Everyone loves the idea of the diaspora when it’s just about accents and “international perspectives,” right? A little exotic seasoning to sprinkle on your diversity panel. But living in the diaspora isn’t just airport codes and WhatsApp calls across time zones. It’s exile. It’s grief with no funeral. It’s shouting in a language your children might never fully understand.

My aunt tells me she left Zimbabwe with a backpack of hope and a head full of borrowed dreams. And you know what she found out there? Loneliness in high definition. Racism wearing a suit. People who asked where she was from and then blinked blankly when they heard “Harare.”

Like her whole nation was just a footnote in some NGO report.

Out there, you’re too foreign to belong, but too assimilated to return. And when you do come back—if you dare—you get side-eyed like you’re some ghost of privilege. “Ah, diaspora people, they think they know better.” No. They don’t think they know better. They’re just tired of pretending that leaving fixed them.

It didn’t. It fragmented them.

Let’s stop romanticizing the diaspora. It’s not glamorous—it’s survival. And even now, my aunt carries  Zimbabwe in her throat like a hymn she’s afraid to forget. She writes about it, speaks on it, dreams in it—because she’s terrified the silence will swallow it whole.

Diaspora isn’t an escape. It’s an extension. And sometimes, it’s a burden you carry quietly until you remember—it’s also a bridge.