I'm a kid from Memphis. My family's been in America since at least the 1850s — long enough that "where are you from" only ever had one answer, and it was a zip code, not a continent.
Here's what nobody tells you about being Black in America: you can carry a full heart and a half-erased map at the same time. I know the smell of my grandmother's hot water cornbread and her collard greens. I know my mom's upside-down pineapple cake — my favorite thing on earth. I know every pothole on my street. I know exactly who I am — and there's still this whole side of me the ocean took a few hundred years ago, and you just learn to live around the gap. Most of us do.
Then I spit in a tube.
Eighty percent African. Almost half of that — Igbo.
I'll be honest: I sat with that number a while. How do you grieve and celebrate the same thing at once? It's a name for the half of me the manifest never bothered to record. A door where I'd always been told there was a wall. There's something nagging inside all of us. Sometimes we choose to ignore it. Sometimes we decide to finally answer.
And then I found Chi.
In Igbo cosmology, your chi is your personal spirit — your destiny, your guiding force, the piece of the divine assigned to you. Chinua Achebe loved an old idea: when a man says yes, his chi says yes also. Your fate isn't something that just happens to you. It's a conversation — you and your chi, working out the road together.
And I thought: I've been having that conversation my whole life. I just never had the word for it. Every time I left the safe thing, bet on myself, tried to build a little freedom out of a system that wasn't designed for me — that was me and my chi, saying yes to each other. My ancestors had the language the whole time. They carried it across the water in the one bag nobody could take: the inside.
Here's the thing about a lineage like mine, though — it doesn't trace back to one dot on a map. The DNA is scattered all across this side of the continent. Nigeria holds the biggest piece of me, but there are pieces of me out there everywhere. And Benin became the first country in West Africa to stand up and say, out loud, that the Atlantic slave trade took something from us — and to open a door back, offering citizenship to the descendants of the people it lost. So I'm taking that hand. Benin is the bridge I can get the papers for; Igbo Nigeria is the bridge in my blood. I'm going to walk both.
So I'm going. Not as a tourist — I've been to Nigeria before, to discover, for friends, for opportunities. But this time, as a man walking back across a bridge his great-great-grandparents only ever got to cross one way.
And I don't have romantic illusions about it. Lagos doesn't owe me a homecoming. The continent isn't a theme park for diaspora feelings. A DNA result doesn't make me anything but what I am — an American. End of the day, an American with an American accent, learning out loud, probably getting many things wrong and pronouncing even more of them wrong, catching the funny looks as I stumble my way through — mixing up Nigerian pidgin with Igbo names and Yoruba food.
But that's exactly why I'm here. To stumble. To fall. And to stand back up holding something that was lost. That's why I want to film it. The bridge isn't a place you arrive at — it's a thing you build by walking it. And honestly, camera in one hand and a thousand questions in the other, I'd rather do that than pretend I've got it all figured out.
That's the whole reason this magazine is named Chi. Not because I've arrived at anything — because I finally know the name of the thing I've been chasing. And I've got a feeling a lot of us are chasing it too.
