This story comes from NPR’s Next Generation Radio project:
Shams Alkamil describes herself as a “diaspora kid.”
While her family is originally from Sudan, Alkamil was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there until her parents decided they wanted to relocate to the United States.
Her father moved to Irving, Texas, when Alkamil was 4. Two years later, her parents applied for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and were accepted. The rest of the family joined him in upstate New York when she was six.
“There’s a lot of me first coming to America that I don’t even remember. But I do have a lot of memories,” Alkamil said, including “what English sounded like as a foreigner because I didn’t speak a lick of English. I only knew Arabic at the time.”
All that moving around made her start thinking about home in a different way.
“For me, home is the collective of the people that I surround myself with and like how they make me feel and how I make them feel and the shared reality we have,” said Alkamil.
Language and cultural barriers were Alkamil’s biggest challenge when she started school in New York, an experience she described as “overwhelming and scary.”
“I would get time out for just having my cultural paint [henna] on my hands,” Alkamil said. “I remember wanting so desperately to go back to Saudi Arabia, to go back with my aunt, my grandma, and go back to the preschool that I used to go to when I was there.”
As she struggled with assimilating into American culture, she also felt shame about her Sudanese background.
Then, as a teen, Alkamil found an outlet — poetry.
