Vagabon on Musical Beginnings and Moving from Cameroon to New York

Vagabon has lived in America most of her life, and still feels like she's from somewhere else. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, she traces why: born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, moved to Harlem at nine when her mother, a lawyer, brought the whole family along to chase her own ambition, then raised between two worlds in one day: American school by morning, Cameroonian food and language at home by night.

It's a conversation about carrying a place with you: the grandmother who ran the school inside the family compound; the all-girls Catholic school she couldn't wait to escape (and the classmates who now DM her about her music — "you were so mean to me"); the guitar her parents gave her for graduating with honours, and teaching herself on Taylor Swift songs before she knew Joni Mitchell existed; going home after fifteen years to find she could still walk the compound with her eyes closed; the 300-strong group of first-generation Cameroonians in New York who speak like her, joke like her, emote like her; and why the stories of oral-history cultures can vanish in a single uninterested generation.

Her answer to what family means, consistency, is one of the show's best. And then, for the first time, a guest flips the question: Vagabon asks Nabil, and gets the story his whole book is about.

00:00 "I'm from somewhere else"
00:45 Yaoundé to Harlem at nine
04:12 Two worlds in one day
05:48 Her mother's leap
06:51 Catholic school & the ledger of enemies
08:48 A guitar for graduating with honours
11:33 The grandmother's school & stories that skip
13:21 Back home after 15 years
15:00 The 300 Cameroonians of New York
17:30 Family is consistency — and the question, flipped

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