Journeys: Djami Diallo ’28 and George Humphreys ’28

Journeys: Djami Diallo ’28 and George Humphreys ’28

“American Children”

By Djami Diallo

“Look at the American. She can’t even speak a sentence of Fula, only English. Her mother raised them all to be American,”  once said one of my aunties, assuming I didn’t understand her.

Being the last born of six first-generation kids, my experience has shifted so many times during my life. Three out of six of us were born in our home country Guinea, while the rest of us were born here in the States. Being the youngest of six children, when it was my turn to be under my mother’s microscope, she had already learned the ways of American children from my three older sisters and two older brothers.

I didn’t experience the first stages of my mother’s imperfect English but the updated, newer version. I can gather the little moments of having to be my mother’s translator, but I hold no significance to them because when the responsibility of being an American child translator got to me, my mother’s English was perfect, to me at least. As I got older and observed my friends’ dynamics with their mothers, I began to compared their American born mothers to my Fulani mother. I especially noticed their conversations: “Hi my love, how was school? What did you learn today?” did not compare to my mother’s demeaning silence every evening after school. Being that my mother was stripped of her education at a very young age, why would she think to ask me what I learned? The more observant I became of my mother’s untraditional ways of interacting with her children, the more I questioned her love for me.

In December of 2018, I left the States to go back home to Guinea for the first time. I call it home because it’s my parents’ home that I yearn deeply to be a part of. The occasion was for me to meet my father for the first time at twelve years old. I was empty of feelings. I didn’t know the right way to react, so I didn’t.

My father tried his best to utilize the little English he had left to communicate to me; he didn’t live in America long enough to diminish his distinct Fulah accent when he spoke in English. It’s not like I didn’t understand my native language, Fulah. I was never taught to speak it, but only to understand it. I’d practice my Fulah alone my room, but I was always too embarrassed for these words to ever fill my voice. My mother spoke to me in Fulah and I responded back in English— that was our dynamic. While experiencing Guinea for the first time, people gawked as if they could tell what I am, American. I was so taken aback by the boldness in questioning my Fulani status. My mother has always reminded me I am Fulani, as if I ever wanted to oppose that.

By my second time traveling back home in May of 2019, my father had already passed away from heart disease. He’d been a ghost my whole life, so this was no difference. I spent a significantly longer time in Conakry, Guinea, this time a full month. I’d accidentally hear my father’s brothers and sisters whisper conversations about his “American kids” and how we act like everything is ours. This was projection of course, as they were the ones who had plotted over my father’s land as soon as he died. I’d give them the meanest side-eye they’d ever seen before going to complain to my mother. I hated how they so boldly talked about me and my siblings as if were our fault my parents decided to have kids in a new country.

Being in Guinea gave me a taste of what growing up was like for my parents. Hand washing clothes, no running water, the sound of chickens clucking around the house. It was all so new to me. The environment was so completely different from the States. There wasn’t a deli on every street underneath a train station. Instead, there were mounts of burning trash that children avoided playing around and little markets set up in rows all along my father’s neighborhood. I immediately recognized a new side of my mother there; she was her happiest self around her family. She’d smiled, danced, and was joyful, three things I’d believed my mother forbade herself from doing. My mother wasn’t known to be an outgoing, charismatic woman at all. In fact, she can be very cold and non-verbal with an extremely sarcastic sense of humor.

By my third trip to Guinea in February of 2023, my mother’s happiness around her family made me jealous of them—why were they able to connect with my mother in ways it has taken me years to even scratch the surface of? I thought going back home would make me feel closer to my mother, but while we were there, she was having moments with my cousin and uncles that I’d never experienced with her.  That visit it clicked for me over a meal of Maffe Hakko, made by my mother’s younger sister: When I ate the food, it tasted exactly like my mother’s way of making it, even though they haven’t lived together in decades. My mother couldn’t find the connection, one of true struggle and deprivation, with her American-born kids. She viewed her family back home as her true family because they grew up in the same abusive conditions, spoke the same language, were robbed of their education, and faced so many hardships that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Coming to America and leaving her people behind was extremely troubling for her, especially when half of her siblings had died during her absence.

When this fell into place for me, I felt a bit relieved. I didn’t have the jealousy weighing so heavy on my waterline, ready to drop whenever she would share a genuine loving moment with my cousin. Though we are of the same blood, my and my mother’s experience of growing up are two different sides of a flawed spectrum. Over the years, my mother has definitely adapted to some of the American ways of showing affection, like staring at me while I scream in pain, then checking to make sure I’m still alive. One step at a time.

“Musical Language”

By George Humphreys

During my gap year before college, I traveled a lot. Unlike many other solo travelers, I preferred to connect to the foreign world around me solitarily. While others set out initially with a friend or find traveling companions along the way, I trotted the globe alone, and liked it that way. It felt more fitting to the cobblestone streets I wandered to be by myself. There were stretches of days at a time that I spent alone. It wasn’t until March that I really spent much time with other people, like St Patrick’s Day with my friend in Dublin, and towards the end of a month abroad, I flew down to Spain to live for a few months with some family friends in Cádiz.

I arrived there just in time for Semana Santa, the Spanish holy week. It’s celebrated the week leading up to Easter Sunday, with daily processions that march for hours around the cramped, spiderwebbing roads of the three thousand year old city. The processions are made up of hundreds of colorful, pointy-cloaked penitents marching barefoot, costaleros who would carry in groups of thirty to forty multi-ton sculpted floats of Christ and the Virgin called pasos; and, accompanying each paso, was a band. To me, this was the most incredible part. Each band consisted of twenty drums, mostly snare, a dozen or so low brass, twenty to thirty regular trumpets, and about a dozen Spanish cornets, which were like trumpets but sound an octave higher and are played with a little dial instead of valves. The drums played a hypnotic beat that approached common 4/4 time, but pulled back at the end of every other measure so it was ever so slightly longer, rhyming with the trancelike motion of the pasos, the drums rolling into each beat with the immense sway of the sculptures. The sound produced by the huge brass groups had a weight to it I’ve never heard before or since. The thick ribbons of incense curling out of sensors born by white robed penitents provided a base upon which the euphoniums and trumpets and the keening cry of dozens of Spanish cornets could not only sound with a divine resonance, but seemed to pull memory out of the ancient stone of the street itself. I was so taken with the spectacle that I saw every hour of the processions that I could in the next week.

After Semana Santa, with the music still alive in my brain, my host mother approached me and said she talked to the leader of one of the bands and got me a spot to play in one of them. The band was called Ecce Mater and was full of people of all ages, from ten to the oldest, hovering around fifty. They met four nights a week for two hours a night. I was ecstatic about being able to partake in that beauty which I’d idolized to such an extent, but I was terrified that I would feel like an outsider. As far as I understand, I was one of the only, if not the only American to join one of these groups and play this type of music.

I showed up to the first rehearsal sometime in mid-April, and my Spanish was immediately put to the test. It had sufficed until that point, but walking into that world of colloquiality and tumbling rapidity made me feel completely lost. I could barely understand anything anyone was saying. I barely managed to get the music from the section leader, though that was only because he knew I would be there and that my Spanish wasn’t great. I was ushered into a group with six or seven other trumpets to warm up, and I did what I always do with music I don’t know—I relied on my ear. As soon as we started playing, much of that linguistic barrier between us fell. We were speaking the same language. After warming up with these musicians, I felt leagues more comfortable.

We then all lined up in a huge circle in the plaza where we were rehearsing and the music began. Over the next two months, I learned in parallel how that music worked as well as how the people and the language worked. I learned to feel the systematic delay in the music and the patterns of speech. I learned the accents, the stresses, and the syllables of both. I connected with the people and their music as deeply as I could. A few of those songs are still some of my favorites that I’ve ever played. There were songs and evenings there that felt profound to me. The vivid memories I have of the warm Levante wind blowing sand from the Moroccan Sahara across the Strait of Gibraltar and the brilliant tapestry of music being interwoven under the setting Andaluz sun are ones I return to often. In those moments I felt connected to the people in a way that transcended the language barrier. The music brought us together to create something incredible and greater than the sum of its parts. It was not only an end for us to achieve, but in each run of a song, a complete and meaningful package of something grander—a connection that one can only achieve in pursuit of the nebulous goal of artistic perfection side-by-side with others.

By the time I left, I had performed two processions with Ecce Mater, and made some incredible friends. My Spanish had improved significantly, but I still found myself leaning on communication through music towards the end, because it was a language we were all fluent in. A few days before I left, after my second procession, the whole trumpet section went out for drinks and they gave me a framed picture of the whole trumpet ensemble with me near the center, from our first procession, with the message “Te echaremos de menos,” or “we will miss you” at the bottom. I have it hanging in my dorm now, and I look at it most nights. I remember the people and the friends I made, as well as the music that helped me to forge those connections.