MISTI Blogs

My dad has a habit of leaving the PBS channel running on the living room TV. I rarely sit down to watch it with him, but I’ve caught snippets of travel shows in passing. One sentiment I’ve heard runs along the lines of, “travel accomplishes the same thing as a good book: it opens up a whole new world.” I grew up as a big fan of books for the feeling of getting away from the immediate issues around me. How fanciful it was to ache, laugh, cry, and celebrate about ups and downs that were nothing like my own. I could be worrying about a character who has to use her cyborg brain and power of illusions to stop her evil stepmother from taking over the world instead of feeling self-conscious about the boys in math class who made fun of my off-brand sneakers or tugged at my braids.

Queerness is an ongoing process of shaping my internal universe, my outward expression, and how I relate to others in ways that expand the architecture of cis-normativity and heteronormativity.

I understood the statement about books, but I hadn’t dreamed of traveling. Why go all the way across the world when I could just use my imagination? Well, I’ve come to realize that the realm of possibilities within my imagination are limited by the environment I’m immersed in. I feel this whenever I go back home to Lexington, Kentucky between semesters at MIT. When I’m in Cambridge, I get used to being around people who are scrambling around between p-sets, projects, parties, and endless more. Meanwhile, professors are doing groundbreaking research that’s probably changing the world as I shuffle to my East Campus dorm with my groceries. It’s a sea of minds from all kinds of backgrounds flowing in unknown directions. There’s the greater Boston and Cambridge area which has its cost of living crisis, but a strong community-based movement for social justice. Back in my suburbs, it feels more flat. As much as I appreciate the quiet comfort of home, being Black and queer is more inflammatory than I would like.

Queerness is an ongoing process of shaping my internal universe, my outward expression, and how I relate to others in ways that expand the architecture of cisnormativity and hetero-normativity. I wanted to travel for the intention of reshaping myself as more of a grounded human being. When I left behind places where I had settled, I had to evaluate what key elements would keep me stable in the new place: a prestigious university in the middle of London.

I: Mirrors and Windows

I like to think that every new experience is a glass surface; it makes you see yourself clearly like a mirror, or it lets you see through your walls like a window. When I first landed in London and had to figure out the public subway system to find my residence hall by myself in the evening after a seven-hour haul over the Atlantic Ocean, I desperately needed to ground myself in something familiar. The first thing I noticed was people who looked like me. While the Black population in the UK is about 4%, in London it’s closer to 13%. The former percentage is similar to MIT, and the latter is similar to the US overall. What I first loved about Black people in London was the fact that they’re mostly immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Having been born in Kenya and moved to America when I was eleven years old, I had a sense that I was undeniably defined as Black, but markedly different from folks who were descendents of enslaved people in the Americas. I feel waves of grief from witnessing the grandeur of a country responsible for colonizing where I come from. I felt the same grief and anger over colonization of America, but this was personal. Who would I, or my parents, or my grandparents be if colonial rule never imposed itself over our lives? What would the UK look like if it hadn’t extracted wealth from other places?

I know that I’m bound to see reflections of myself everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, because we are not all that different.

It’s a wildly open-ended question, but I know one thing from a research project I did for a memoir writing class I took a few semesters ago. The prevalence of homophobic and transphobic laws in Africa came from the era of colonial rule. Now it’s a flipped situation where the streets of London are flooded with Pride paraders the day before I arrived. I see flags everywhere and LGBTQ+ positive posters, and people in my lab office are openly queer. It’s not that different from Boston and parts of Lexington, but it’s very different from home.

As for the African diaspora I’ve encountered in London, I usually feel a sense of solidarity with them. Several people smiled at me as I made my way between London Underground Tube stations, and someone stopped to help me with directions without having me to ask.

One day, I was walking back to my residence hall from the east side of the city, where vintage shops hug streets of skaters and graffiti. It’s about three miles away, and I could easily take the Tube in twenty minutes, but I decided to walk for the scenery. I walked through varied layers of the city, and I could tell when I’d stepped into a new one. The street art and quirky coffee shops give way to ornate white buildings and business suits, which turn to nightclubs and cocktail dresses. I was finally in my neighborhood, and I decided to pause at a nearby park. I was trying to stop and smell the flowers more. A ring of benches surrounds a central patch of flowering plants, some as tall as me, and the perimeter was lined with them too. I entered the ring and sat on the far end across from someone close to my age, having a snack and leaning over their phone on their knee, AirPods in. Their hair was braided in long hot pink cornrows, dyed ginger underneath.

I think of myself as warm, confident, and outgoing, but being in London has made me realize how hard it is to make friends outside of school or work. If I were in a college context, I would have no problem sitting next to this person solely because we’re the same race. Certain spaces carry the assumption that everyone who visits is there to socialize. This wasn’t one of them. Still, I had been excited to meet people in this new place, and I figured there would be no harm in giving a compliment. The person noticed that I had been paying attention to them, so I told myself I couldn’t back out now otherwise, I would have made them uncomfortable by staring. I approached them, waited for the AirPods to come out, and said, “I like their hair.”

To my surprise, I got a compliment in return. They told me they liked my haircut and that they had also buzzed their hair down a couple years ago. We chatted a bit about hair dye choices, and I noticed that they’re wearing Buffalo brand shoes. I own a similar pair. I got excited and rambled until I remembered they probably wanted to go back to their phone, so I got back on my way home. I know that I’m bound to see reflections of myself everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, because we are not all that different.

II: Windows

Working in the UK has shown me that it is possible to have a work-life balance culture, affordable food with little to no added sugar and preservatives, and regulated public access to weapons. Some of the other MIT exchange students in the residence hall kitchen have joked about how we’ve experienced the two extremes: from having to prove you’re over eighteen to buy a butter knife in a cutlery set at the supermarket, to being in a Walmart stocked with guns. Someone from New York had told a story where they took a four-hour train to Boston, and I had to interrupt them to ask how it’s possible, given that I don’t have a good sense of the geography, that their ride was four hours long when the train between London and Paris is two hours and twenty minutes. Quality of the trains in Europe, they said. One of the first few nights of the program, I shared some strawberries with a friend who bought them for £1.50 at Sainsbury’s. The same amount could have cost as much as $10 in the US. They were consistently sweet and vividly red. I think it’s the small, day-to-day details of inhabiting a place that make it a positive experience.

As for the people I’ve interacted with, I haven’t been able to draw any conclusions about British culture. It’s hard to tell if a behavior is characteristic of the individual or the collective. I would hope that someone encountering me for the first time and asking where I’m from, what I study, what I do for fun, or anything like that would believe that no matter what I answered, there would be more unspoken complexity to the story.