How I learned to dance in silence

How I learned to Dance in Silence is a work of creative nonfiction framed in ten linked letters from a son to his father addressing issues of family, identity and displacement. Opening on a Saturday morning in the living room of the speaker's brother's apartment, but mostly prompted by his American niece's query about their family's dispersal across the globe, the speaker navigates the family's past from its cradle in Cameroon to her birth city of Chicago. In an attempt to provide answers to his curious niece while coming to terms with his own migration to the US, the speaker in these letters also reflects on the role that history, music, food, and silence has played in their family's trajectory. This work is also a meditation on the dynamics of a father-son relationship in a context where national identity is fluid and fraught. Above all, it is a portrait of a post-colonial African family in a seemingly borderless world.