BE-Coming an African Immigrant Family: The African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework in Practice

African immigrants in the US and across the globe are confronted with issues of language and culture retention, resistance to the loss of the same, and reconstruction of their identities while navigating the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of the host nations. The experiences of one such family are shared through the African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework developed on the tenets of African oral traditional storytelling techniques, African ideologies, and African worldviews, in which storying is both method and analysis. Through oral stories, poetry, proverbs, and songs, the Opokus invite readers to partake in the fireside chat as they share their lived experiences and the implications those experiences have on their identity conceptualization and that of their children. The shared stories expand scholarly discourse on the social identities of African immigrant families and youths about the global, political, and economic forces that shape their experiences. Finally, it also urges English language arts teachers to engender African-centered writing approaches to acknowledge African peoples’ linguistic ambivalence and the “power” associated with the teaching and learning of English due to colonialism.