More than immigrant: I am transnational

I sat in a lecture hall at school on a cold Tuesday morning, half-listening, mostly thinking about the pot of Ital stew waiting for me at home, when Professor Patricia Landolt said a word that stopped me: transnationalism.

It sounded academic. Distant. A word for textbooks, not for me, but as she broke it down (this idea that immigrants don’t simply leave one place and arrive in another but build lives that stretch across both at once) I felt something click into place that I didn’t know had been loose.

That is exactly what I do. Every Sunday, I call my family back home in Jamaica while I am cooking Sunday dinner here in Canada, and for that hour or two, I am in two kitchens at the same time. I pack the barrel every few months: cornmeal, clothes, the good soap you cannot get the same way down there, a little something extra tucked in the corner for little cousin’s school fees. We send remittances so the light bill gets paid and the roof gets fixed before hurricane season. Sometimes it feels like I am living two full lives: one that pays my bills here, and one that keeps my family’s household running there. I vote in elections here, but my chest still tightens when any Jamaican team plays. I am not visiting my culture. I am living it, from here, every single day.

The course readings gave me language for this. Glick Schiller and Basch wrote about “transmigrants” people who maintain and build connections across borders that are just as real, just as load bearing, as the ones in the country they live in now. That is the barrel, the remittance, the phone call to my family; not sentimental extras, but the actual scaffolding holding two households together. Nancy Foner asked what is new about transnationalism, since our people have been doing this (packing barrels, wiring money home, keeping one foot in Jamaica while planting the other firmly in Toronto) for generations. We did not need a pandemic or a plane ticket to invent this. We were built for it.

Then there was Janelle Joseph’s book on cricket and the Black Atlantic, the way a sport becomes a whole architecture for diaspora life. Reading it, I thought about every Caribbean cricket league match I have watched, every uncle arguing about the West Indies batting lineup on a lawn chair, every child born in Canada who somehow, still, knows exactly who to cheer for. That is not nostalgia. That is infrastructure. That is community holding itself together across an ocean.

Here is what I want you to understand, family: being an immigrant implies a one-way trip. A before and an after. Leave there, arrive here, assimilate, done, but that has never been our story. We are not caught between two homes, forced to choose, forever homesick for a place we left behind. We are the bridge itself. We hold both places, actively, on purpose, every day, in our cooking, our calls, our money, our music, our mourning, our joy.

This matters how we talk about ourselves. When we only call ourselves migrants or immigrants, we accept a story where our real life is somewhere else, and we are just passing through here. When we understand ourselves as transnational, we claim both. Toronto is not a layover on the way back to Kingston or St. Ann’s or Clarendon. It is fully ours, while home is still fully ours too.

Healing, for me, started with a word. Not a diagnosis, not a wound, a name for something whole I already was. So, if you have ever felt like you are living two lives, doing citizenship math in your head, translating yourself between rooms, you are not confused, and you are not broken. You are transnational, and that is not a compromise. That is a superpower we have been running on for generations, whether the textbooks noticed or not.