My name is Renée Cheréz, and I am a freelance writer, traveler, and travel liberationist who creates magic at the intersections of travel, race, identity, and Black Liberation.
The question tumbled out with a slight cackle: "Wouldn't it be funny if we were related to Marcus Garvey?" I was hanging out with the women in my family having dinner at City Island in New York. Through the years, I never considered the name of my Jamaican grandmother before marriage because I'd only ever known her by my grandpa's name.
Traveling and moving through different parts of the world over the last five years have dispelled many myths for me about love and all its blissful iterations. While moving through countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India, I began to form bonds that unraveled the myth of a single soulmate.
Bali's honeyed humidity wrapped me in its arms as I made my way through the plane tunnel off my first flight to the island in the wee hours of the morning in 2017. Indonesia was part of my first solo 67-day backpacking adventure across Southeast Asia.
" So, where's your favorite place? " It's probably one of the most asked questions of any wanderer who has moved across place, and yet the question can leave us tongue-tied as we scan through our mental Rolodex of the places we've journeyed through: countries, cities, towns, the block we grew up on, villages or our grandmas' house in the country.
On a mid-March evening, when New York was officially under stay at home orders, I began compiling a list of Black people who had died from COVID-19. ". . . And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American.
The Black travel movement has grown to unprecedented numbers over the last decade. The movement, mainly powered by Black American millennials, encourages both domestic and international travel with a goal to experience different cultures. In a Mandala Research report, this demographic spent $63 billion on travel in 2018, up from $43 billion in 2010.
Since 2017, I have backpacked and lived in countries like Thailand, Vietnam and India for extended periods of time. At the start of 2020, I was back on the road in New York, where I'd previously worked for seven years as a preschool teacher and nanny.
As the plane ascended, the tears streamed down my face uncontrollably. It's was if my eyes contained all the water from every ocean, river, and lake in the world. I was mortified as I headed to Thailand for my first solo adventure, unsure of my choice-but there was no turning back as the plane lifted off the ground .
In silence, we can't share the magic of our unique adventures T raveling while Black has been the greatest experience of my life. I've seen and done things I could never imagine would be part of my reality.
It was a tumultuous 2016 both personally and politically. My relationship of four years ended as January 2016 began. Just a year before, I had made the choice that the teaching career I built over five years was no longer what I wanted, and I was nannying with multiple families to earn a living.