| Photo by Jeojango Maps on Unsplash
As America marks 250 years of independence, the question is no longer whether the nation was born free, but whether freedom has continued to thrive. Every Fourth of July, America celebrates its birth. Every Juneteenth, Black America reminds the nation that independence is yet to be evenly distributed. Where one holiday commemorates an idea, the other commemorates the long struggle to make that idea true.
I spent Juneteenth returning to the streets of Harlem in New York City. After six months of traveling the world to promote the zines and books I published through my independent publishing house, I heard my soul beckon me home. As a Black Filipina writer, in the aftermath of what could’ve been the first Black woman elected to the American presidency, my crushed soul gathered its shattered pieces, placing them in two oversized suitcases before journeying to the Philippines.
And as most Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) would say, “Ma for-good na ko,” which translates to “a decision to stay in the Philippines forever.”
When I decided to leave America for good, forever escaping the shadow of a divisive administration that would always detest a black woman like me, I came to a stark realization. Perhaps my blackness has more currency overseas. Perhaps my look as a writer is best suited to a global literary image. Therefore, I will only become successful if I choose to leave America.
So I poured my savings into building two literary cafés in Mindanao—yes, that mysterious place where Manny Pacquiao is from. Between sleepless nights, I found myself whispering Muhammad Ali’s iconic poem as though it were a prayer:
Me. We.
The next day, in between leading poetry sessions, conducting film screenings of black cinema, and crafting lattes for the locals of my small agrarian village in the Philippines, I snuck into the bathroom to phone a friend.
“I want to go home.”
But where is home? I no longer knew where home was, but I was certain I no longer wanted to be in my beloved Philippines full-time. Some people need a break from vacation, and I need a break from identity. No one understands the entirety of my story on both sides of the world. Home in the Philippines means I’m just a rich American, and no matter how much I worked to establish a writing career and literary spaces, my goodwill was always reduced to the simplistic story of yet another American encroaching upon the integrity of a small farming town.
Of yet another American who delights in her self-important, so-called “intellectual” hobbies.
Of yet another American exploiting local labor.
Of yet another American scheming to appropriate the culture.
“But I’m Filipino, too,” I would say
For every poetry workshop I built, former friends and politicians dissuaded me:
“This town is not ready for an intellectual place.”
“Why not pour your money into church?”
“Why not take your money, and get a life insurance policy – why are you putting so much effort into this hopeless town?”
“Why not just buy a life insurance policy?”
To which I answered: “Is it not life to you for our town to have the first space in this town where books and ideas collide, making magic in a young person’s mind?”
And then on June 8, 2026, the earthquake rocked the core of the Southern Philippines, shook its foundations so hard that the markers of the globalized world succumbed to its wrath. Jollibee Fried Chicken chains crumbled, SM Megamalls cracked, and colleges in General Santos City collapsed in on themselves. Gradually, we began losing customers who were too traumatized to enjoy books and coffee on the second-floor terrace of Edaya’s Star Terrace Cafe.
It is the quiet confidence—the epiphany—that one never has to ask for permission to belong in just one place. Home is not where you are least questioned. Home is where your whole story, in all its beauty and complexities, can breathe unapologetically.”
And then the realization dawned upon me: my home is in the diaspora. And by that definition, the idea of home’s permanence was no longer of my beloved Philippines. Then I decided that perhaps home was the place that gave birth to my dreams: New York City.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been living for longer stretches around the world, building my dreams and career, and trying to make an everlasting mark on history. But to be back in New York City, frolicking upon the streets of Harlem, surrounded by people who look like me, smiling at the talents of street musicians in full display, moving to the beat of African drums, seeing black artists turn the streets into a living tapestry of art with the hustle and entrepreneurship of everyday living, eating oxtail with rice and peas from a Jamaican food truck, buying my signature scent from Nigerian men who trade essential oils and the occasionally overreaching compliments that reduce my feminist energy into a catcall: “if you were my girlfriend we will never sleep, ha-ha,” reminds me of why home is such a schizophrenic concept in my life.
I often resented New York City while I lived there. Yet from every corner of the world—Berlin, Manila, Prague, Lisbon—my fiery braids, scented with rose and jasmine, always carried me back to Harlem with what the Portuguese call saudade: a deep longing for something that still feels like home.
I thought I was leaving America forever. Instead, I discovered that what I was really leaving behind was the belief that home had to be singular. The Fourth of July asks us to celebrate a nation. Juneteenth asks us to interrogate it. Harlem taught me that freedom is neither departure nor arrival. It is the quiet confidence—the epiphany—that one never has to ask for permission to belong in just one place. Home is not where you are least questioned. Home is where your whole story, in all its beauty and complexities, can breathe unapologetically.
And as my friend Xyza Cruz Bacani would say, “The Diaspora is Home”
One of the freedoms my American citizenship has given me is the ability to cross borders with relative ease. In the past year, I’ve been to Manila, Kathmandu, Prague, Karlovy Vary, Berlin, Dubai, Casablanca, and, at this very moment, I am writing this essay in a cafe by the Praça do Comércio, where a big screen is showing the soccer game between Norway and Brazil. In the past year, I’ve had the curious privilege of contemplating my freedom, scribbling in my journal as I watched the sun set all over the world.
Ironically, it was only by leaving America that I understood what it had given me. It is through this American passport that my dreams of writing around the world have taken flight. And for this, I am incredibly grateful.
As I watched the sun set beneath the Rua Augusta Arch, I couldn’t help but think of Mindanao. Long before the earthquake in Southern Philippines altered my own understanding of home, Lisbon learned in 1755 that even the ground beneath our feet is temporary, yet the stories we build upon it endure. My freedom is in the moments I spend crafting sentences that weave the beauty of Mindanao across cities around the world.
And in the city haunted by the legacy of Fernando Pessoa, I find myself returning to one of his lines:
“Que amor é este que me faz ir e voltar.” Which is Portuguese for: “What kind of love is this that makes me leave and return?”
Perhaps that is the cartography of freedom: not choosing between the places that have made us, but carrying them with us wherever we go.
Happy 250th Birthday, America.
From one of your daughters,
Who had to leave,
to understand why she keeps coming home.
Mabuhay!
Love,
Dreamweaver
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org
