I’ve asked myself this without letting the question resonate with me. My fears of using the word immigrant when describing my father felt fake. But it’s true by meaning. My dad came to Canada when he was sixteen or eighteen or twenty, somewhere around there, and I didn’t care to nail down specifics. He could have come at five, like some of my friends did, and I would have still considered him an immigrant. That’s what he was — not in a bad way — but in a real way. But I felt so foreign when writing that word to describe him. That’s why I don’t like to read back my words after I’m done writing them. I want them to exist. Like me. A Black man, with an immigrant father and a white mom.
I never thought about how my so-called immigrant father was also Black. And by the time that I got around to describing him as an immigrant, he had been on Canadian soil longer than I had been alive. Compared to me, he was an immigrant. He told me that.