On Their Shoulders I Stand and Be

I have been thinking about a lot of things.
I have been thinking about countries like mine, countries that in addition to requiring you to provide
your own identification (an identity card, a driver’s license, a birth certificate) and copies of your
parent/guardian (s) identification, require you to provide a reference letter from a recommender. My
country specifies that the person cannot be a relative, but can either be a “Minister of religion, a
Minister or Legal Practitioner, an established Civil Servant or Bank Official.”
Why do they need someone else to tell them who I am? What will that reference letter tell them?
What will that stranger tell them?

Is not enough that I am myself a person, an autonomous person who is able to think, decide and
certainly speak for himself? Is my identity so lacking—full of gaps only others can fill?

Is not enough that I am a person, and of persons for whom the Constitution has guaranteed
citizenship and for whom a passport is an identification document?
Why do I need to know someone, to be able to get documentation to prove that I am of this
country, and the passport here being additional documentation because I have my national
Identification Card that proves I am Kenyan, and for which I also had to provide documentation?
Does my bearing this card written Citizen of the Republic of Kenya have no meaning? Is not fact
now that it is down on paper and in some government institution server?
Is the fact of my being and being of here not a concrete enough tie to the soil?

I had the privilege of knowing an acceptable recommender so I got my passport. But I keep thinking
what if I didn’t know that person? What then? Would I have gotten a passport? Would I have been
able to leave the country? Would I have been able to get to Dartmouth?
And I keep thinking about what it means to be the first in my nuclear and extended family to get a
passport.

When I told my uncle I wanted to apply for a passport, he told me to stop joking/fooling around
(loose English translation of ‘wacha mchezo wewe’) and just concentrate on my studies. Told me I
shouldn’t even be thinking about applying for a passport. I mean for what?

I held these words with bitterness and close to my heart for a long time until I understood that he
had nothing against my applying for a passport. Passports are only needed when leaving the
country—I guess he didn’t think it was even imaginable that I, or anyone in the family could
conjure up a legitimate, legal, provable reason to leave the country let alone study abroad.

I am a first-generation college student
And it is a privilege of privileges

I am not the first generation of anything because I worked hard—okay maybe I did—but that is the
very tiniest part of this picture. I might be the first but I wasn’t in any real sense of the word. My
parents were the first because without them I wouldn’t be the first of anything. And they were the
first because of their parents before and their parents before them and everyone who came before
them and their communities.

On their shoulders I stand and be

I am a first-generation passport holder, if there is such a thing

My passport is not mine but ours

I had the privilege of having the choice, and being able to come back home last summer and I
haven’t been back to the US since.
My family, friends—especially my friends—here keep asking why I choose to take classes from here
and stay here. My uncle now says it is a waste of my visa; that if he had the chance and/or choice he
would be there, not here.
And I am here, not there

A first-generation Dartmouth student who studies abroad but from home. Here, I am closer to the
people and ancestors that made it possible for me to be the first of anything, these ancestors to
whom I feel I owe everything.

I am close to the soil, to the architecture of our communal land, so we are close now.

Sometime back, when I had gotten my passport and was preparing to leave for Dartmouth in the fall
of 2019, my friend McKenzie who had already left the country to study abroad wrote to me before I
left, in her infinite wisdom, about the need to “say goodbye to the soil so you are not tied to it.”

Don’t be afraid to let go. Sometimes the wheat grain has to fall to the ground and die for new life to be born.
Don’t be afraid to fly.

At the time, I thought it ridiculous.
Now, with my passport, our passport, locked away in my suitcase or somewhere; with my visa, our
visa, ‘wasting’ in my suitcase; now I get it.
She was right
She was so right
Forever ago

There is something intangible but powerful that I cannot quite overcome.
And, I do not want to overcome.
I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of sacrifice by previous generations of mine that must have
gone into making it even remotely possible to get that passport, that visa, to have a reason to leave
this country.

these tears, are
not of sadness
but of humility &
recognition

That need for recognition of the others before me, overwhelms and subdues the singular idea of self
that I have for a long time held central to my identity.
It powers, drives and pushes the idea of the collective being and connected existence of persons, and
ah! It is a beautiful thing! It warms the heart. It floods and washes the soul. And through mine eyes,
the soil is watered.

There should be a word for this: being in alignment and congruence with the soil so much
so that your bearings are tied.