Nuances of Identity: I Feel the Need to Explain

In Miami, I am conscious of the question 'where are you from' just as much as I was in Brussels. I hate it, I wish I had a concise answer.

Last Saturday I was the bartender at a 50th birthday party for a family friend; a Trinidadian woman whose friends and family included someone I went to school with way back when. I bumped into someone from school! More than ever Miami feels like the small island, I keep bumping into people who know me! This is not a surprise, this city is Caribbean after all. Once, visiting Brooklyn with my family as a teenager, we saw our next door neighbor walking on the street to the corner store as though we were home. The diaspora is an interesting thing, it doesn't feel abstract at all. But, because the question is confusing for me, I've ended up here via several detours (and am not sure where I will call home, ultimately), I don't really consider myself a part of the community of Trinidadians abroad as easily as my parents do, with their 100% pure island accents.

As a recent posts indicate, I do think way too much about the little things, and my accent is one of those little things that turns out to be really big.

A woman who looked vaguely familiar walked up to the bar on Saturday night, and asked me to make her a drink. She called me by name, the way that Trinidadians pronounce it. She knew me, she said, and joked about the way I talk now 'so you American now, or what?' This isn't the way I pronounce it, and the accent she knew me with, at school on the island, isn't the accent I speak with anymore. Partly because I've been in different places and, sure, perhaps subconsciously it was a choice to ease up on the 100% Caribbean accent. I could overthink myself into paralysis, wondering if I suffer from ethnic inferiority complexes, if I lack cultural pride, if I should or shouldn't represent...

How to explain that I talk the way I do because I evolve and change as I move, and the person she knew in Trinidad is not the person I was and will be for all time.

That's the thing about moving around a lot, I think about things that are just taken for granted, identity just is what it is for people who are from somewhere and have moved somewhere else. Perhaps I make too much of the details in between, but leaving them out feels like leaving out an important part of who I am.

Really, this is just a conversation opener, I could say anything, I can choose what to say, what bits of information to highlight and to omit. Where the facts are simple to explain in two seconds - "I'm from (insert city here) and I moved to Miami last year," or "I'm Caribbean, I live here now" are answers to an easy question.

It's me, I make a simple smalltalk question entirely too complicated.