A Non-Fiction Essay Published in Bia! Zine Issue 002

I am sinking into the familiar grip of depression. Dublin’s cold has that effect on my spirit. I need to fight it, this lunch my parents’ friends are hosting is for me, it seems. My welcome lunch — welcome to Dublin,  welcome home.

Sinking into the soft leather couch, I stare at my feet. I am not well acquainted with fuss, uncomfortable with emotions. I envy the tiny strands of the rug, clutching onto each other, a strong but soft collective, a community. 

I have spent most of my grown life, a lone wolf—away from my pack. To survive, I discarded any yearning for familial fuzzy feelings a long time ago. It was inevitable after a shy, nervous seventeen-year-old me joined my parents at the Dublin immigration offices to get residence permits. It was December of 2001, I had just finished my last high school exam in Johannesburg and we were finally joining my older sister and father in Dublin. My expectations, like the cord that once anchored me to my parents, were cut by a stern immigration officer’s cold declaration that I was too old to join my mother and younger brother as dependents on my father’s work permit. 

‘Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do. Best bet—she enrols in an Irish secondary school, completes a year and then stays to go on to university.’

Redo my final year of school? 

I shuddered at the suggestion. 

Head up. 

I remember trying to manifest a Plan B as I struggled to find where I fit in Dublin, in life. 

Back straight. 

I remember gasping at the €15k tuition costs for non-EU students.

Eyes dried. 

I remember the depression. 

Fuss was a luxury I could not afford.  

A time to regroup, reset, relocate.

With no kick or fuss, I decided to rather enrol into a university in South Africa. 

And from then on, cold flashes of that stern immigration officer dragged me back to reality whenever I considered a renewed reiteration of my mother’s request for me to join the family. Bitten once, I opted out of Dublin. 

In Gqeberha and then Cape Town, I claimed my mark on this world. I visited my family in Dublin on Christmases first as a student and all the way through the various stages of my career. Supposedly, done with Dublin. 

But yet here I am, more than twenty years later, considering renewing my Dublin subscription.

It is this warm glow of the Sub-Saharan Sunday lunch. A fussy warm welcome. The roaring orange fire muzzles the sound of the rain slashing away at the trees and the balcony’s porcelain tiles. The prodigal child is finally relenting to requests to join the family in Ireland, permanently (maybe). 

Twenty years later. Everything has changed; growth, the pandemic and too much loss. Priorities have been realigned. Time is the luxury. 

We are called to the dinner table by our hosts. The man is from Malawi, and the woman, Zimbabwean. The two countries are more than mere neighbours, you can tell by the similarities in the way we speak, listen, laugh and cook. The apartment, the host’s hug, and her food, all smell like home. 

Born from nomads with links to Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe; a Johannesburg childhood; a degree completed in Gqeberha; a base in Cape Town; and family now staying in Dublin—I have learned to carry home as I go. It is in my memories, in my taste buds. Home has become a taste for me. 

 If this Dublin, with these smells, is what awaits me then maybe I can add this cold city as a possible home. For lunch, there are various types of fish (Malawian favourites), spinach, telele (okra), fried kale, butternut, atchaar (pickled mangoes), rosé wine, and most importantly nsima, the stiff maize flour porridge that is a staple carbohydrate, wherever we call home. In 2001 finding Rajah curry powder on the shop shelves was but a wild dream.  Everything has indeed changed!

I focus on eating my woes away; forgetting the nightmare 2021 has been, albeit just until we bid the hosts farewell. But our host refuses to ignore the heavy clouds that loom over me.

‘How are you finding Dublin?’

I want to say: 

I hate it. 

The remaining pieces of me, after just managing to survive the chaos of the year, are slipping from my grasp. 

My essence is solar-powered. Being here is numbing the surviving pieces. 

I miss my life, my apartment, my books. 

I wish I shared your generous and gracious spirit. I hate Covid for leaving me bitter and debilitated. 

I am vulnerable, still recovering from an obtuse wave of ill health that had hit me in Cape Town, a world away from my family. 

After too many doctors’ bills, the obtuse affliction was diagnosed as Long Covid— a parasite, sucking away all physical, mental, and financial health.   

A regular stream of income—lost. My life as I knew it—lost. Again a time to regroup, reset, relocate. 

I want to say:

I miss my friends, the sun, my independence… me. 

…

I think I’m still depressed.

But, I do not say this. Of course not. Instead, I smile. With a deep breath I take in all the aromas, the nsima and nsomba and telele and the Rajah Curry Powder. 

‘I am grateful to be here.’ 

Not a complete lie. Dublin is beginning to taste like home.