Michelle A. Chikaonda
Getting Myself Into Formation:
An African Immigrant Inhabiting American Blackness
Photo credit: Madga Ehlers, Pexels.com
Holy shit, I spoke aloud to no one in particular in my coworker's living room that evening, slowly leaning forward toward the TV screen as everyone else at the party around me continued to half-watch, half-chatter through the beginning of Beyoncé's set. Incredulity at…
Snakes in the Night
Photo credit: Phillip Visser, Pexels.com
[NB: This piece was originally published in September 2018 in Arts and Africa, a now-defunct literary magazine.]
"Mommy — what's chitsulo?"
My mother and I were sitting in the playroom together after dinner, on the sofa adjacent to the room's bay window. We didn't normally do this, converse after…
A Holiday Parable for 2020
A photo from my 2019 visit home to Malawi, taken in Mulanje District [image my own]
[Adapted from a Facebook post from December 24, 2020]
In 2002 my family went to Mzuzu, in the northern region of Malawi, for Christmas. It is about a four hour drive from Lilongwe, the capital city, and eight hours from Blantyre, where my mother still lives today. On the second…
We Weren't Supposed to Win
Photo by Maria Tyutina from Pexels
13 years ago this December, Benazir Bhutto — former Prime Minister of Pakistan, and candidate for the same office again at that time — was assassinated. I remember the day of the event so clearly because my entire family and I were vacationing together at Lake Malawi for Christmas, on…
The Jerusalema Challenge: The Challenge of Joy
[Photo credit: Gabriel Santos Fotographia, Pexels]
I'm not a particular fan of social media challenges, whether as a participant or a spectator, and I think I last participated in a line dance at a wedding five or six years ago. So when I first came across the Jerusalema Challenge on Instagram in mid-August, a line-dance based…
On the Brokenness of American Healthcare
When it Becomes Personal
[Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels]
In June 2017, when the fight to save the ACA was in full swing, my father had just been diagnosed six months prior with metatstatic colorectal cancer. He and my mother relocated to the United States — where I have been living since my undergraduate studies…
Wherever You Are, There You Are
Convocation, College Hall at the University of Pennsylvania
Note: This was originally published on the Penn Admissions Blog in March 2015. …
The Things Dad Used to Say
My father passed away on the evening of October 29, 2018, after a nearly two-year course of treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer. We brought him home from southern California, where he was being treated, to Malawi, where we are from, on November 18, 2018; he was buried at his home…
Colossus in the Veld
I have been endeavoring to publish more essays that talk about my childhood and adolescence in my home country of Malawi. Here is one of my latest, "Colossus in the Veld," published at the Kalahari Review, a Medium-based journal publishing primarily African writers, in October 2018:
https://kalaharireview.com/colossus-in-the-veld-d7a122d9f421
"Snakes in the Night" is about an incident in my new life in Malawi less than a year after our family returned in 1994. I published it through a Medium-based literary journal, called Arts and Africa, in September 2018:
https://artsandafrica.com/snakes-in-the-night-4a30f5c290c
Philadelphia born, world raised. Find me at www.michellechikaonda.work