Jone Bagdanskyte
Spring 2022
“The Reason why I decided to go with my parents to America was because I totally believed in the American dream. I was like ‘this is the opportunity of my life, I have to be there.'”
Augustella Makiese was born in Congo (Brazzaville) to a diplomat couple and has since
migrated to multiple countries, including Switzerland, Angola, Portugal and France. Today, at the age of twenty years old, she lives in the US. After moving here when she was fifteen and settling in Fresh Meadows, Queens, now, Augustella attends Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and is hoping to major in Politics, Philosophy and Economics on the pre-law track.
When asked about what she expected her American experience to be like before immigrating into the US, Augustella says that she had a lot of exposure to American media through movies, TV shows and even social media, but she did not realize that the experiences of living in the country depicted on these platforms were “not real”. “I feel like I had this very sensational view of America, like oh, it’s going to be like this and this. And especially moving to New York, you feel like it’s the best city in the world. And you’re just like, oh my God, it’s going to be great. It’s going to be amazing. And then you move there and you just realize that, for example, [for] people who live in the suburbs, to get into the main city like Manhattan, you have to commute a lot and it’s expensive. Having a life, it’s really complicated because you have those costs and expenses. You kind of have to disassociate yourself from those exposures.” She thoughtfully adds that she quickly had to differentiate between “the sensational” – the ideas she had of the country before coming here – and “the reality”.
Augustella moved to the US in the middle of her high school career. Students were already in the process of applying to colleges, and so she had the pressure of getting good grades and succeeding in the process. However, her experience was different to the students around her because she faced additional responsibilities. Her mom was living abroad due to her diplomatic work and her dad was busy working as a diplomat in the US, so the daily care of the household and her two younger brothers was placed on her shoulders. “I had to be the mom, be the dad, be a good student and be a good sister. A lot of roles were just imposed onto me. Sometimes it was really hard. I saw how some of my friends who did not have those responsibilities, it was very easy for them to just, for example, go out after school. [But] when I came back from school, I had to clean, make food and then start working. … In that sense, I feel like I was always trying to work harder to get the same result, you know?”
All of this was happening while Augustella was trying to figure out how to express her identity in the highly racialized United States. Before moving, some of her friends warned her that the US has historically not been a welcoming place for people of her identities. She was worried about the way she was going to be perceived as a woman of color, especially within the New York carceral system within a context of renewed attention on police violence committed onto Black bodies. Luckily, Fresh Meadows – where Augustella’s family initially settled – is a very diverse area, which Augustella found encouraging when discussing the issues she was experiencing because “other people felt the same thing”. Nevertheless, moving to what she describes as a highly racialized society initiated more thought over her identity. At the time, Augustella felt like her parents were encouraging her to act in ways that did not bring attention to herself while stressing the importance of avoiding how “a Black person should not behave”. As a result, she spent the first couple of years in the US “laying low” while actively trying “not to mess up”.
“[The US] really forced me to consider my identity as a Black woman much more than, for example, Paris or Lisbon, or even Geneva, where I spent ten years of my life. I’m not going to say it’s because racism does not exist in these places, but people try to integrate, they try to blend in a lot more. I feel like they kind of erase their identity as minorities and they try to fit into the larger mold, they try to really blend into the majority. And here, because race is such a big issue, it’s the elephant in the room, [and so] you have those discussions a little bit more. It just projects more questions about how you identify. I feel like you have to be much more assertive about these things than in other places.” As Augustella learned more about American history and culture and interacted with more natives, she slowly started becoming more comfortable in “behaving the way that they did” and expressing herself more freely. When asked about the overall effect of becoming part of American society had on her own perception of herself, Augustella reflects: “I don’t think it changed the way I perceive myself because I always thought of myself as being a woman of color. … It’s not really a new thing that I’m learning. It’s much more me asserting this identity even more than before and having those discussions without fear of apprehension.” This ability to assert herself, however, did not come immediately – Augustella claims this is something one has to develop as they navigate the US landscape.
Augustella also highlights the significance having an accent had on her experience as an immigrant. Most of the time, an accent is an immediate marker that prompts conversation and questions from others. At first, Augustella avoided these discussions and tried to minimize her accent in fear of being seen as “really an immigrant”. She says she now realizes it was “unproductive [of her] just trying to conceal [her] accent and not explain the full extent of where [she] come[s] from.” Augustella admits that she did not initially understand the real intentions behind strangers’ expressions of their curiosities over her cultural background: “I don’t think it’s coming from a bad place. And that’s what I didn’t get. I thought it was always coming from a really bad place, like [they were] trying to out you or outcast you or put you somewhere else and differentiate ‘you’ from ‘us’. But sometimes, people are just really curious and just want to know.”
Something that makes Augustella’s migration history unique is the number of countries she has lived in. A result of this is that she does not have one physical space to call home: “I think my family is really what I consider home. It’s the thing that remained constant. I feel like my environment always moves, but my family remains the only variable that just stays the same.” Though this is the natural way of being for Augustella and her family, she has found it hard to explain this to others. “You have to pick a specific physical place, a community. And I cannot, this is something that’s beyond me. I cannot just find a place and consider it to be home because of my experience. Imparting my experience onto other people, they have to kind of shift their thinking a bit further in terms of what you consider home to be like.”
Due to this societal expectation to have a singular physical home, after coming to the US, Augustella initially tried to avoid explaining her background: “I was trying to conceal where I was coming from. And it’s not because I was ashamed, but because it was very complicated and I felt like people would not understand.” Having lived in several different countries, she also noticed the difference in reaction when she mentions one or the other. “It gets tiring when people are like ‘oh, where’s that?’ For example, Scotland, most people know where Scotland is situated on the map, but I come from places that are not known places. So then I have to go into the details of where that place is and just explain to them that I’ve moved a lot and it gets really confusing. It’s really messy. When they ask ‘where are you from?’, they’re expecting just one answer, one place.” In Augustella’s experience, people in the US tend to also be puzzled by her lived experiences in countries outside of Europe. “Switzerland, it’s fine. France, it’s fine. Portugal, it’s fine. But when I mention Angola or Congo, then it gets confusing. They’re like: ‘oh, so how do you live there?’ They ask questions like they’re backward countries.” According to Augustella, those asking similar questions tend to be confused about her family’s move from European countries back to Congo and Angola.
She says they question “how do you go from living surrounded and sheltered in Europe and America’s modernity to how they live in Africa? I think they have this conception of Africa as being this place of utter poverty. … I feel like if you’re an African living in Europe, they kind of get that. But if you just mention underdeveloped countries, then they see you differently. And sometimes it’s a little thing, like an ‘aw, you lived there?’ Why would you feel the need to be pitiful about my situation and the fact that I lived there, but when I mention Switzerland, that’s impressive.” However, despite all of this, nowadays, Augustella remains hopeful and confident in telling people about the countries she is from, saying she is trying to “impart some of [her] knowledge based on [her] lived experience ”. She is aspirational in her future goals, which are closely connected to the places she has lived in.
“I feel like if I move or if I stay here in the US, I would have to find a way to still maintain the connections with the countries I’ve been immersed in. I will try to incorporate [them] into my daily lifestyle and just find a way to be of help here and also contribute to or be involved with the countries I’ve lived in – the countries where I created lasting relationships and memories. I know it’s really ambitious in that sense because why would I do that? Why would I put myself through this? What do I have to gain? But I feel like it’s just a way to say thank you, to be grateful for the experiences that I had and appreciate them in a positive light.”