By Ayodeji Adebanjo

In his personal essay “Becoming an Immigrant,” published in Issue 51 of The Adroit Journal, Ademola Adefolami offers not so much a narrative of departure as an anatomy of apprehension. Before a plane lifts, before a border is crossed, the essay situates us in a mind already in transit—restless, questioning, uncertain whether movement across continents might also entail a subtler, more fraught migration: that of the self. It is a piece that resists the triumphalism often associated with scholarship-funded departures to the West. Instead, it opens in doubt, even dread, as the writer contemplates not just relocation but the potential dislocation of moving to a place so geographically and demographically estranged from his own that he wonders whether it might constrict thought itself, severing him from the communal rhythms that have shaped his intellectual life.

This early preoccupation with geography is one of the essay’s most arresting features. Adefolami understands, instinctively, that place is not an inert backdrop but an active participant in the making of consciousness. The landscape is not merely where one lives; it is how one thinks. His questions—will ideas wither in alien soil? Will community dissolve in unfamiliar air?—recall a long tradition of writers who have wrestled with the intimate entanglement of mind and terrain. One thinks, inevitably, of Nan Shepherd, whose The Living Mountain dissolves the boundary between observer and environment:

“The mind cannot be entirely detached from the body, and the body from its setting….” She goes on to make the poignant observation that “place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.”

Shepherd’s insight resonates here, as it does alongside other meditations on place, from James Joyce’s Dublin-bound consciousness to Wole Soyinka’s evocations of Yoruba cosmology. Adefolami’s anxiety is thus not merely social but epistemological: if the ground beneath one’s feet changes, what becomes of the ideas that once seemed rooted there?

From this unease, the essay turns outward, invoking James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” that enduring account of Blackness as spectacle in an insular Swiss community. evilin’s experience of children recoiling, their fear inherited from a cultural lexicon in which darkness is synonymous with evil, finds an echo, however attenuated, in Adefolami’s anticipations. His situation may lack Baldwin’s stark isolation, but the underlying concern is familiar: how does one inhabit a body that is read, instantly and reductively, by others?

The essay’s reflection on this theme opens, intriguingly, onto a broader meditation on identity, particularly African identity. I am reminded here of a widely circulated social media clip: toddlers, encountering white strangers for perhaps the first time, react with unfiltered alarm—some fleeing, others bursting into tears. Such reactions seem to suggest that, beyond learned prejudice, there might be, beneath the layers of social conditioning, an inarticulable core of recognition and difference. While Adefolami does not pursue this line of inquiry, one may nevertheless note that for all the contemporary emphasis on the fluidity of identity, something stubbornly essential persists; an element resistant to language, yet impossible to ignore.

If the essay raises questions about identity, it is less forthcoming with answers. On the matter of literary categorization—what it means to be an “African writer,” for instance—Adefolami remains tantalizingly oblique. One suspects he inclines toward the position associated with Christopher Okigbo: that a writer is, simply, a writer. Yet this stance, while possibly correct, elides the historical and political weight carried by such labels. To be an African writer is not merely to originate from Africa; it is to write within a web of expectations shaped by colonial histories, global inequalities, and the persistent demand for representation. The debate is unlikely to resolve itself soon. One wonders, indeed, whether it would exist at all in a more equitable world.

Curiously, for a work so attentive to the psychic costs of migration, the essay is largely silent on loneliness, the condition most commonly associated with displacement. This omission is striking. Did Adefolami, contrary to his fears, find a community that mitigated isolation? Or is the absence itself a form of reticence, a refusal to dwell on a pain too familiar to require articulation?

His apprehension about leaving is all the more paradoxical when set against his own conception of home as a series of “fleeting moments.” If home is not a fixed location but an accumulation of transient experiences, then why fear its loss? The answer, perhaps, lies in the racialized dimension of his journey. For a Black man relocating to a country with a fraught history of racial violence, the question is not merely whether he will belong, but how he will be seen. The deeper anxiety may not be about leaving home at all, but about entering a space in which Blackness carries a different, heavier meaning, one he has not previously had to inhabit in quite the same way.

Adefolami is clear-eyed about the material realities underpinning his migration. Though he travels on a scholarship, he does not romanticize his departure. The economic impulse is neither denied nor disguised. At the airport, the family’s joy is tinged with expectation, the hope that this journey might alter their collective fortunes. One imagines, not without irony, that his premature return would be met with a complicated mixture of curiosity and disappointment. Migration, for most Nigerians, is not just a personal endeavor but a generational investment.

Yet the essay’s emotional core lies elsewhere: in its treatment of grief. The death of the writer’s mother hovers over the narrative, initially held at bay through denial and a kind of magical thinking. It is the arrival of the acceptance email, with its promise of opportunity, that ruptures this fragile equilibrium. Here is a dream fulfilled, one that likely belonged to his mother as much as to him, and she is not there to witness it. The moment is devastating in its simplicity. Those who have experienced similar losses will recognize the peculiar ache it describes: the sense that every subsequent achievement is shadowed by absence, that joy itself becomes a reminder of what and who is missing. It raises an unanswerable question: what is the value of success if it cannot be shared with those we love?

In seeking to make sense of both loss and transition, Adefolami turns, as many writers do, to literature. Books become a kind of scaffolding, a way to structure experience that might otherwise feel overwhelming. Yet the section titled “reading things” is, structurally, one of the essay’s weaker moments. A slight chronological confusion disrupts the narrative flow, and the heading itself promises more engagement with texts than it ultimately delivers. It is a minor flaw, but noticeable in an otherwise carefully composed work.

Arrival in America, at JFK, marks a subtle but significant shift. Adefolami registers, almost immediately, that something within him has changed. He is still himself, and yet not entirely. Identity, it seems, has expanded to accommodate new pressures and perceptions. He speaks of a “fickle prize,” lamenting the magnitude of what has been sacrificed. The phrasing is puzzling. Having only just arrived, what prize can he already deem so uncertain? It is unlikely to be the degree he has come to pursue. More plausibly, it is the broader promise of migration itself, the elusive idea of a better life, whose contours remain frustratingly vague.

If the essay occasionally gestures toward abstraction, it is at its strongest in concrete encounters. One such moment unfolds when Adefolami, seeking respite from heavy conversations, instead finds himself subjected to a bizarre and invasive interrogation by a stranger—a man who, invoking the ghost of some long-discredited phrenology, scrutinizes his features, declares them “un-American,” and labels him a “pure blood.” The exchange is unsettling, not least because of its casual audacity. When Adefolami responds affirmatively to the question of his African origin, the man’s reaction carries an undercurrent of menace. The tension escalates, subtly but unmistakably, culminating in a farewell—“be safe”—that the stranger receives with a knowing, almost ominous acknowledgment. It is a moment that seems to foreshadow the later mention of an assault, one serious enough to be reported to school authorities, though the essay refrains from detailing its specifics.

The institutional response to this incident is, by the writer’s account, tepid. He meets it with a kind of weary equanimity, as though he had anticipated little else. There is a sense of resignation here, a recognition that racial friction is not an aberration but an embedded feature of his new environment. This resignation, however, is not absolute. In another episode, Adefolami is racially profiled at a supermarket, subjected to an unnecessarily thorough receipt check. This time, when he challenges the attendant, white customers intervene in his defense. The moment offers a brief but meaningful glimpse of solidarity in action, a reminder that injustice, when confronted collectively, can be resisted.

This possibility of connection finds an unexpected locus in a cannabis store, where patrons of different races share a joint. Adefolami, alluding to Kaminsky, likens the act to “sitting in water with someone,” a striking metaphor for intimacy and trust. It is an image that invites speculation. Though empirical data may be scarce, anecdotal observation suggests that certain communities, particularly book lovers and cannabis enthusiasts, tend toward a more open, less discriminatory ethos. They are, perhaps, bound by a shared willingness to explore altered states, whether of mind or perception. In such spaces, friendships can form quickly, even endure.

For some artists of color, there is a temptation to dismiss racism as a distraction, something to be ignored in the pursuit of more “universal” concerns. But for the migrant, especially one newly arrived, such detachment is scarcely possible. Adefolami reports that his essays, like those of many African writers in the diaspora, are inevitably shaped by the experience of being Black in America. There is, in his case, a palpable sense of obligation to document, to bear witness, to contribute to a lineage that includes Baldwin and others who have written from within the crucible of racial encounter.

One of the essay’s more original contributions lies in its attention to the liminal phase of migration, the period in which one is neither fully immigrant nor comfortably rooted in the homeland. This in-between state, characterized by uncertainty and provisional belonging, has received comparatively little literary attention. Adefolami identifies it with precision, though one wishes he had lingered longer on its complexities.

The question of universality surfaces again as the essay progresses. Are there, Adefolami wonders, stories that transcend regional and cultural boundaries? In one sense, all stories are universal, insofar as they arise from shared human emotions of love, fear, loss, hope, and so on. Yet the insistence on regional classification persists, and not without reason. Labels such as “African writer” or “Asian writer” carry political weight; they shape how texts are received, marketed, and interpreted. They are not merely descriptive but constitutive.

Here, I find some divergence from the essay’s implicit assumptions. Adefolami appears to treat “migrant literature” as encompassing anything written by a migrant. A more precise definition might restrict the term to works that explicitly engage with the migrant experience. The distinction is subtle but important, as it preserves the specificity of a category that might otherwise become too diffuse to be meaningful.

The matter of cultural identity proves particularly fraught in the Nigerian context. Unlike nations with a more unified cultural narrative, Nigeria’s identity is deeply plural, mediated through ethnic affiliations—Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and several others. To speak of a singular “Nigerian culture” is, in some respects, to engage in abstraction. For the writer, this complicates any attempt to articulate identity in national terms; the lens must inevitably narrow to the ethnic, even as the global context demands broader categories.

For all its thematic richness, “Becoming an Immigrant” is not without its limitations. Certain threads, glimpsed briefly, then set aside, invite further development. The essay feels, at times, like the beginning of a larger conversation rather than its culmination. This seeming incompleteness is, however, not necessarily a flaw. It may, instead, reflect the provisional nature of the experience it seeks to capture.

What emerges, ultimately, is a thoughtful, probing, and quietly affecting work of considerable accomplishment. It resists easy conclusions, preferring to dwell in ambiguity. One hopes that Adefolami will return to these themes in his future writing, perhaps with the added perspective of time. His decision, unusual among Nigerian immigrants, to return home so soon raises questions that this essay only begins to address. How have his perceptions changed? Which fears were realized, which dispelled? And what does it mean, after all, to become an immigrant only to unbecome one?

These are questions that linger long after the essay ends. They are questions that, one suspects, will continue to shape Adefolami’s work and to reward the attention of readers willing to follow him as he pursues them further.

Ayodeji Adebanjo is a Nigerian storyteller, cultural curator, and literary programmer. He holds a BA in Literature from Lagos State University and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from Bournemouth University. His work spans editorial practice, festival curation, and literary programming. He has contributed to major literary platforms, including Book and Art Hub, the Lagos Book and Art Festival, and the Quramo Festival of Words. His practice is rooted in shaping cultural narratives, supporting writers, and expanding engagement with African literature. Ayodeji writes from the United Kingdom.