Come by Here

August 15, 2024
Personal essays about the complicated identity of coastal Georgia and its people. Powell-Ingabire grew up in coastal Georgia, a land with a rich but layered, sometimes troublesome past, both for her personally and within the American context. In her debut, she searches for the link between her ancestral history in the region, her own childhood, and the area's rich connection to Black resistance, from the suicide-by-drowning of West Africans bound for slavery in the Americas to the protests following the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. (He was killed just miles from where the author grew up by one of her former classmates.) As a queer Black American activist and organizer who came late to appreciate her hometown, Powell-Ingabire has distinct lenses through which to scrutinize the particular shape of systemic racism and misogyny in a persistently mischaracterized area. Even as luxury tourism has boomed and the enduring culture of the Gullah Geechee has gained wider recognition, notable events in regional Black history have continued to be overlooked, underreported, and intentionally omitted. As the author sheds light on the oppression and resistance woven into the foundational fabric of her homeland, including effective Black uprisings, land ownership, and advocacy, she offers striking, unsettling insights into how this heritage has impacted her own sense, criticism, and acceptance of self. A studied formality and timid care in both prose and structure indicate the author's humility and sympathy before her subject matter but also keep the reader at a distance; each idea seems only to scratch the surface of the author's connection to, knowledge of, and empathy with the region and its Black people. Though it can feel stilted, this may be central to the author's point; Powell-Ingabire knows well the danger of a co-opted narrative and has traveled a path to demand control of her own. An interesting and worthwhile, if somewhat restrained, memoir.

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October 7, 2024
Journalist Powell-Ingabire debuts with a stirring collection that traces the twin histories of her family and of Black settlement along Georgia’s coast. She begins with the personal, sharing recollections of her elegant grandmother and largely absent father, then expands her scope, linking her own sense of connection to Georgia and its coastal islands with that of writer and spiritualist Cornelia Walker Bailey (1944–2017), who served as the “griot,” or storyteller, of Sapelo Island. In adulthood, Powell-Ingabire learned—from sources including Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—about Gullah Geechee culture, with its unique hybrid of West African and American traditions, and discovered how its influence, from cuisine to crafting, distinguished her and her maternal family from “Black people raised inland.” From there, the collection’s brief yet forceful essays deepen common perceptions of local tourist destinations like the Okenfenokee Swamp with research about their rich Geechee histories, drawing on interviews with families who’ve inhabited the region for generations. Threaded between these sections are pieces in which Powell-Ingabire reflects on contemporary matters including Covid, #MeToo, and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Inspiring, informative, and unique, these essays amount to a powerful and elegant probing of the relationship between person and place. Photos.