In current times with heated debates about the right and might of countries and states Tayie Selasi’s meesage is crucial: ask me where I am local not where I am from, as the country as measurement for human experience does not quite work. “What if we asked, instead of “where are you from, where are you a local? This would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are. … The difference between these 2 questions is not the specificity of the answer, is the intention of the question. <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local/discussion#t-11606″>https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local/discussion#t-11606
Replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs. … How can a human being come from a concept? From newspapers, textbooks, conversations, I had learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal, singular and naturally occurring things but I wondered, to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute, some fixed point in place and time, a constant thing, but was it? In my lifetime countries have dissapeared, Czechoslovakia, appeared Timor-Leste, failed Somalia. To me a country – this thing that could be born, die, expand, contract, hardly seems to be the basis to understand a human being. What we call countries are actually expressions of sovereign statehood an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago. … History was real, cultures were real, countries were invented. … the limiting trap of language of coming from countries sets, the privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience. All experience is local. All identity is experience.”