Finding Home Wherever I Go

How can you explain diaspora? Is it simply what comes from knowing what it feels like to leave home behind, and build it elsewhere? Is it in the communities we form? Is it in the people we find along the way of our travels? Or is it being connected through webs of culture?

There’s a particular feeling that washes over me when I step into a place I’ve never been…but somehow recognize. When the air of a country I've never been to smells familiar like my body recognizes being somewhere it’s already been loved. When the language feels like a cousin of my native tongue and is close enough to understand, but different enough to make me take pause and be attentive. 

That kind of embodied experience of physical spaces is about memory, lineage, and the small ways Black diaspora connects with itself across oceans, land, time, and space. 

The first time I felt it, I was in Colombia for a conference. It was not my native land, my passport wasn't Colombian, I didn't know the songs that they all happily sang together at bars while holding on to each other. But I knew the kindness. I understood the coming together around a fire to cook a big pot of sancocho. I knew the busy streets that woke up to the sound of guacarachas instead of roosters.

It felt familiar, like a conversation my spirit already knew.  I recognized the smells, the sounds, but the language was different… yet, so familiar. I was home… but I wasn't home. 

As a Black woman born and raised in Haiti, fluent in multiple languages and still longing for one place to belong, I’m always carrying fragments. Haitian memory. American structure. Latin American rhythm. And everywhere I go, I’m gathering proof that the diaspora has never truly been scattered. 

Travel, for many of us, isn’t just vacation. It is a reclamation and an uncovering of our histories beyond oppression, a redefining of our present, and a reclamation of a future where black womanhood can take whatever shape we desire. 

It’s the undoing of stories told about us and the relearning that “Black” doesn’t look one way, or speak one tongue.  When I travel, I am introduced to the ways survival and grief transforms into dance, song and rhythm that travels through space and time. 

When I travel, I look for the spaces where Blackness breathes easily. I look for street corners, cookshops, and my grandmother's kindness in strangers’ eyes. I look for the places where everyone understands the sacredness of laughter filling the room. I look for food that tastes like patience, murals that prove we were here, the unspoken alliances where we commit to keeping each other safe, even as strangers. 

Travel has taught me that we are united through the common desire to be held, to be heard, and loved. But diaspora travel isn’t always glamorous, it comes with questions. Will I be welcomed? Will my Blackness be seen? Will I feel safe? Will I be reminded of trauma? Will I feel too foreign or maybe painfully familiar? But we take the risk in the hope of finding something more. Still, we cross those borders with the faith that we will live the stories that are meant for us. 

I go because my ancestors dreamed of crossing borders freely. I go because there’s something healing about walking streets our history textbooks never centered us in. I go because we deserve to take up space globally. I go because I want to experience joy bathed in sunlight, movement and wandering.

Travel is also where I learn the most about myself, where the flaws I tried to run from, follow me and force me to face them. It’s where I adapt, where I discover the bravery I had hidden inside of me. Traveling taught me that language lives in my hands, my eyes, my tone, and eyebrows when words fail. I learned how to trust community where I find them, I learned to develop integrity across borders,  to listen deeply, and how to honor discomfort without running from it. Being Black in motion means constantly negotiating visibility and safety, and still being brave enough to choose adventure and wonder. 

At its core, diaspora travel is about love.

Love of self. Love of people. Love of story. Love of possibility. Love of the fact that despite being carried across the world by force, migration, hope, or choice, we still find one another.

Somewhere in every place I’ve ever traveled, someone has reminded me: “You’re not far from home.” Even if we don’t share a nation, we share a knowing. A rhythm. A stubborn insistence on being alive loudly. A tenderness in how we greet our elders. A way of seasoning food that suggests we have survived deeply.

So I travel to remember. I travel to collect versions of Blackness that remind me my identity is not a single location but a constellation. I travel to stand in the echo of history and say: look at us still here, still laughing, still beautiful, still whole.

Sometimes home isn’t where you started. Sometimes it’s where the diaspora recognizes you and says, we’ve been waiting for you to arrive.