Notes on Divesting from America

A pilgrim is a seeking person, with faith and necessity as their compass.

I will never be fully divested from the West because I have been conditioned by its schools and its languages, moving around the world armed by its blue passbook whose privileges have paved the way for my decade long journey as a Pan-African pilgrim. The allegiances of ‘naturalized’ mobility aside, it is precisely because of these journeys that I’ve begun to more practically interrogate the necessities that demand pilgrimage in the first place. A pilgrim is a seeking person, with faith and necessity as their compass.

“On the Motherland and in the diaspora, the colony says: forget your wounds and join our mirage of citizenship.” (Githere, 2024)

Most recently, I journeyed to Burkina Faso on a pilgrimage in homage to the late Burkinabè guerrilla theorist and state-architect Thomas Sankara. Burkina Faso was the first country where my American passport was more prohibitive than it was privileged—my partner and I were on the verge of being deported upon arrival on account of visa debacles, when my dear friend/mentor Francis Kéré intervened and testified to our intentions which led to our being granted entry into the country. [If you read my newsletter often, you’ll know this isn’t the first visa saga I’ve found myself in recently.]

(L): Meeting Valentin Sankara; (M) An excerpt of Francis Kéré’s project renovating Sankara’s memorial; (R): The entrance to the current Thomas Sankara Memorial site in Ouagadougou.

I will spend the rest of my life thanking Francis for opening the door to what was nothing short of the single most catalytic journey in my life to-date. What I experienced in Burkina Faso — from meeting Thomas Sankara’s brother, to praying at Thomas Sankara’s burial site, to witnessing FESPACO for the first time and witnessing Ouagadougou in this moment of incomparable revolutionary embodiment, stewarded by President Ibrahim Traoré — fundamentally shifted something within my lived understanding of what Afropresentism can and must mean.

A week after being back to LA from Burkina Faso, I boarded a flight to Nairobi — finally making the leap to relocate to my mother country. I had applied for a big teaching job in LA and gotten rejected for it; but by the time that rejection letter arrived, I had a visceral somatic epiphany that I needed to resist the exiled impulse towards brain drain by recalibrating the nexus of my cultural work towards my indigenous homeland(s).

To quote an essay I penned last year for a Bloomsbury Academic published Black Feminist Reader:

“This Age of Total Recall that Kodwo Eshun alluded to at the turn of the millennium – long before the terabyte trance of social media entrenched itself into the rhythm of collective life lands as a prophetic portrait of the present day. Forgetting is an art learned across generations, one that proclaims to reward loss with the promise of continuation. On the Motherland and in the diaspora, the colony says: forget your wounds and join our mirage of citizenship. Forget your languages and join us in our lies of a leveled playing field. Forget your value and your values; embrace our currencies in their place. Forget your Gods and pray to us for salvation or pay the price of insubordination. Forget your compasses, forget your curiosities and let our algorithms lead the way. Forget the essence of your own constitution(s) and you can join us in the future, sculpted in accordance with our vision of paradise. Having been fed prayer and false promises in an illusory quasi-eugenic effort to defer Black embodiment in its integrity to the distant future, “now” – forever shifting, by definition – emerges as a battleground upon which Afropresentism is waged. Afropresentism here refers to the ritualized manifestations of Black fugitivity in an expansive, re-indigenized definition of technology where progress is neither binary nor presumed; and the burden of time is not disengaged, but rather its wounds are well-attended.” [Githere, 2024]

For two years I wrote about heartache & exile & contradiction, and this year I plan on acting on rememory: attending to the wounds of exile in its plurality as I navigate the opposite of romanticization towards ‘return’. The heartache & exile & contradiction are still very much here — just with new prototypes & platforms for holding them.

My notes on divesting from America are relatively quotidian. I miss açaí smoothies and I’m embarrassed to admit it but it’s lowkey what has been hardest to adjust to — before, I’d spend long stretches of time here but never missed my imported-to-America food staples cuz I knew it was temporary. For some reason, missing açaí was one of the quotidian things that made me somatically realize that this move is different from previous stretches of time I’d spent back home. It also got me thinking about how the best parts of ‘America’ are things (&/or people) that are in exile there too.

That being said, having fresh tamarind juice every day has more than balanced out my unfulfilled açaí craving (and I’m sure I could find açaí here too, but I’m leaning into the yearning so I haven’t looked lol).

I am writing this now on a fold out couch in my bedroom in my dream home in Nairobi, having been on calls all day planting seeds for the incubator projects of my dreams. Afropresentism in 2020 was defined as channeling ancestry through every technology at your disposal until “the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality — now” — a definition I wrote more so as a prayer than a proclamation.

A short blurb on the lecture I’ll be giving on 31 July 2025 “Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine”. You can RSVP for free here.

My prayer at present is that these notes find all who read them in a place of remembering what is most necessary even when it is not effortless. May your investments reflect the most intimate of your needs. Write me if you’ve made it there, and/or write me if you want to figure out how to, too.

With Love,

🖤 Neema