Paper long abstract:

This paper presents perspectives of now adult children born and raised in the UK to Nigerian parents who traveled abroad post-independence to seek skills and resources for a better life. This movement to expand the horizons of parents, in some cases, becomes self-tethering to histories and earlier traditions for their culturally estranged/diverse children. In these regroundings, adult children both invent new pasts and reinterpret old ones as they search for identities they can relate to. Specifically, this paper considers narratives of childhoods recalled and the experiences of living both in England and through their home life, in 'Nigeria', and the affects this disjuncture has had on their identity/ies. It further considers the contemporary searches for 'roots', what the adult children reconcile these to be, how these can be accessed, and how such connections impinge on their senses of being well in themselves.