I learned a thing or two in the past week: an app, Nurx, will deliver affordable birth control to women’s doorsteps in Cali & New York; LELO is re-engineering the latex condom, 70 years after its invention; and US senator John Lewis led a sit-in calling for a vote on gun legislation. I learned of Panashe Chigumadzi—writer, editor, and #goals for days. And I discovered Snapchat groups.

Snapchat groups are formed on the basis of shared identity. Rwanda’s RWA-250 is the first group I am introduced to. Kenya’s Umoja254 and Tanzania’s Maisha255 and others quickly follow. Hosts broadcast their thoughts and routine. English is spoken. Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda as well. Subscribers tour the hosts’ residences, neighborhoods, classrooms, even churches. We get glimpses of Kariakoo by day and Houston by night. The hosts are shy, forthcoming, vain, intelligent, brave. This is an earnest invitation and a performance of self.

There are pitfalls, of course. The groups cannot and rarely presume to be representative. Some are more diverse in topic and class while others are echo chambers of privilege. Everywhere, the confrontation of the local and diasporic persists. 

Snapchat groups sweep the globe and, beyond the prerequisite of affiliation, do not appear to discriminate on who gets to host. This is a good thing. It also means a plethora of well-intentioned individuals who just really want to tell you how the sun sets in the West and rises in the East.

But, even in their mundanity, Snapchat stories bind. They perform a multifacetedness we know exists, have at some point defended, and can now relax into. In Somalia for instance, activists counter media portrayal by broadcasting their day-to-day.

At the risk of overselling the concept, these groups broadcast home in ten-second, first-person accounts that are intelligent, arrogant, original, derivative & ultimately essential parts of various collective identities.

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

Agha Shahid Ali, Postcard from Kashmir

What a time to be alive.