27 views of Raleigh is a book in which 27 different people share their views of Raleigh through poetry, photographs, fiction stories and personal stories. From page 64 to page 75, Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s offers her perspective as an immigrant in the city.
Nfah-Abbenyi, CHASS director of diversity programs and an English professor at N.C. State, was born and raised in Cameroon, West Africa. Her contribution to the book was proposed simply—through an email from the creator of the book.
“I got an email from Elizabeth Goodman saying she was putting together a book, and that she heard about my work,” Goodman said. “She had heard about one of my short stories that had been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, so she really wanted to see if I could contribute, and so it went from there.”
The 27 Views collection had already been done in places such as Durham and Chapel Hill, and Nfah-Abbenyi said she was excited to see it come to Raleigh.
“I was told that they have done books like this before,” Nfah-Abbenyi said. “It was really exciting and interesting to me that they did books about other cities and now one was about Raleigh.”
Nfah-Abbenyi said the motive behind her story, “Home Is Where You Mend the Roof,” was to engage in the struggle that comes with moving from and living in a variety of places.
Nfah-Abbenyi said she was born and raised in Cameroon, where she attended university. She then moved to Canada for a few years before eventually moving to the United States. She said she moved around often within Cameroon as a child, as well.
“Movement has always been a part of who I am,” Nfah-Abbenyi said. “I wrote this story because when I move, I feel that I am beginning all over again. That has always been a constant thing in my life.”
Nfah-Abbenyi has called Raleigh home for almost a decade, but she said she still feels dislocated from her first home.
“Even though Raleigh is home now for me, there are times when I feel also really dislocated because something would happen back home—I want to be there but I can’t be there,” Nfah-Abbenyi said. “But this is still home and all my family members are back [in Cameroon], so that is still home.”
Nfah-Abbenyi said she doesn’t think home has to be one particular place.
“I don’t see any contradiction between saying that is home there and this is home there, but in between home here and here, there is a constant struggle of identity and being located and dislocated,” Nfah-Abbenyi said. “It is that struggle between the dislocation and location that I wanted to explore in the piece that I wrote.”
As for the other views in the book, according to Nfah-Abbenyi, they are diverse.
“You have journalists, professors, writers, crime reporters and people from different walks of life writing about Raleigh—some who have lived in Raleigh for a long time and some who are new to Raleigh,” Nfah-Abbenyi said. “So that gives a really holistic perspective of what Raleigh is, and that’s what I really enjoy about it—all of the stories are talking about the same place but they are all really different and I like that a lot.”
Nfah-Abbenyi, an eight-year resident of Raleigh, said the book offers a lot of new information about the city.
“I think people should read it because people know Raleigh, but there are a lot of things in the book that I learned even though I’ve been living in Raleigh for eight years,” Nfah-Abbenyi said.
Though Nfah-Abbenyi talked about multiple places being her home, she describes Raleigh in one single word: “Refreshing.”
