys -at least five of them - hanging out on top of a little shop.

His pleasure at spotting monkeys was immediate, and they were quite animated and adorable. “Monkeys!” he exclaimed, pointing.

The shop keepers, seeing his excitement, immediately jumped on the opportunity. “Come up and see them! You can pet them! You can feed them!”

Gabriel’s eyes were wide but before he could answer, Aditi put her hand on his arm and said, “Do NOT pet the monkeys,” and steered us away.

She explained that the monkeys were often quite vicious. And they also steal and then you have to buy fruit from the market in order to trade the monkeys to get your stuff back.

“There’s no way they aren’t working with the shopkeepers on this,” she mused.

I am an abolitionist, and I absolutely believe in freedom and liberty. But I also really, really need someone to tell me when it is safe to cross the street. I also don’t want to worry about being scammed by wildlife and need somebody to make sure I’m not scammed by wildlife. That is something I didn’t know about myself until I went to Jaipur.

All of this would have honestly been a welcome distraction for me from the troubles of the U.S., if I had been able to escape the reach of U.S. politics for even an hour or two. But it turns out that the average person in India is far more informed about international politics than the average American and a lot of people in India are trying to figure out what the fuck is happening to the U.S. and why we aren’t more freaked out about it. Every news station in India (and there are soooo many more news stations in India than in the US) was talking about the ghastly impact of US politics and what it could mean to the rest of the world. At every panel I spoke on, questions revolved around the current state of the US.

In the book signing after one panel talking about identity in the US and in India, a group of younger trans people came up to me and asked if they could ask me a question that they hadn’t gotten the chance to ask during the panel. Sure, I said.

We have rights and recognition here in India, they said. What can we do to make sure that India doesn’t become as bad as the US on trans rights?

A lot of people in the US think that, even now, the country is still a bastion of freedom, at least compared to the rest of the world. “Why don’t you go to another country and see how you like it?” bigots and trolls will say when those of us targeted by the state have the audacity to complain. “Why don’t you see what other countries do to people like you?”

But this argument only works in the US because passports are expensive and capitalism punishes any breaks from labor, and so few of us who would most benefit from the experience of knowing that there exists systems different and better than this one have the means to travel.

The truth is, our country is a cautionary tale to many of the countries that our ignorance and hubris allows us to look down our noses at.

The more that the US kept coming up, the more I wanted to go home. I followed the news of the States closely, yes, with some of the dread that I always look at our news with, but also with a longing. It wasn’t a longing for our fucked-up systems or for the horrific headlines – I needed, deep in my bones, to be with my community.

There has been so much talk about where people would go if things got worse. So many people in our circles have been sharing lists of countries that might be safer. This is a discussion full of privilege and oppression. To feel targeted enough that you might have to leave home, and to be privileged enough to know that you can. And even as I write this, I know that my work and my very existence as a Black, queer woman in the United States might well become too dangerous for me to be able to stay.

But I have spent so many years here fighting, Not just because I’m angry (and I am so, so full of rage) but because I love. When I talk about love and its importance to movements it’s not just theoretical. I love people. For a long time I said I love the idea of people more than people themselves. I loved the potential of humanity. And I invested in that potential with my work.

In recent years, though, as I’ve deepened my in-person organizing, and in this past year and a half as much of my work has revolved around organizing and coalition, I’ve fallen deeply in love with the people I’ve been working with and the communities we have been fighting for.

And as I read through every ghastly bit of news about the US from my hotel room in India, I felt a desperate need to be back here. As I answered every question from my panel on how things got as fucked up as they are, I wanted to teleport myself back to the center of it. Not because I love the fucked-upness or because I love the pain or the struggle (I hate it so very much) but because I love the people in its crosshairs so much. I love my community so much and it broke my heart to think of it facing this without me right there in it with them.

Our trip was wild and amazing, and honestly too short. I hope to be back to India one day, and I hope to stay long enough to get over my initial shock and truly begin to appreciate the vast beauty of the country. Nobody should fly 27 hours to spend only 5 days in a place so gorgeous. I’m so grateful, nonetheless, for the opportunity and the experience (and the Jaipur Lit Fest is the most fantastic literary festival I’ve ever attended and I can’t recommend it enough). And I’m so grateful for what I learned about myself. But when our plane landed I immediately gathered up my jetlagged brain and body to try to reach out to friends to reconnect, as if I’d been gone a year instead of only a week. I needed to lay my eyes on my people again. I needed to check their pulses, to look them in the eyes, to know that they were okay and ask what I could do if they weren’t.

I have no allegiance to country. There is no flag that calls to me. And I will still feel a need to leave the US occasionally, if only to remember what it feels like to not be targeted by the country I live in. But people – the beautiful people I’ve marched with, cried with, strategized with, celebrated with – they and my beautiful family are why I get up in the morning, read the awful news of the day, and decide that it’s still worth going out in the world and fighting.

We deserve better. We are all worthy of dignity, of safety, of liberation, of joy. Every one of us. I’m so honored to be able to fight next to you for it.