Solace in Solidarity & Authenticity

Traveling With Your Identity By Nya Patton (She/Her/Hers),we are Intern and UNC-Chapel Hill Student

A little over two years ago, following a tumultuous New Years Eve and two incredibly inconvenient, yet inexpensive, transatlantic flights I arrived in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Belfast was my second gap year placement, following a three-month stint in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil. I was meant to be there until early April, until the world found itself in a pandemic and I was sent scrambling to find last minute flights back to North Carolina in the middle of March. Northern Ireland was especially interesting to me, I was enticed by the seemingly industrial and gritty feel of the city and even more so by the long history of sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics there. I had never been to such a homogenous country though and being a Black woman I found myself quite worried at what kind of people I could possibly encounter there and how welcoming Belfast would be. I spent much of my flight pondering how different it would feel traveling with my identity there than it did in Brazil, where I often glided through cities and small towns invisibly, as long as I didn’t open my mouth. Brazil, having the highest concentration of African descendants outside of Africa, was easy to travel through comparatively, even with a steep language barrier. I found out quite quickly that just walking dogs in Belfast warranted lots of stares, and it took almost my entire time in the city to get comfortable with them.

Yet, there were many moments, moments that I still think fondly of today, where I was grateful for the solace my identity created for others. This is exactly what happened at the school I was temporarily volunteering at— one day the head teacher came to me with a third grade girl by her side asking if I had any time to talk. Of course I said yes, and was introduced to a girl whose family had just immigrated from Portugal. We talked for around 30 minutes, about how much she missed her mother who remained in Lisbon and how happy she was to be able to have a conversation with another Black person, outside of her father, for the first time in a while. I used what was left of my makeshift Portuguese to connect with her in the language she was most comfortable with and we continued to talk every week for the remainder of my stay in the country. Those moments in which I was able to provide even a little familiarity and comfort to a girl who had lost access to most of the Black women in her life made all the stares and loneliness worth it.

I was placed in a Protestant school, neighborhood, and family home but would often go visit my boyfriend who worked primarily with Catholic children through a Quaker organization that provided childcare. Being nonreligious myself, bisexual, and a different representation of American than I think the family I lived with was expecting I found myself relatively excluded. Protestant women my age were incredibly different from me and scoffed at the weekends I would spend at the cottage my boyfriend lived in, making it truly difficult to forge relationships with them. However, occasionally, I would meet people who were indifferent to any aspect of my being other than my personality, and within those people I found the welcoming community I was looking for. Through my time there I found my ability to code-switch and alter myself ever so slightly to conform to my environment to atrophy. I became even more comfortable with embracing my differences and found ease with remaining consistent in my identity regardless of possible disapproval. The cultural adaptation skills I thought I would depend on during this time counterintuitively left me isolated within groups of people unaware of who I really was. Instead, I chose to show up to spaces unapologetically myself– a decision that has followed me back home and grounded me in my identity at Chapel Hill.

For this and many more reasons I urge those who are considering traveling to a homogeneous country and find themselves scared of what they may find there– to go and see what they discover not specifically within other people but instead within themselves.