94. The Wellness of Black Migration with Dr. Nafeesah Allen in Peru

Nafessah Allen 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to The Purpose of Money podcast this week we are switching it up and we are doing a podcast swap. So this episode is actually a recording between Christine and Dr. Nafessah Allen. From the flourish in the Foreign podcast we are going to talk about in this episode Dr. Allen story of going abroad as a teenager, and how that impacted her life. Dr. Allen is also going to share her perspectives on black migration and wellness, raising third culture children and authoring a bilingual children's book. So make sure to listen to this episode. If you want to know more about studying abroad in high school, raising children abroad, intercultural marriages, transnational migration, becoming an author and so much more. I really hope you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave a comment on our website, or in the reviews. And let me know if you liked this idea and think that we should do more podcast swaps in the future. And of course, if you enjoy the episode, make sure to follow flourish in the foreign on all podcast platforms or wherever you may be listening. So you never miss another episode

Nafessah Allen 1:18

Wellness in a really broad concepts like a very holistic way. It's part of why many people have gone abroad and have thrived because at some level, they've made this assertion in their head and they truly do believe that things will be better wherever they're going.

Christine Job 1:43

Hey, everyone, welcome back to flourish in the foreign. The award winning podcast that elevate celebrates and affirms the voices and stories of black women living and thriving abroad. I'm your host, Christine Job, a black American woman currently based in Spain. So today's guest is Nafessah Allen, and Nafessah is a diplomat, writer, an author, a scholar and academic and our conversation that we had not only about her own journey of living and thriving abroad, but also around a lot of her scholarly work around migration, and examining diasporas. We talked about so many great themes in particular about black transnational migration, and how wellness is often embedded in the migratory experience. But I will let her tell you all about it.

Nafessah Allen 2:49

My name is Nafessah Allen. I'm 36. And I currently live in Lima, Peru, I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which is a city that has a whole lot of history, and both good and bad. But I think some of my early memories of living there, were really just seeing people who spoke lots of different languages, but knowing that they didn't look like me and orcas are really segregated city even today and there's lots of books written about it. But there is a part of town, that it tends to be Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish speakers as well and that was not the part of town that I grew up in, but I knew it existed. I knew that there was this whole other side of town that people had a lot of ownership over both these language groups and cultural groups as well as the city we lived in.

Nafessah Allen 3:39

So I think I always had that kind of exposure to those different cultures at a really young age, even though I wasn't necessarily living next door to these communities. But one of the things I think that's really launched my career as an immigration scholar in particular, and the reason why I have to know this is because people keep asking me this, and I it took a very long time to figure it out. But alas, here we are, is I went to a private school for middle school after having gone to pretty much an all black elementary school in Newark, and having gone to be equivalent, I guess, of what you get in the United States when you go to Islamic school.

Nafessah Allen 4:17

So I started off in Islamic school when I was sort of preschool to first grade and then went to normal public school, but in an urban city, so everybody's black, essentially. And then I went to a middle school in a predominantly white suburb, and one of the classes there that we had was history. One of the projects was about who was your first ancestor to come to America. Can imagine how this is a setup to fail when you're African American and you'd have to explain to this whole group of white folk from lots of different places like how you don't know the answer to that question, but I think institutionally it showed that that institution wasn't in fact ready to integrate, frankly, and the guinea pigging that it was doing with us, I found to be really damaging.

Nafessah Allen 5:06

But the project itself was one I actually was in like sixth or seventh grade, I was like actually trying to complete it. So I talked with my family at the time, both my grandma's and as much as I could gather and at that point, I did not know, they didn't know. And we had gone back almost six, seven generations. And they were like, No, we're still in the south. So I didn't have an answer.

Nafessah Allen 5:29

But I did have a lot of history, pictures, and information about multiple generations of my family having been in the United States and I just remember my professor teacher just being like, disappointed in my answer was like, this is really cool that you know, all these people, but you don't have an answer to the question. I was like, cause because American history, you're the history teacher, not me but I just remember feeling like all of my family's history was really negated by not having this origin story of immigration.

Nafessah Allen 6:03

I remember feeling that that story was a really privileged story like to be able to say, the person who came to the United States, whether it be for Fortune, or for dis fortune, felt to me as a young person, like a currency, like a social currency in a way to be able to say that you're part of this national narrative and that you're, you know, part of America's immigrant story. I didn't feel like I had that. But I do remember feeling really proud of my family and feeling like I didn't need to have that weren't not for this assignment. I never felt like I was at a loss for for origins or for ancestral pride.

Nafessah Allen 6:43

So I thought it was really interesting to be posed in that way. And to have people really have a story, I think one of the most shocking things about that, for me was that I, when I went to that school, I didn't go as the only black person from my prior school, there were other black kids who went to, and I was expecting all of us to have the same story and expected everybody to be like no slavery, we don't know. But that wasn't the case.

Nafessah Allen 7:06

Actually, the other three students had at least one person that they did know from their family who would come from someplace, most of them were from like, Barbados, Jamaica, the Caribbean, so they did know. That was also interesting to me, as I look back around and adult expect anybody else to be from someplace else. But those questions never came up in all black environment, nobody was like, you know, fourth grade, like, where are your people from? And that just wasn't a question that was being asked. Our school was so Afrocentric and so about black pride in like, all of its diversities that I never even thought to ask that question. But in, you know, this predominantly whitespace it was coming up. It was really confusing for me and I think now I can say it was painful to try to feel like I belonged in a space where I was the only person who had this sort of African American slaves narrative and even then couldn't mean their verify. Nobody's like, yes, my great, great, great grandpa was a slave, like, my family was like, I don't think so they were sharecroppers, but I don't know about slavery, because I just really felt like I was lost and not having an origin story. I went to college, basically, curious about this, like curious about African diaspora is black diaspora? Is these conversations about migration? When do people become of the nation that they're in? And when do they get to continue to hold on to their ancestral identities, and when not, so I think all of that really came from growing up in New York and growing up in New Jersey, where there's just so many different people from different backgrounds, and there's a lot of people who are claiming sort of an immigrant story. But there's also a lot of people who are from my heritage of being part of the great migration. I call this Late Great Migration grandbabies, where our families have been in the North for generations. But our roots, our cultural practices are still very southern. So all of that I think, is part of my experience as a young person growing up in New York,

Christine Job 9:06

You know, in the face of story of having to go to school and present her heritage, and feeling conflicted. It's actually a common occurrence I've observed for black Americans in particular, I've had a past guest, Maya from Episode 48, in Paris, who relayed a very similar experience on her episode. So definitely go check out that episode, if that resonates with you, if that's something that you've experienced. So then I asked Nafessah one of my standard questions, which is did you attend university? If so, what did you study? And if you have the opportunity to study abroad while in university, and actually Nafessah studied abroad before University,

Nafessah Allen 9:50

I actually studied abroad in high school so when I left this middle school, I went to a boarding school in New England and that really opened up my eyes to different It cultures and different cultural groups. It was like the first time that I had been around, I went to a school outside of Boston and Cape Verde. And I was like, Who are these people? Where have you come from? My first boyfriend was Cape Verdean. And I had so many friends who are Cape Verdean, and I never even know that this country existed. It was just very eye opening. And I feel like that both that school and the Boston area presented a different set of demographics that I had never really been around before. Although I had grown up in a predominantly black setting, I feel like I was being reintroduced to different types of blackness. So I will credit Boston in some of those experiences, even today. To that time, just because I think it was, again, when you kind of grow up, like I said, sort of a Great Migration baby. My parents both converted to Islam. So I grew up Muslim and was raised that way. And I feel like it was sort of this idea of Afrocentricity as very, like universal, but then I got to Boston, I was like,

Nafessah Allen 11:00

No, there's different ideas happening here. So I went to Spain as a junior in high school, I studied abroad there and lived in Santa Rosa. And at the time, that was my first second language, so really got a chance to know a lot about Spain and met people from all over the United States. So the program is called sya it's school year abroad, they currently have campuses, a number of different countries, I think they have China and Italy and Spain and France. At the time, there was just Spain and France. And so I landed in Santa Rosa did not speak very good Spanish, I think it was probably the worst Spanish speaker of the group and left being one of the strongest if not the strongest, and lived with a host family and my whole stitch that a host mom she was in her 30s had more than enough time to dedicate to me.

Nafessah Allen 11:49

I'm still really close with her today. And I think that really launched what I got interested in, in college. So I came back from my senior year of high school in Boston and taken all the AP Spanish classes you can take was super curious about learning more about sort of blackness in Latin American spaces and Spanish speaking spaces, but just generally very curious about migration and identity around the world and this particular program was a bunch of students from all over the United States.

Nafessah Allen 12:22

So it was a new group of people there was about, I think, seven or eight black girls in this group of like, 50 students abroad, and we grew really close to and so I just feel like I came back with like a very different sense of myself, and an independence. I don't think a lot of my parents had even though I'd already been at boarding school, and we were pretty independent. I think I came back even more fiercely independent. I remember, I came back and I had a cell phone because I was living in Spain and cell phones were a thing and everybody's like, Oh my God, you're not supposed to have a cell phone here. And my mom's like, I'm not paying for a cell phone in states. And I was like, I literally have just spent a year living in a foreign country. I'm having a cell phone. So I think I just really stepped out on my own after that. So in college, I went to Barnard University for undergrad and I studied African Diaspora Studies, and Spanish and Latin American literature with a minor in Poli Sci.

Nafessah Allen 13:20

So with this double major minor, thankfully, the program was very flexible and interdisciplinary. But what ended up happening is I needed to write a thesis that brought all that together. I had been working on Latin America throughout most of my undergrad thinking about Cuba and Domincan Republic. But I also had some really great professors like Dr. Graham Glover, Dr. Abu Mooney, who really brought into the conversation, some paradigms, I hadn't thought about French and Francophone experiences, were really part of what Professor Glover works on. So I feel like I was learning about CES air and thin Gore in ways that I had never really learned about. So I finally had a vocabulary to talk about the ideas of Black Power and black nationalism and black experiences and liberation in ways I didn't know.

Nafessah Allen 14:10

I also really got introduced to the idea of colonization at that point, which, up until then, and most Americans don't think about America as a colony in the same way that we think about, you know, some of the countries who have more recently gotten independence. But I think that's when I really started to understand like, what does it mean to be dominated by a European country? What does it mean to be of the belief that you could eventually assimilate what does that look like for particularly black people around the world, but my thesis was around Black Brazilians and how how they form representative government and how some of their senators use either race policies or social policies to try to deliver services to a black population, which if you know anything about Brazil, it's a really complicated way to talk about blackness often it's masked under socio economic demographics is the excuse or the reason why Black people are in certain conditions, although black people are always disperately represented in these underprivileged groups, so anywho I think through college, I really tried to bring together all of the things that I had learned and tried to give myself the challenge of going into a new language group, and thinking about Latin America from a different perspective than what I had originally thought of which was all Spanish speaking, and so on when I went to graduate school, I went to Columbia again and studied similar things. I continued to study international affairs, but under this rubric of Latin America, and race and social policy, so I continue that research on Brazil got stronger in my Portuguese and was pretty fluent. By the time I finish.

Christine Job 15:42

As an academic that explores and researches at migration on many different levels. I asked Nafessah for her thoughts on wellness and migration. I think

Nafessah Allen 15:53

Migration in and of itself is extremely human, I don't I don't find Migration Stories, whether they be black transnational Migration Stories, or any other segment of the population to be anything more or less than human, it all boils down to survival, nobody will ever just say, Oh, I just chose to go to XYZ place because it was going to be worse for me than where I am now.

Nafessah Allen 16:18

Nobody ever chooses to do that. That's never the calculus. At some point, there is a value proposition that a person makes that they do believe that life will be better wherever they're going. That could be defined by many different things. So most people will think of that in socio economic terms. And they'll think, Oh, I'll get a job or I'll be able to save money or I'll be able to move forward and race in certain professional ways that I can't in one place or another.

Nafessah Allen 16:44

We have lots of documented information about African Americans over the 19th and 20th centuries moving abroad just because of their own psychological well being that Josephine Baker's, who left the United States, James Baldwin even left the United States in search of accepting racial belonging, not constantly being menaced by the fear that their blackness would come back to be used against them in some way. So we certainly see that across the board, I think, where, in my research, it's come up, and I've written about this is in the concept of love. I think when we talk about women in particular, many of us have some value proposition around love.

Nafessah Allen 17:31

That's part of why we, we moved, we left we migrated. Sometimes it's a love for our children, and wanting to give them a better life and hoping that they have a better experience than we did growing up. Sometimes it's for a spouse, many people have either had arranged marriages or fallen in love with somebody who's from another country and have given that relationship, the space that it requires in another country to hope that that would work out and there's also self love, like I said, there's people who recognize that they have talents and gifts that are not being either respected or reciprocated in their home environment and so they go in search of, of their people, they go in search of the people who are their legs, soul tribe, regardless of how they look or how they identify, they go in search of a sense of belonging of people who will accept them, who will love them, who will nourish who they actually are.

Nafessah Allen 18:25

So I think on many levels, that's true that wellness, in a really broad concepts like a very holistic way is part of why many people have gone abroad and have thrived because at some level, they've made this assertion in their head. They truly do believe that things will be better wherever they're going. So that faith in many ways, is very motivating to make it better. You don't want to fail and haven't gotten someplace and you don't have a happy ending. So in many ways people do create their own happy ending, or a self fulfilling prophecy of having sought that in the first place and having gone through so much trouble to be displaced people really do want to see that happy ending on the end, I think for myself, I have lived in a lot of different places. I have written quite a bit about how other people do this. But I think for me, I will say I grew up in many different expat experiences, not living in one country, not trying to fit into one country, but knowing that I would be rotating and moving and never really in search of belonging so much as self acceptance and if you move enough times you realize that the baggage you carry is with you.

Nafessah Allen 19:39

Nobody else can put that on you are there certain freedoms that you have because you're not trying to fit in and there are certain freedoms perhaps that you lose similarly, maybe community bonding that you might lose because you're not trying to adhere to a culture.

Christine Job 19:52

I often wonder if those of us part of the African diaspora who are choosing to live abroad. Are choosing to live abroad to fulfill some type of experience of home of belonging. Maybe even if it's subconscious, if there is some type of, I don't know, deeply embedded desire to continue to move, to migrate until we find a place that feels like home. And that can mean whatever it could be heritage and roots, it can be lifestyle, it could be so many different things. But I often wonder if that is part of our desire to move abroad. So I put that to Nafessah.

Nafessah Allen 20:43

I could go down a rabbit hole on this question, I think is very rich, I think the notion is deeply embedded in a definition of diaspora, that whenever you are forcibly displaced, you will always continue moving.

Nafessah Allen 21:00

I'm actually in the process of writing a book about this now. It's a follow up to my academic book. But the idea is that travel becomes both your problem and your solution, if you are not coming to the migration process, from a place of 100% agency. I think most people who would call themselves part of a diaspora know that for historical or personal reasons, agency was stripped of people, which is what created the trigger for migration in the first place.

Nafessah Allen 21:37

So people who are of that descent, will always continue to search for home over the generations, because of that forced rupture, that's pretty integral to any definition of diaspora, that we keep moving. Until we can find home, which may not even exist, we're gonna keep doing that. So I think all of these moments, whether it's the Great Migration, or the Harlem Renaissance, or today, are part of that long, Deray trajectory of people who were not originally from the place where they were born in search of an identity or a sense of group belonging, in some way, shape, or form, that they probably will never find, like, it probably doesn't exist anymore, historically speaking. So that that personal impetus to do that, I think, is like I said, very human, it's very human, if you're, very rarely will you find someone who, who was part of a narrative like ours, like this one, who was not willing to move or not willing to, at some point, uproot themselves from some part of their identity to find better because they, there's something in there around historical memory of of diaspora.

Christine Job 22:59

In our conversation, Nafessah reframed a black American hero in the context of migration, that really blew my mind.

Nafessah Allen 23:10

I think most people in America don't think of the United States as anything other than what it presents itself to be today, this United Federation have all of these different states, and now we're all under one, one rubric, and we are united as a country. We operate as one united economy, and people can travel from one state to another.

Nafessah Allen 23:31

That is a very recent idea in the grand scheme of American history. And again, this is part of where my knowledge of colonization really comes in. Because most people don't think of America as a colony don't think of ourselves as previously colonized. But of course, we were we were colonized by the British, we were colonized by the Dutch, New York, New Amsterdam and those realities had an effect when we think about prior black figures and their relationships with power, race and agency as a migrant. In the United States.

Nafessah Allen 24:05

I'm still developing this work for a chapter in the book that I'm that I'm writing now. But Sojourner Truth is for me, very emblematic of a larger phenomenon of not thinking about African American figures within the context of migration, talking about her talking about Harriet Tubman, these types of revolutionary women who we now can celebrate and their time, they were rebels. They were rebels, they were outlaws, they were they were sought after, they were bounties on their hands, and not for leaving the United States. Right.

Nafessah Allen 24:38

It was for passing through a variety of different states that had different laws that are different regulations that controlled black access and black labor. So as we think of them now in a much more national narrative, it's like, oh, yeah, she was a national figure, but not so in her time. I think this is also part of the historical memory that a lot of us have around her trouble is that it was extremely violent and it was extremely punished to be traversing different spaces at different times.

Nafessah Allen 25:09

Even though we can think of these people as heroes today, they didn't get that hero in reception in their lives. Sojourner Truth and in particular, was born in upstate New York, which was at the time a Dutch colony. She was born speaking Dutch, she was an enslaved on a Dutch plantation. And she eventually, after a number of different trials and travails, runs away with her youngest, I believe her youngest children, youngest daughter, maybe also youngest son, she runs away, and she runs away, not to Canada, she runs away to the equivalent of British New York.

Nafessah Allen 25:49

So she runs away to an English speaking part of New York, where she believes that she can have her freedom when she can exercise our freedom, she eventually does gain her freedom. And she goes in search of her son who was still enslaved. She comes to find out that he was illegally sold into slavery or deeper into slavery, I believe, into the south. And in for some reason, I'm not going to be clear on all the laws, but it was against the law for her previous owner to have done that. So she's the first person black woman who takes a white person to trial and wins.

Nafessah Allen 26:30

So she, she goes to court and says, This was illegal. I want my son back. She actually wins and if you think about this, I mean, this is huge. Just imagine in the grand scheme of if we think about the two countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, or even if we're talking about going from Mexico to the United States, yeah, there's a border. But there's so many cultural barriers, there's so many difficulties to being able to not only communicate, but assert your rights, that's completely unheard of, particularly during this time where slavery is, is allowed. I mean, sure, it's not allowed in some pockets. But the overarching reality is that the United States had slavery. And there were places where it was permitted.

Nafessah Allen 27:15

So she, she moves forward, she gets her son back, amazingly, and then becomes this order for not only black rights and inclusion, but women's inclusion, and then she finds herself very sidelined in these conversations around what most people will call white women's feminism, where they don't want her to speak and they don't want her to be the voice of female liberation. Then, of course, she, you know, writes her famous Aint I A Woman, and kind of launches into this entire career around black feminism. But if we think about her, and as I think about her as a migration scholar, I think of her like, she's an immigrant to the spaces in which she she inhabit, she's teaching herself these new rules, she's learning how to behave in a place where she was not initially born.

Nafessah Allen 28:05

She's trying to create a space for making and lawmaking for people who look like her are going to experience the space, whether or not they were born into it, or forced into it and so, her story, I find to be extremely foundational to understanding blackness over time and migration for black women in particular over time, because it's only until recently that figures like her have been either brought out or celebrated, or even acknowledged, and even today, we don't acknowledge her as a person who overcame some of these fundamental, you know, barriers to inclusion at a, at a migration level.

Nafessah Allen 28:46

We talked about her and so many other lenses but not acknowledging those origins. And I think that's something that we see a lot we see a flattening of black women's experiences as they move and live abroad. We see an oversimplification of the trials and travails that they go through to move abroad and to live abroad, that sort of double veil of being both black and a woman that intersectionality often is extremely punitive. I think in the rewriting of history and trying to create these victor stories, we often underestimate just how heroic these women were in being black travelers. Harriet Tubman, of course, we can talk about for years and years and years, but there's so many other figures who are part of that same experience, who we really need to reinvestigate and think about differently because their stories are really triumphant not just because of who we believe them to be today, but because of how they lived in their time and in their time. They weren't.

Christine Job 29:55

Hey, I hope that you are enjoying this episode of flourish in the foreign If you are, please consider supporting the podcast by either becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/flourish foreign, tipping the podcast via cash app at $flourishborn, or buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee.com/flourishborn or purchasing a piece of production equipment via our Amazon wishlist at flourishintheforeign.com/support. I also want to invite you all to check out the plethora of resources that I have compiled for you all, at the website flourish the foreign.com/resources There you will find a book list to help you get stay and thrive abroad, as well as the build a business abroad guide and moving abroad with intention guide. All right. Let's continue the show.

Christine Job 30:59

I asked Nafessah to share with us some of her reflections on her experience as a black woman abroad.

Nafessah Allen 31:08

Yeah, I think thinking of it chronologically is probably the best way I think foundationally my move to Spain was really important. So I would start even before some of the places that I've lived as an adult, I turned 16. In Spain, there sort of a coming of age that happened for me at that time. And I think being a young black girl on your own, frankly, frankly, in another country and number one, I had a number of other black girls around me. Who trusted and felt really bonded to and in many ways I think of us as like a sorority before, it's sorority because we experienced so much together, I had that, as well as being introduced to these pockets of black people in Spain. Some of them weren't recent immigrants, like we can African immigrants, but many of them were mixed or have some sort of African and European parentage and maybe didn't really acknowledge their blackness as much as being white today have maybe pushed them to do so I think at that point, it was really about maybe even like black girl magic before it existed.

Nafessah Allen 32:18

Like, I think we felt so exceptional. And we felt so powerful and so unique in this experience. I think I came back, never really being the same never. I never really came back thinking of the world that I was living in as my only option. I never felt like I would ever live in one place full time. I think that that really bit me when I lived in Spain that like, why why would you ever suffer in a place you don't enjoy? Like, just go somewhere else? You can you can do it. I could do it at 15. Why? Why couldn't I do it at 20 or 30 or 40 or 70. Because I think that always opened up that door in my mind that I can always move and that's part of my calculation of my survival as a person is that this I don't like something, I always want to have the option to be able to move as I sort of grew up in these different other roles where I was able to travel as a professional and then also as an academic, I would say, I think India and the Indian subcontinent. I traveled to Pakistan as well, I think was interesting. For me, I think people were very confused by me.

Nafessah Allen 33:27

Sometimes it was like, people were guessing, like where I was from, and of course, they always gets wrong partially because they speak Hindi. So sometimes they'd be like, Are you from this other part of India? Like I don't get it? And then other people would just be like, Oh, you're from Africa. I got like, Are you from Nigeria? Are you from Congo a lot. And then it was funny. I was I was tell people, I was in this market in Delhi and one of the vendors like, Okay, you from Africa, where and I'm like, not Africa. And he's like, oh, and I was like, think like Obama like Obama, not really Africa.

Nafessah Allen 33:58

He's like, Oh, black, like Obama. And then like the light bulb goes off, like, yes, American black like Obama. So I feel like being in India at the time that we had a black president with, with perhaps a good explanation of it was kind of a, a way to just be like, if you don't get it, I'm not going to dig into this too much.

Nafessah Allen 34:17

But like, here's your example of how a person like me could exist. But I feel like I also had some really good experiences where I think people had never really met a black person. And I think I could, in many ways, connect with them on a personal level out of their curiosity and respected. I think, as a person who constantly traveled I don't, I don't typically offend much.

Nafessah Allen 34:41

I don't get out of sorts when somebody says something that sounds crass or callous around not knowing who I am, what I'm about. So I think in many ways, I was in a position of being an educator, I suppose and that can be exhausting after a while, but I didn't really get offended in the same ways. I think some other people do. And then I left and went to Mozambique. I think it was the week felt, frankly, really fantastic at the beginning, because I felt like there wasn't this huge gulf of culture. I didn't walk around being identified as not from there. It was one of the first times I've gone to Ghana before, but I think it's very, you know, Ghanians can also spot African Americans very quickly.

Nafessah Allen 35:23

So even there, like I felt like an outsider. But I feel like when I was in Mozambique again, because of my fluency with the language, and my husband's Mozambican, I really got into spaces where I felt like I was just being treated like anybody else. I wasn't being like, singled out, it wasn't considered special, just like it is what it is and of course, I had the family dynamic to where like, I'm marrying into a Mozambican family and I'm black, but I'm not Mozambican. So there were definitely some early clashes of them, his family being like, Well, why don't you do this? And why doesn't she want to do that. And he's like, she's not from here. I remember telling him at the beginning, I was like, I wish he would just tell them that I'm white.

Nafessah Allen 36:00

Like, it would be easier. There'll be easier, because if they thought that I was like, physically not like them, I think there wouldn't be as much pressure to fit in, there wouldn't be as much pressure to like, know all the things. But because I'm black, there's a lot of pressure to like, try to be Mozambican and so that took a lot of time for both of us in sort of asserting ourselves in our relationship to be like, yeah, she's going to do what she wants to do. And she's not always going to do the things you think she should. And she's not from here. So like, let it go. And I think when we went to Angola, it was very liberating, I think, for both of us, because Angola is also a Portuguese speaking country, but it was a country neither of us was from.

Nafessah Allen 36:39

So I think there we can really establish some autonomy around our family and the ways we wanted our children to be raised and the type of rules and behaviors that we wanted to have in our household, which was a little bit different than what we felt the pressure to adhere to, in Mozambic because we had family and his whole family's there and so there was a lot of were just a lot of expectations, I think that we didn't have to deal with in Angola and it was great. We actually absolutely love it. A lot of people find it really challenging, but we absolutely loved it, and have many, many really good friends from there.

Nafessah Allen 37:08

South Africa felt a little bit for me like a homecoming when we ended up there. Because, again, I studied in Joburg at the University Vitznau. But because I was living in Mozambique, I really didn't spend as much time living in Joburg as I would have liked. So this sort of maternity time, actually gave me the opportunity to get to know South Africans in a way that I really didn't know them before.

Nafessah Allen 37:31

Like, I think I felt like I had known South Africans really well for my studies and my experiences. But I also got to really understand at that time, the fees must fall movement and what that was all about. And in some of the other protests, which, again, like I had read about, but hadn't really been there for. And they're I think one of the big takeaways for me, I'm still a visiting researcher at Vitznau is the the history of racism in South Africa is so different than the history in the United States.

Nafessah Allen 38:02

But there's so many parallels. And one of the things that I experienced there with being like, oh, I'm the token black person here, like I was in one of those in a workshop and everybody in the room except for two people was black and we went around the room and nobody was black, South African, the only South African was white. So there's somebody from Zambia, there's someone from them, there's someone from God knows where blah, blah, blah, and then there's me. And we're like, wow, this room appears to be integrated, but it is not integrated by black South Africans.

Nafessah Allen 38:38

So in this like elitist notion that foreign black trumps native black, I think I felt myself being the foreign black for the first time, like this elite privileged black person. I'm sure many other places I had been that, but I had never really noticed it and never really acknowledged it. But I felt that very acutely in academic spaces in South Africa after I spent more time there. And just recognizing like the places that I would go for lunch or dinner, like very high end places in Sandton, for me and the power of the dollar, it wasn't very expensive. But I would often be one of very few black people at these places and, and I was not just going for lunch, I was it wasn't like a special thing, but like it would be an occasion for other people.

Nafessah Allen 39:24

So I think that's really South Africa, for me is a place where it really is very close to my heart. I think if I ever lived anywhere for a really, really long time, we probably would be there. Because I just feel like there's so many experiences that I think I felt from the other side and I can really empathize with and just so many profound conversations that I've had with people, South African and Zimbabwe and other communities of black people who had never seen it their way before.

Nafessah Allen 39:51

I think I started to see it their way in many ways after spending more time with them. So here, you know, here in Peru, I still don't really know I can't read If they were, the black community is like here I often haven't really passed very many people I think it's an active decision you have to make to go to certain areas to be in commune with from Peruvians because it's not always just like easy to find those communities.

Nafessah Allen 40:15

But one of the things that I really felt here is that again, now we're in a new language group. So I speak Spanish, my husband speaks it kind of okay, but we had been raising our kids bilingual, English and Portuguese. And now we had to learn a third language. They're super little, and they're very malleable, they're sponges, so they got it, but I actually created a children's book, a bilingual children's book this year, because I felt like I was missing these learning tools to have trilingual multilingual content for small black kids living abroad.

Nafessah Allen 40:48

So these Third Culture, kids who aren't really from Peru aren't seeing that many black Peruvians and are learning this culture and never seen an image of kids that look like them. I felt like it was something I needed to do as a mom. But I think there's there's a lot to be said about how will they identify and I think, as a as a mom of kids who are probably going to move around quite a bit. And that's always a question like, you know, their earliest memories gonna be in Peru. Are they going to feel like they grew up in Peru? Like, are they going to feel Peruvian? Are they going to feel Mozibican are they going to feel American? Like, how is that going to come together? And I know that a lot of that is based off of the things that we do now. Like how culturally accepted they feel now, how welcome and respected do they feel now at foreign to a lot of those things can be really foundational and can really affect their lives much later. So I think all those things have really affected how I think of my blackness abroad.

Christine Job 41:42

Nafessah is American, her husband is Mozambican. And so and they all live with her two kids in Peru. So I asked her what it has been like raising Third Culture kids?

Nafessah Allen 41:59

Yeah, Third Culture motherhood, while black. It's like a full time job. I think it has some of the complexities that are already just part of being a black mom anywhere. But some of the things that I felt challenging are, number one, the sense of community. I think some of the people that just by the nature of my job, a lot of people that are really close to me, are American and even though we live in Peru, we kind of live in our own little bubble of English speaking and talking about shows on TV that are from the States and we'll still watch Netflix, our kids are watching Backyard Games and those kinds of things. So they have these references that are not about living in Peru and then the references that they do have around Peru are not about them.

Nafessah Allen 42:49

It's about these larger conversations of indigenous communities and people who live in Ima, and they have a really different way of life than that our kids are exposed to and as of now, I have to say, I maybe there's a lot more anxiety than there's actually tension. Because, again, it's been Coronavirus for the last year and we really haven't been able to make local friends in a profound way. I mean, my kids have like one or two grooving friends just because we live in the same building, but not the same way that they will have when they go to school and that starts for my son next year.

Nafessah Allen 43:29

I think education is extremely important. And the decisions that we made around their schools, I hope are there ones I think parents can always take themselves for hindsight. But I think our intentions are always for the best. We decided to put our son in a school that's really close to our house It's, it's, it's a Peruvian school. And it's because we really just wanted we could have put them in the British school, we could have put them in the American School. But there's a lot of things that I had to had to weigh and balance, I get all of those places, he will probably be the only black child.

Nafessah Allen 44:03

I think in all of those places. He is probably going to be the only person speaking three languages. But in the Peruvian school, I felt like eventually his English and his Portuguese, English and Spanish will come together because he would eventually get to an age where they started to do English in school. He catched the English in no formality in most of the American or British schools. Spanish doesn't really happen. It's not part of the curriculum. You can take it as an outside course. But it's not really part of what they have there. And I felt like that was really important.

Nafessah Allen 44:38

I didn't want him to grow up in Peru and not have that same level of fluency. I also felt like I didn't want him to like even at this age, he doesn't really know much about countries like him. He's like, Americans were my grandparents. My grandma lives like he doesn't know like the concept of the country. He doesn't know these geographies, and he's still I'll remember certain parts of Angola. But like he doesn't really get where that is on a map and I felt like if we were in the US schools, there'll be a lot of competition about what's happening in America and what has happened in America in a way that he wouldn't even understand because he's never lived there enough to identify with those issues.

Nafessah Allen 45:20

So my husband and I just made the decision that we would go with this really cool, it's not exactly Montessori. But like I said, I'm kind of crunchy granola. So it's like Montessori adjacent and really small classes. They do have other diplomatic kids, but from other countries, so there's like Korean students and other places and so I felt like it would be, it would be the place for him to get the type of attention that he needs, particularly after not having been in school and preschool. And most kids probably would have been, so that's important for us.

Nafessah Allen 45:52

We also still have a Portuguese tutor, who virtually teaches him three days a week. So she lives in Portugal and we do online classes. My husband sits with my son and they basically preschool in Portuguese now. So he has that. My daughter is younger, and she came here at the baby and she's kind of got her own little girl gang of other like two year olds is pretty funny and one of their moms actually started to have a teacher, Peruvian teacher come to an apartment building and give classes because the schools weren't open.

Nafessah Allen 46:26

So she's part of that group. So she actually speaks Spanish way better than my son. Well, they both speak pretty well, but she speaks it. Like she she really knows that. She doesn't have as strong Portuguese. She She catches it from conversations with her dad, but she doesn't have that schooling yet. So I'm trying to figure out how things come back together. Maybe next year, does she also get the tutor from Portugal as well. And while he's in school, is that something she does? I think languages is really important to how I feel about parenting, have them speak all the languages that they know fluently, I want them to feel 100% entitled to to fit into any culture in which they have touched or felt or have experienced, I do very much feel, maybe going back to my roots as that seventh grader, I do feel like there's a power in giving your children the opportunity to have multiple citizenships.

Nafessah Allen 47:19

I felt that really acutely in some of my research on Indian communities in Mozambique, it gives people options, it gives them at a very base level, it gives them the choice to go to universities and certain places that they couldn't go to, or to get loans or to buy property, things that could affect them very significantly in the future. So for right now, my kids do have both Mozambican and American citizenship, and we're another opportunity to present itself, I would, I would make sure they had that too, even though I only have American. So I think those are the things that have come up most recently and part of why I you know, did these children's book series is because I really struggled with finding material that will kind of let us be this trilingual black family, like it just really is hard to find that reflected anywhere else. So I made it and I think that's something that comes up a lot in my motherhood is like, I don't expect anybody else to live this experience. I think it is novel, that I might be the only family we might be the only ones and that's okay, but I'm not gonna use all the privilege and opportunities and choices that we have to like, sulk in the like, woe is me, this doesn't exist for me space and just make it I do it, I figure it out. And I have to DIY that for my kids because I, I have chosen a lifestyle where they're not sitting in the same place. And they're not laying on grandma all the time. They don't have the same support system, like my husband and I are that support system. The two of us are that and in many ways we make decisions like we don't we don't travel, the kids don't travel unless we've all traveled together. So even though I might have to go someplace for work, or he might have to go someplace for family things or whatever, when they travel, we all travel as a family. So there's no you know, there's no sense that Oh, mommy and daddy are in different directions or we're not moving as a unit. We move as a unit. And those are some of the things that we've had to put in place because we feel like it's important for them to see that we feel like it's important for them to know that there is safety and security in the ways that we that we live even though we might live in a way that's really different from some of their friends and our other family members,

Christine Job 49:22

as I've said before, Nafessah is a writer and author. So I asked her to share more about that aspect of her professional life.

Nafessah Allen 49:30

I feel like just recently have I've been allowing myself to call myself a writer, but since forever ago, I've been writing books and magazine articles and things like that. So a lot of my work now you can it's on my website, Nafessahallen.com. And then you can also just check the other sites. It's magazine work, so I do a lot of work on DEI, integrating diverse voices into mainstream stories around finance, wellness, real estate, a lot of different issues like that, that are now all under my byline. So you'll see pieces in like real simple parents house beautiful, that kind of thing. And all that's like, readily available, done, and it's still in production now. So I wrote a book about my PhD dissertation. So it breaks down a lot of what I said about Indian and Pakistani communities in Mozambique and what their migration patterns were like, that's coming out with Paul Graves next summer. And I've written a gang of academic articles, there's a new one coming out about one of these indo Mozambican figures that should be out early next year.

Nafessah Allen 50:34

But I've also written cover interviews with blemishes, unique was a really famous Mozambican writer, I think this year, she was named Person of the Year on Lusophone world I've interviewed, I do go to a lot of different folks. So that's also out in the world writing the children's books, the children's books kind of started off as a fluke, again, like I said, I was just like, so frustrated. So the way most bilingualism works is that one parent has to consistently speak one language, and another parent speaks the other so or caregiver.

Nafessah Allen 51:04

So the child has to know that whenever they talk to person X, they're going to speak this language and whenever they're talking to person y, they're gonna speak another language and at their age, they don't even know they're two different languages, they just know that they have to use certain words when they talk to one person or another. So my husband and I were super committed to this, we were like, this is happening for our kids, we don't care how long it takes and once it gets a little bit older, my son got a little bit older, he would ask us to read bedtime stories to him, of course, and the books that we were reading in Portuguese, they were just so heavy, it was like very heavy black history, stories, like they were well beyond his his reading level and they also were about references, of course that he didn't really know like, I mean, it's kind of like having a foreign kid read a book about Thurgood Marshall to go to bed. It's just like, it's too heavy and and so we realized that wasn't a good option. And then we started defining children's books. But then the stories would either most of the American stories were really simple rhyming stories, very whatever. But you'd have to buy two books. Like we'd have to buy the book in Portuguese and the book in English for both of us to read the book. So often, my son would be like, Mom, I want I want you to read the story daddy read and I was like, Well, I don't have that book in English. That's a daddy book. I can't read that book. And similarly with my husband, he'd be like, Dad, can you translate this book into Portuguese? And my husband is poor, poor heart, he would actually try to do it. And I was like, why are you trying to do this?

Nafessah Allen 52:25

Like, just tell him? No, but he's like, No, it's important for him to learn this vocabulary in Portuguese to like, he doesn't know how to say some of these things outside of English. And if we don't give him a Portuguese translation, he'll never know what those words mean. So I went in the search of bilingual books, and there are not that many. But the ones that do exist at this age group, there's one series by Shelly Admont, who I absolutely love her work. It's amazing. It's on Amazon, it has been a staple in our house, really simple books, like really, really simple books that are translated into multiple languages and we can get the side by side in English and in Spanish, or English and Portuguese, and my kids loved it.

Nafessah Allen 53:04

But those characters are bunnies. They're all bunnies. And when we went to Portugal, we went to Spain, even to have been to Brazil, like the bilingual books, often don't have black kids, or even brown kids, for that matter and even Spanish, like, most people will be like, oh, what about the books by Dora or that kind of thing? A lot of times, there are Spanish words, in a larger English narrative. It's not the book written in Spanish. I long story short, is I found some freelancers who would pull together the illustrations for me, a great low showdown in California took the job and I did the writing myself. So I just came up with this narrative.

Nafessah Allen 53:44

It started forever ago, way before COVID. The story is about a kid going to the doctor's office to get a shot and realizing how brave they are. But it's even more relevant now and I started that story. And the concept behind the book, I used to talk to a few different friends, they gave me feedback, they read it to their kids, and I use their feedback to simplify the story even more and what makes these books unique. The title of it is Xavier the Superheroes if you go on Amazon, it's available now in ebook version, and in print version, both in Spanish and English. But the thing that's really unique about it is just how simple it is. It's it's a story that rhymes in both languages, which apparently is like this amazing feat that everybody like, Oh my God, how are you able to do that?

Nafessah Allen 54:24

I was like, it's not that hard. When it's a kids story, and it's so simple, it's actually not that complicated. But again, I have this facility with languages and I speak them when speaking Portuguese for over 15 years now. English being English I grew up with and Spanish for over 25 years. So I I know how to do this stuff and so it felt really like a gift that I can give my kids that also I could give to a lot of other people who may not even know that they need this, I think because I moved so much. I knew I needed it.

Nafessah Allen 54:56

My kids were asking for it and I needed to provide it to them. But I could just imagine, and I've talked to so many people who are like, they're trying to teach their kids a heritage language. So maybe their grandma speaks a language that the mom or the dad don't speak, but they're trying to teach their kid. In so many ways, books like this are educational for adults, too, because they didn't know how to say something this way, or they or they speak a language, but they never read a language.

Nafessah Allen 55:24

So they know how to say all the words, but they didn't ever seen those words written down. So in many ways, I find that other families who have used this and who have bought this, it's really enjoyable for the adults too, because they've never seen something presented so simply, so easily, and so universally, but written in both languages, and the main character is black. But there are other characters of color throughout the book. It's just a really, in my mind, it's a gift that I say that I gave my kids, but that they gave me I don't think I ever would have needed to produce something like this. We're, we're not in the situation of motherhood, abroad, I never would have thought that oh, my god, somebody could need this. But I did. And I'm sure there are other families that do it.

Christine Job 56:07

Nafeesah also has an incredible project in resource called Black History bookshelf, and I'll let her tell you all about it.

Nafessah Allen 56:16

Yeah, Black History bookshelf was kind of a project that started to come out of my work after finishing my PhD. I ended up with at the states, lots of people were like, Oh, my God, you're back. Why are you back? And then also being like, Oh, my God, you got your PhD, like, tell me all about it. And I went on to tell them stories, like, oh, my gosh, I never read this in a book. I didn't know books about this stuff even existed. I never heard of these stories. And I was like, oh, yeah, I've got like, stacks and stacks of this stuff.

Nafessah Allen 56:44

I mean, again, I've been studying this since undergrad. So I've got I've got no car Kimbrel in my library just as much as I have Tallahassee coats, because I've been working in this work for so long and it came to a point where a lot of people would just ask me, like, oh, I want to read a book about this, or, Oh, I never heard a story about that. And I'd be like, Oh, here's this book. Here's that book. And I felt like that a little bit of downtime, because of the pandemic.

Nafessah Allen 57:09

I felt like it was time for me to really get these ideas out of my head and put them in a place where they were accessible to people. And again, similar to the children's book, I just realized, like I had this particular knowledge that brought together a lot of different worlds that circulated around each other maybe admired one another, but like really weren't connected. So I started off by just doing some book reviews about stories that I felt like were interesting. Then I grew to start to translate some of those stories into Spanish and into Portuguese so that even if you couldn't read the book in Spanish or Portuguese, you knew some of what the book entailed, and eventually could get to a translation or find a version of that book. And then I think as it evolved, I started to include books that were written in Spanish and Portuguese and doing that same service back into English because the same way I said before, like when US we don't think of ourselves as colonized or have a column colonial history, we often don't think about, like, the barriers that come up around English, we don't realize that when we're reading books about people of different cultures, by reading them in English, just by the nature of reading them in English, you're missing something. Missing some nuance of how native cultures would have talked about themselves and I felt like when people started talking about Latin America and Brazil and get more curious about traveling the world, like they needed to hear that these stories existed and people's own words, not through the lens of an American researcher or not through the lens of some visiting traveler, but like because these people are writing their own books and writing their own stories.

Nafessah Allen 58:43

So as of now, the bookshelf is kind of a book review repository. We also have a bookstore on bookshop.org, where we use sort of curated lists and people can go to our curated nonfiction and fiction list to look up different things about different topics. We ran a book bundle around Afro native histories during Native American heritage month. So lots about black Seminoles and different groups, and did the same for Afro Latinx heritage and had some book bundles that were sold around those stories and I'm sure we'll do it again for Black History Month.

Nafessah Allen 59:21

It's kind of my passion for books. I just absolutely love books. I absolutely love going into bookstores and getting lost and finding manuscripts and old stories and things that probably have way too much dust on them, but really tow unique legacies that you probably couldn't find. So I just wanted to make that available to people who are black history enthusiasts around the world and all of the authors are black. That's one thing I also realize that a lot of people when they're talking about reading black histories, they're assuming they're going to read black authors and that's just not the case. There are a lot of people from a variety of different heritage Heritage's or reading about the stories and narratives. I felt like when I would get other bibliographies or other lists, it would be really, really narrow and that has a place, it certainly has a value. But I also felt like to give true historical graphic relevance, it's important to include other people who, who have a passion for the same things to and may not identify as black, but have a lot of expertise to share. So that's black history bookshelf, and it's growing, it's on Instagram, and our our shop has all sorts of things from swag to books. But it's just really a passion project that I felt like I needed to give to the world.

Christine Job 1:00:40

I asked Nafessah, What is her definition of wellness? And how has her concept and practice of wellness evolved, as she has lived abroad?

Nafessah Allen 1:00:52

It's an existential question, I don't even know where to begin, I don't have one definition of wellness. But I definitely am a person who can feel into my body and know when something doesn't feel to me and so I think my definition of wellness is always guided by that, by that body communication that for some reason, either I'm safe, I'm not safe, I'm happy, I'm not happy and fulfilled and not fulfilled and that can be at an emotional level that can be a spiritual level, physical level, but I'm very in touch with my body and the ways that I feel about a situation.

Nafessah Allen 1:01:24

I think that's really important to have our travelers experienced, there are times when, you know, I will do things that other people would consider to be risky in their context. But I know that it's not risky in the context in which I did it. And I know that certain people might misjudge situations or feel one way or another. But I am very much guided by my intuition. They also find that there's always wellness communities, no matter where you go. Sometimes they're more they're harder to find than others. But I did a retreat and 12 day, you know, silent meditation retreat in Mozambique, of all places. And I think most people were shocked to know that that even existed and in Mozambic, but it does. It's everything from yoga communities, to mommy groups, and all that other stuff.

Nafessah Allen 1:02:08

They always exists, there's always somebody doing it, you just have to find your people. I think one thing for me that I've discovered about myself, particularly while moving abroad is just how much I don't have it giving my body the care that it deserves. I think being a mom back to back and again, just moving around a lot. I just never really, since moving abroad have given my body, the thank you that it deserves. I think I do a lot with my mind, but I haven't done it with my body. So things like massage, like at this point, I do like weekly massage as a writer, I need it like my shoulders are cramping arms, some of these things I think I used to consider to be luxury and in the States, maybe they would be just because they're so cost prohibitive.

Nafessah Allen 1:02:49

But outside they're not. And it's not necessarily a luxury. So I always go back to, to these these original statements by like Audrey Lorde, like some of these things are not about, they're not about looks. It's about self preservation. It's not about spoiling myself. It's about the self care that needed to be able to get up in produce, and mother and live and do all these things in a world that, you know, is always new and always different and always changing. So I think taking care of yourself is really important. And the only way that you can know that is to be in touch with yourself to know what that means for you. And living abroad. That has changed a lot of how I think I have resources to take care of myself. But I do think that it's made me much more acutely aware of when I need help and how I get it.

Christine Job 1:03:37

Thank you so much Nafessah that was so wonderful. I enjoyed it so so much. If you all enjoyed that episode and you want to keep up with Nafisa you can via social media,

Nafessah Allen 1:03:50

oh my gosh, I'm all over the social media. My handle is that theblaxpat so t h e b L A X P A T, on Instagram and on LinkedIn. And my website is nafessahallen.com. You can subscribe there to hear more about what I'm up to and what I'm doing black history bookshelf has its own handle. So blackhistorybookshelf.com is its website. And we are also on Instagram and Facebook and I'm on LinkedIn just under my name. And I'm happy to connect with folks there as well.

Christine Job 1:04:26

You can learn more about Nafisa via her show notes page on the website flourish the foreign.com/episodes/nafessah Thank you all so much for listening to this episode and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed recording it and editing it. You know, I think there are so many layers to wanting to move abroad, even being able to move abroad and how you construct your life abroad. But I think that we do ourselves a disservice thinking that this is brand new think that there's so much to learn by looking to the past, people who've done it, but also recognizing that for a lot of us, migration is part of our heritage it is whether it be forced or otherwise. I think exploring that in more detail and with more nuance and care, I think would do us all good. I think it would. So if you enjoyed this episode, and you want to hear more Black Migration Stories, more experts talking about this, the history of black migration, or anything else that you've heard in this episode, you have to let me know.

Christine Job 1:05:38

That's how I know what y'all like. So be sure to jump in my DMs comments, send me an email, and let me know if this is more of the content that you enjoy. All right, big thanks, as always, to Zachary Hicks, who produce the music of this year podcast. And remember, it is not about going abroad, moving abroad is definitely not about just being abroad. Now, it's about thriving abroad. Yes, yes. So go abroad and cultivate a life well lived. See you next time.

Acquania Escarne 1:06:23

Thank you for listening to the purpose of money podcast. For more resources and information, check out my website, thepurposeofmoney.com and while you're there, please sign up for our newsletter so you have the latest information on new episodes and blog posts. Until next time, keep creating freedom in your life today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai