How do you define immigrant?
The Diversity Visa Lottery fondly known as the DV lottery is a congressionally mandated Visa lottery program sponsored by the United States that allows up to 55,000 persons from nations that are historically underrepresented in terms of migration to the United States of America to qualify each year for immigrant visas which are also known as Green Cards. It is called a lottery because 10-12 million people apply each year and winners are selected through a random drawing.
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When I was a toddler, my aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law lived with us in the 2-bedroom apartment we were renting in Buea. She was a college graduate with no job prospects or suitors. She lived with us until she left for America on a B-2 tourist visa, to accompany her elderly mother, as a traveling caregiver for a relative’s graduation. Though they both got visas, she traveled alone. Her mother decided not to go.
My aunt was fond of my mother, who let her stay at her house rent-free, not even requiring her to do chores or cook. At a time when even her family was fed-up with her young-girl habits, which my mother allowed: tending to her appearance, lounging around the house, and spending evenings through the night at the off-license drinking top and chatting up the university lecturers.
Playing the DV lottery on my mom’s behalf, accruing all the cost, and sending in her application from the states was my aunt’s way of thanking my mother.
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When I found out we won the lottery, I was away
at boarding school. Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
an all girls’ catholic boarding school at the outskirts of Buea.
My classmates were affluent meanwhile I barely made school fees.
Most of their post-graduation plans were for university abroad.
I imagined an entire life in Cameroon:
I would attend the University of Buea,
study something like journalism or law,
spend my evenings like my aunt at off-licenses
eating suya and drinking malta,
Weekends at Limbe beach sucking
the flesh off roasted mackerel fish,
long holidays in the village with my grandparents,
pulling groundnut out of the earth, raking my hands
through bunches, feeling the slight pressure of the soil
caked under my fingernails.
Honora Ankong is a Cameroonian-born poet, writer, educator, and emerging multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Charlotte, North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry from Virginia Tech and is a 2022-23 Fulbright grant recipient to Mauritius. She has a debut chapbook of poems, our gods are hungry for elegies (Glass Poetry Press, 2022) and has published poems with CreamCity Review, Foglifter, Poetry Daily, The Maine Review, Lolwe & elsewhere. She has held fellowships/residencies with the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Goodyear Arts.