Jennifer Neal began packing moving boxes early in her life when her father’s career ambitions prompted repeated relocations across the U.S. “Approximately every three years,” Neal writes, “I could become someone else.” After college, Neal taught English in Japan, and while there, she began to envision her adulthood as an expatriate. “Only after leaving did it become clear to me just how much the United States has failed so many people,” Neal writes, “especially Black families like mine who sacrificed intimate parts of themselves only to be compensated with a country’s very conditional love.”
In the bracing and insightful memoir “My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search for Home Across Four Continents,” Neal recounts her adult life abroad, as she moves between Japan, Australia, and Germany. Her American “Blaxit” was hastened by the racism she directly experienced and observed more broadly, a desire for adventure, and familial estrangement that grew more pronounced the longer she lived overseas. “My Pisces Heart” is a travel memoir that steers clear of the glorification of exotic climes trope and, instead, interweaves personal stories, observations, and research on how her chosen countries have historically treated Black people.
In each country, Neal confronts the national myths people collectively tell about themselves and their historical treatment of Black people. In Japan, she encounters “the myth of homogeneity” that spurred officials to deny the existence of any racism when presented with evidence of it at the 2006 United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Neal challenges the dominant view among Japanese people that the inhabitants of Japan have been racially and culturally homogenous since the Meiji period. Her research and personal experience highlight Japan’s history of racism and colorism, from a neighbor welcoming her with a basket of bleaching creams to the legend of Yasuke, an enslaved man who became a samurai; a story that is often told through a racist lens. She also writes about how the Japanese developed their ideas about “racial hierarchy” from studying Charles Darwin and various eugenicists.
In Australia, Neal challenges the false belief that minstrel-inspired images in their children’s books and television shows have nothing to do with racism. She documents the development of the “Golliwog,” a popular doll in Australia with dark skin and exaggerated features that she believes “provided children with an age-appropriate entry to racist ideology.” She also dissects the “White Australia” policy that was implemented in 1901, requiring all those who wanted to immigrate to write 50 words in a European language. This policy, Neal notes, was influenced by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States and the laws in British colonies that were aimed at restricting “the immigration of non-white people after benefiting from their cost-effective labor.” Neal remains wary of Australia’s “Jingoistic rhetoric that seeped into the political discourse like a transpacific contagion” and its erasure of Aboriginal history, but she decides to apply for citizenship not out of “pride or duty,” but because she does not want to return to the United States, a country she feels less comfortable in each time she visits it. Neal decides that in Australia she can have “some semblance of a life that was sustainable and safe,” not exactly a ringing endorsement of the country as a possible refuge for Black Americans.
In Germany, she tracks racism as a global infection. The Nazis emulated America’s Jim Crow laws in enacting their own horrors. Neal is chilled by Germany’s violent history and treatment of Black citizens — which included servitude in human zoos, forced sterilization, and genocide. She also notes that, unlike Australia, Germany repeatedly acknowledges the wrongdoing of its past, especially through the engraved brass stones placed in sidewalks that mark the last place a person lived or worked before Nazis murdered them.
Neal also repeatedly interrogates a narrative she frequently encounters while living abroad: America is uniquely obsessed with race and is the world’s most racist country. It’s true that when demonstrations against racism become global, they often spring from an American origin, such as when protests against the murder of George Floyd swept from Cape Town to Barcelona to Osaka. Racism is part of America’s global brand. However, when Neal points out blatant racism in other countries, such as a blackface television performance in Australia, her White boyfriend scoffs, “Don’t be silly, Jenn. This isn’t America.” This happens so regularly that Neal seeks refuge in facts and eventually breaks up with the boyfriend.
She is also forced to reflect on the painful reasons why she chose to live in Japan, Australia, and Germany. Ultimately, she determines she can only live in a country with “socialized health care” and “gun control,” where she is less “prone to state-sanctioned violence because of the color of my skin, my gender, or the person I choose to love.”
She shares that while other countries are a far cry from antiracist safe havens, she was able to forge the kinds of communities that finally make her feel at home among other Black people from all over the world. For example, the “Black in Berlin” group she joined enthusiastically rejects “the idea that the cultures we’re born into are the ones we have to live with for the rest of our lives.”
Ultimately, Neal suggests that there isn’t a single country that can offer an answer to what a Black American expat might seek. Those who seek to leave American soil must make an idiosyncratic choice, a choice that is as individual as their own lives.
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