Son of Elsewhere author explores identity and belonging in new memoir
Posted May 29, 2022 9:02 am.
Unless you are Indigenous, you likely came from somewhere else or are descended from someone who did. And if you are an immigrant, or the child of immigrants, you may feel a tug toward to the country of your ancestors. Pop culture writer, podcaster, and radio host Elamin Abdelmahmoud explores these themes of identity and belonging in the new book Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces.
Abdelmahmoud was 12 years old when he arrived in Canada from Sudan, moving from Khartoum to Kingston, Ontario.
“Kingston is not a large town. There’s not a lot of people who look like me in Kingston,” he explains. “And so, as a result, I found myself in late elementary school, early high school, engaging in this, what you might call, erasing of certain identities. I tried as much as possible not to talk about my Blackness, about my Muslim-ness, and the fact that I’m an immigrant in order to fit in. I just wanted to just sort of belong.”
“So, this book is more or less an apology or a sort of an attempt at an apology for that.”
Abdelmahmoud felt, and still feels, like someone stuck between two worlds. It’s a place in the mind he defines as “elsewhere.” As the son of immigrants, myself, I found it to be a very powerful image.
“I would define it as sort of constant dance in between which place is home,” he says. “I’ve been in Canada for 22 years. This is, for all intents and purposes, my home. But so much of the time, I find myself debating the exact percentage of how much of myself to allot to my old homeland versus the new one. And I think this is a feeling that is familiar to a lot of newcomers, and it doesn’t really go away regardless of how long you find yourself in this country.”
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A cousin in Toronto told him, “You won’t be around a lot of Black people, but Hip Hop can help you connect to them” as she handed him two CDs, one by Lauryn Hill and the other by Nas. But Abdelmahmoud’s first taste of belonging in his adopted country wouldn’t come from music, but from pro-wrestling of all things.
“You know, wrestling really does not ask a lot you,” he says. “Wrestling is like a story of good guys and bad guys. And even if you speak no English whatsoever, you’ll be able to pretty quickly tell who the good guy or the bad guy is, just by listening to the crowd and who they’re booing.”
“That became an early bridge to some folks that I wanted to be friends with, because we talked about wrestling. And by talked, I mean, I mostly listened. And, as time went on, I found myself in a bunch of online communities where we write wrestling fan-fiction. And we’re talking thousands and thousands of words a week.”
To Abdelmahmoud, wrestling represented a place where his words finally mattered.
“That gave me something entirely different, which is the opportunity to express myself without having to worry about what I sounded like, without having to worry about an accent, without having to worry about how I carry myself that day because I was still kind of getting used to all of this. And so, I was writing before speaking,” he says.
“It was the first time that I could settle into that and have that feeling without having to worry about how I sounded.”
These days, Abdelmahmoud finds things in his new homeland that connects him with his old one.
“The smallest things will trigger it like I will walk past incense and go, ‘Hey, that smells like Sudan a little bit.’ I’m a big, big fan of country music. Country music reminds me a lot of Sudanese music,” he explains. “They are just a lot of moments that invite me to remember my other homeland.”
Abdelmahmoud is also a dad and he finds his four-year-old daughter is developing her own concept of elsewhere.
“For her, Sudan is a bunch of stories that she’s heard. She’s heard that I’m from there. She’s heard that my parents are from there. She’s seen some pictures of my cousins. But it’s still theoretical, it’s still like this other place,” he explains. “So, I sort of have to work a little harder to cultivate her imagination about what Sudan is like by giving her as many stories as possible so that she can think about this other place that she also has a stake in.”
Ultimately, he hopes the reader thinks about their own identities and the places they call home.
“My hope is that it communicates a level of complexity that we’re maybe not used to thinking about all the time, when it comes to these identities,” he says.
“I hope that people will spend time with that complexity and are inviting themselves to think about their own elsewhere, invite themselves to think about the other places where they might occupy a couple of identities all the same time, and they’re not quite sure whether they can feel able to claim it or not. I think that is that is allowed. I think that it’s something that is hopefully universal, and I’d love to hear from people about how this book might have changed their relationship to their own identity.”
