Small World, Big Love with Faith Adiele: Reunion in the Village, Part 1

As we wrap up this month’s theme of significant reunions and gatherings of family or friends, I’m reflecting on how I’ve made a travel career out of finding and reuniting with long-lost family on three continents. And why.

Where I grew up, most people planned to grow a new family. They tended to partner up and then add children to the mix. That didn’t interest me. From a young age, I was obsessed with recovering the already-existing family lost along the way.

I was born missing family. Not only did my twin abandon me in the womb, but my parents had already split up before my birth. My father moved to Ottawa, Canada to pursue his doctorate, and soon after my birth, political unrest back in Nigeria led him to sail home before he had the opportunity to see me.

My mother, a college student in Seattle, had been kicked out of her white, Nordic immigrant family for choosing to have me rather than a risky, back-alley abortion. After my birth in a so-called home for unwed mothers, we moved into the projects with all the other single mothers and their children, living on government-surplus cheese and strange bulk grains.

Eventually, when I was five, we moved to my grandparents’ farm in eastern Washington. Though I was an only child and the only Black member of my family and the only Black girl in school, I found my soulmate in Mummi, the Finnish grandmother who would set me on the gathering-family path.

Each of us had lost our fathers as babies — mine to the Nigerian independence struggle, hers to premature death. As we picked raspberries and baked saffron buns and painted almond-scented sugar cookies with tiny brushes, she told me about family members left behind in Finland and Sweden. Immigration and travel weren’t for the faint of heart.

When she wasn’t looking, I rifled through the family albums, searching for anyone who looked like me or who was unlabeled. I knew that, when she was 42, Mummi learned that the father she’d believed dead for 40 years was actually in a psychiatric hospital. I couldn’t bear the idea of him being forgotten. I collected loose, unidentified snapshots in a shoebox beneath my bed, determined to leave no family member left behind.

At 26 I traveled to Nigeria, where I met my father for the first time. As we stood in a dim stairwell regarding each other, I didn’t recognize myself in him, but when he took me home, I knew I had found the missing pieces. Three beautiful teenagers stood quivering with excitement in the parlor. “This is your sister, come from America to visit,” our father announced. “You love her.”

And he was right, at least in my case. I fell in love at first sight. Despite having a Nigerian mother, each teen resembled me in some significant way. The eldest was a charismatic boy with my sense of humor and my habit of draping myself over a chair. The middle child was a shy, artistic lefty (no easy feat in Nigeria!). The baby, a girl, resembled me so much that villagers and family members crossed themselves and screamed. It was as if my womb-twin had finally come back.

Each morning brought relatives from all parts of Igboland. The earliest to arrive were old women bent from having hiked through the forest from villages they left before dawn. My father and stepmother would run out to meet them, crying, “Da, we would have sent a car! How could you walk all this way—o?”

And the staggering sister or aunt or cousin or in-law woman would sink into a chair, declaring, “I heard that our long-lost daughter has returned from overseas! I have come to see with my own eyes.”

When I was presented to her, she would ululate and clap her hands and give thanks and shout “Nno, Nno!” Apparently, this is what our people do. We’re known for traveling far but always returning home. Without knowing it, I had fulfilled my destiny.