Finding Home

Finding Home is an artistic exploration of Swahili culture and identity, tracing the stories and everyday lives of Kenyan people from coast to mountains.

I have become a hybrid of two cultures, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. This dislocation has carried with it a quiet grief—the mourning of things I wish I had known about myself, lessons I might have learned if we had remained.

My family and I migrated to the United States from Nairobi in 2001, when I was seven years old. The move brought opportunities, yes, but it was also shadowed by hardship, as we navigated the discrimination, racism, and displacement familiar to many migrant stories. Those early years were a unique time: I was raised deeply Kenyan, yet fully aware that I was living in America. My parents’ insistence on holding tightly to our culture often caused friction between us, and I never felt fully Kenyan or American—a tension reinforced by both family back home and friends in the States. As I entered my twenties, I began to reflect on the losses that migration had brought, and, in doing so, I suppose, I began my journey of discovering who I truly am.

It has been a long path toward understanding the complexities of my diasporan identity—an identity that often feels unfinished, shifting into different forms depending on the context I inhabit. Yet, I am learning to find rest within its disjointedness, to embrace the contradictions as part of my story.

This project is an exploration of Swahili culture, from the sunlit coasts to the highlands of Kenya. It is an attempt to capture the everyday beauty of Kenyan life, to seek myself in the stories of its people. Some of this work reflects my family, while other pieces are inspired by strangers whose lives have quietly touched me. This is my first project, and it feels profoundly timely—a marker of the beginning of my cultural and artistic self-exploration.