The Rhetoric of My Roots

“If I didn’t return to Senegal and make some kind of positive impact, then there would be no point in being ‘from America’, and the sacrifices my parents made would have been meaningless.” 
– Me, Common App, 2017. 

A bit dramatic, huh? Maybe “meaningless” was not the appropriate word, but it felt like the only way to convey the need I had to honor the sacrifices that allowed me to apply to university in the first place.

Disclaimer: I am a child of immigrants. *gasp*

Now that I have disclaimed, I promise not to bore you with the pressures, anxieties, and blah blah blahs of a first generation American. I could not write anything that has not already been written. The gist being those factors convinced me my medical degree’s first flight would be to Africa. There was no reason for me to stay in the United States. They most assuredly did not need more physicians here. Or at least that is what I believed when I was seventeen having spent most of my life in a predominantly white Atlanta suburb. A suburb where I had to dress up as a pilgrim on Colonial Day. Where the Civil War was fought to defend Southern pride and culture. Where my economics teacher could call me his “Nubian Queen” and only receive chuckles from the class. Where I thought all that was normal, despite feeling unsettled. They did not need me here. My family did need me there. My roots were Senegal. 

This conviction shown through my college essays and interviews, landed me a seat at Harvard, and for the first years of college dictated my coursework and extracurriculars. Simultaneously, I was beginning to gain the language to explain that unsettled feeling I had come to accept as my own neurosis. Turns out, in many ways, the United States isn’t great. That brought me a strange sense of comfort. At this point I had been told by parents, teachers, and extended relatives that America is the land of opportunity. Nobody “needs” here. Here others come, and here others build. And here, I drank the Kool-Aid despite its sickeningly sweet taste. 

I mean, I was a Grady baby born to an eighteen-year-old mother. Grady Hospital is the largest public hospital in Atlanta and, shockingly, they don’t love teen moms. So, at the ripe age of zero, I was welcomed into a world ruled by inequity with 7 other young mothers, their babies, and the single nurse they shared. Baby’s first systemic racism. Cute.

Thirty years my family has been in this country. And in those thirty years, different members at different times have experienced the worst that the United States has to offer to its members of color. Deportation, poor maternal health outcomes, physician-facilitated opioid addiction, job discrimination — all of which I had decided was coincidence until I was taught enough to know better. Like any good high achieving first generation American, learning about the faults in domestic health care made me want to fix them. I had to resist that urge. I made an unbreakable covenant at the all-knowing age of twelve to myself and my family in Senegal. To give back to the roots that nourished me. My African roots.

But was Georgia not also a root from which I developed? Are the stories and nightmares of my family members in this country not also my history? Which roots do I owe more for the person I am today and can become? Should my decisions about my future depend on which roots influenced me more?

While these questions rattled in my mind, I continued my commitment to global health by traveling to India the summer after my first year of college. Spending days in an HIV clinic trying to understand the barriers to consistent anti-retroviral usage, my overheated mind made many comparisons to HIV in the black and queer communities in the U.S. The cost, inequitable knowledge access, and stigma affecting the women in Chennai with uncontrolled HIV are true of marginalized folks in the U.S., but that’s not the prominent narrative. Here, an uncontrolled viral load is the decision made by the person living with HIV. *insert eye roll here* With every experience the arbitrary distinction between developed nation and developing was becoming clearer. 

A fast-forward to my following summer as a virtual intern at the United Nations Population Fund focused on expanding abortion access for developing countries. I was in love. I left that summer convinced that I would pursue research and advocacy in reproductive and sexual rights. Globally, of course. 

Then it’s 2022, and lessons of expanding abortion access in countries with restrictions and bans must be applied to more and more states every week. I wanted to know more. I wanted to do more. And yet to follow my instincts and do more domestically would have been to dishonor the sacrifices of my parents and Senegalese ancestors.  

As I grappled with these competing ideas, I realized this mindset was a thorny vine grasping and suffocating branching ideas of domestic health research, advocacy, and service. Whereas my roots do not suffocate, they nourish. 

They are every tear-filled conversation with my mother, every laughable childhood story, every aggravating phone call with insurance, every hand I have been able to hold, and every story I have been trusted with. Together they nourish perspective, stability, and passion by building a foundation that has and will continue to facilitate the growth of expansive and steadfast branches.

Branches that are capable of supporting a broader community and affecting more change with a grounded and unshakeable resolve.

But this is not an answer. I didn’t write this to give you answers. This is a self-affirmation. I am as lost as any other second-year medical student unsure of the difference between roseola and rubeola. But I refuse to allow myself to be tethered by vines of obligation. Rather, I am bolstered by my Senegalese and Southern roots. I am inspired by a perspective uniquely my own. And eventually (fingers crossed), I will find my way.

From the author: "The Rhetoric of My Roots" is a crash course in my background and my psyche. For me, there is no way to discuss what my roots are or what they mean without considering the influences of both my Senegalese heritage and my upbringing in the American South, yet these identities have often felt difficult to reconcile. Only recently have I been able to acknowledge and address the internal conflicts caused by dueling identities. This piece is a truncated version of my internal dialogue as I try to decide what my roots are and how I want to engage with them in the hopes that we can begin to normalize having complex feelings towards one's roots. "The Rhetoric of my Roots" is my first acknowledgement of this complicated situation, though I know it will be a conversation and not a conclusion. 

Farimata Mbaye is a second year MD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was born in Atlanta, GA and grew up in a predominantly white suburb of the city. Both of her parents immigrated from Senegal and most of her extended family members still live there. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Government which greatly influenced her current interests in understanding the nuances of marginalized experiences and  broadening access and increasing quality of healthcare for these populations.