the sound of the tongue before its wisdom
the openness of a palm before its reach.
And what to those who call me “African”?
Don’t they know I can count the years spent back home
wishing I knew I was “African”?
And how to cradle and contain the disappointment that is
rekindled whenever someone does not know
my Ethiopia, my Eritrea.
I don’t know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries—
nomads like me have no place as home, no way of belonging.
Mahtem Shiferraw
Mama
I was walking down the street when a man stopped me
and said,
Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland?
Because my skin is a shade too deep not to have come from foreign soil
Because this garment on my head screams Africa
Because my body is a beacon calling everybody to come flock to the
motherland
I said, I’m Sudanese, why?
He says, ’cause you got a little bit of flavor in you,
I’m just admiring what your mama gave you
Let me tell you something about my mama
She can reduce a man to tattered flesh
without so much as blinking
Her words fester beneath your skin and the whole time,
You won’t be able to stop cradling her eyes.
My mama is a woman, flawless and formidable in the same step.
Woman walks into a war zone and has warriors
cowering at her feet
My mama carries all of us in her body,
on her face, in her blood
And blood is no good once you let it loose
So she always holds us close.
When I was 7, my mama cradled bullets in the billows of her robes.
That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton
with a bar of soap.
Years later when the soldiers held her at gunpoint
and asked her who she was
She said, I am a daughter of Adam, I am a woman, who the hell are you?
The last time we went home, we watched our village burn,
Soldiers pouring blood from civilian skulls
As if they too could turn water into wine.
They stole the ground beneath our feet.
The woman who raised me
turned and said, don’t be scared
I’m your mother, I’m here, I won’t let them through.
My mama gave me conviction.
Women like her
Inherit tired eyes,
Bruised wrists and titanium-plated spines.
The daughters of widows wearing the wings of amputees
Carry countries between their shoulder blades.
I’m not saying dating is a first-world problem, but these trifling
motherfuckers seem to be.
The kind who’ll quote Rumi, but not know what he sacrificed for war.
Who’ll fawn over Lupita, but turn their racial filters on.
Who’ll take their politics with a latte when I take mine with tear gas.
Every guy I meet wants to be my introduction to the dark side,
Wants me to open up this obsidian skin and let them read every tearful
page,
Because what survivor hasn’t had her struggle made spectacle?
Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know
that being from Africa means waking up an afterthought
in this country.
Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know
that my flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, resistance
My flavor is mutiny
It is burden, it is grit, and it is compromise
And you don’t know compromise until you’ve rebuilt your home for
the third time
Without bricks, without mortar, without any other option
I turned to the man and said,
My mother and I can’t walk the streets alone
back home anymore.
Back home, there are no streets to walk anymore.
Emtithal Mahmoud
Split
I see my mother, at thirteen,
in a village so small
it’s never given a name.
Monsoon season drying up—
steam lifting in full-bodied waves.
She chops bắp chuối for the hogs.
Her hair dips to the small of her back
as if smeared in black
and polished to a shine.
She wears a deep side-part
that splits her hair
into two uneven planes.
They come to watch her:
Americans, Marines, just boys,
eighteen or nineteen.
With scissor-fingers,
they snip the air,
point at their helmets
and then at her hair.
All they want is a small lock—
something for a bit of good luck.
Days later, my mother
is sent to the city
for safekeeping.
She will return home once,
only to be given away
to my father.
In the pictures,
the cake is sweet
and round.
My mother’s hair
which spans the length of
her áo dài
is long, washed, and uncut.
Cathy Linh Che
When the Man at the Party Said
He Wanted to Own a Filipino
When the man at the party told me that he’d always
wanted his very own Filipino, I should’ve said,
all I’ve ever wanted was my very own 70-year-old
white man (which is what he was), but I didn’t say
that, because it wasn’t true. Instead, I said nothing,
but I almost said, amicably: Yes, our bodies are banging,
aren’t they? Our skin is leather upholstery beneath
the savage sun, our eyes are fruits fallen from the highest
trees, the bottoms of our unshod feet the color
of amethyst. I almost said: We will parade around
your living room in a linen cloth and feed you turtle eggs
and Cornioles meat from a porcelain dish. I almost said:
I’ll be your Filipino, you be my Viking. We’ll ride in
a boat together. I’ll wear your horny helmet. But I said
nothing. At that party, I wanted to be liked, which is
my tragic flaw. I always find myself on the street smiling
at people who look to be Neo-Nazis. I call it a “safety
smile.” Rarely do they smile back, but I would hug them
if they needed it, if I think it would spare me. I used to
wonder if this amenability was inherited. Raja Humabon,
a Filipino king in the 1500s, did not resist Magellan’s
missionary agenda. Humabon greeted Magellan and his
Christian lord with friendship. Maybe out of genuine
religious feeling, or maybe servitude and friendship are a type
of fire-retardant, protected from the torches that burned
down the villages of the chiefs who refused to kneel. Of course,
there were some who refused to kneel, and maybe this is
also something inherited too, along with everything else,
all the possible variations, and it doesn’t take me long to
realize the flaws in this notion of an inherited friendliness.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, the white husband
of my parents’ friend showed me pictures of his Filipino
wife in different bikinis, the ones she sent him in letters
before he hopped on a plane to the Philippines to marry her.
He had
a 5x7 album full of these photographs, these early
flirtations. It made him nostalgic to sift through them.
What’s good about my wife, he said, is that she’s easy
on the eyes. A tuft of his chest hair appeared from the collar
in his shirt, and the soul inside of me nearly choked on its
own regurgitations. Before I could ask if he’d sent her
pictures of himself, I heard his wife’s bright cackle from
the other room, like the firing of artillery from a distant ship.
I noted that she was not easy on the ears, that she was not
easy at all. I realize now that this story was never about us
being owned, because we will always own ourselves. This story
is about the way the world believes that it owns us, holding
its album of pictures in its wishful hands. And we are not
amenable as much as we are insidious. We are the Cornioles,
who, after being eaten alive by a whale, enters the whale’s body
and takes small, tender bites of the whale’s enormous heart.
Marianne Chan
Ode to Enclaves
My lineage is Little Saigon
asphalt, three generations
under one roof and mother-
land recipes. On Saturdays,
my family congregates
at our favorite restaurant:
Kim Phuong. Here, we worship
the hot pot; stuff our bellies
with blessings. My auntie says—
If we’re gonna suffer,
we gotta do it over good food.
The pavement’s cracked
but we know what to do. After
all, these are neighborhoods of necessity.
I remember
the first time I saw white faces
descend upon Little Saigon,
their crooked beaks eager to pick
meat off these streets. Squawking
about craft beers and raw
denim, their foreign tongues
butcher every name on the menu.
All their Yelp reviews sound the same—
“I discovered a real gem in Little Saigon.
So authentic! I give it 4 stars.
Would have been 5, but the waitress
could have smiled more.”
Now, Kim Phuong has a 30-minute wait,
plays Radiohead instead of Khánh Ly
ballads. Waitresses speak enough English
to accommodate vegan diets.
Food bloggers all praise the tabernacle
of my childhood, beg to know the magic
of my people. In the 1800s,
riots ignited violence against Chinese
immigrants. After finding refuge
in each other, they kindled new homes:
Chinatowns. Haven’t Asian American enclaves
always been neighborhoods of necessity?
Before my people built this Little Saigon,
white flight to the suburbs sucked
this city’s economy down to its marrow.
But we know how to take leftovers
and forge something beautiful. Funny
how this city would be boneyard
without us. Now white folks flock
back to the streets they deserted;
rediscover everything we rebuilt.
Of course we learned how to be digestible,
how to shove our limbs into takeout boxes,
skin ourselves and sell the flesh
for profit. The owners of Kim Phuong
can pay off debt, send their daughter to college.
When their restaurant burns down
one winter night, they do not cry.
They can afford to rebuild everything.
In Vietnamese, Kim Phuong means golden
phoenix. I don’t say this for the irony.
It’s not this poem’s punchline, but my people’s
expectation that everything ours can burn
at any second. Koreatown, Little India,
Banglatown, Little Manila—no matter
how many pick at the bones
of immigrant communities,
we always endure the scorch
and cackle with a smile.
These neighborhoods of necessity,
always demanding we cook up
the most authentic kind
of survival: After all,
if we’re gonna suffer,
we gotta do it over good food.
Chrysanthemum Tran
Ethnic Studies
In college, I sit in the back with all of the other students of color
and listen as our white peers theorize the hell
out of the oppression that we were born from.
Buzzwords like institutionalized racism class warfare
are sugar on their tongues—sweet and comfortable:
words from a language my community
doesn’t even know exists because we’re too busy
living the realities of them.
It’s one thing to major in Ethnic Studies,
it’s another to be the reason
for its existence.
For the white students in my major,
Ethnic Studies is like a free study abroad program
that doesn’t require that they bring their baggage with them.
A privilege that is easy for them to close in their textbook
at the end of class.
But study my racial profile until
it exhausts you.
Study how Black looks a lot like
the green light for “stop and frisk.”
How Brown has been made
to look like a much-needed check stop
for any given border. Ask me
what it’s like to have your skin be made to
feel like the nuclear missile we all know
is coming.
And you still won’t know how to sit in the back of a class
and be studied because of how tragic your history is,
as if we weren’t brought in to be dissected,
as if Frogs, Rats and People of Color
can only be understood when you cut them open.
When ethnics study Ethnic Studies it’s not school anymore.
It’s a lesson in survival.
And I’m tired of playing teacher with my oppression.
If I’m not doing it on a stage, I’m doing it from the margins of a classroom.
I’m doing it from the margins in my notebook.
Always on the margin of something never the core.
Never asked to be more than what makes me easy
to feel sorry for.
It’s easy to avoid confronting the things that make us
uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty.
Who chooses to walk through the warzone
if you were told that you don’t have to?
If you grew up believing that there isn’t one?
If what you don’t know won’t kill you?
Race is the rent I pay for this skin.
But the belief that racism doesn’t exist anymore
is when I feel the foreclosure of this home taking my knees
from right under me.
You can’t claim that racism doesn’t exist
when you’ve never known what it means to survive it.
When you keep looking at the warzone like a teaching moment
you’re not ready to learn the lesson from.
A comfort zone you’re not willing to sacrifice.
It’s easy to avoid confronting the things that make us
uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty.
But comfort is what kills us in the long run.
Comfort is sitting down when you should be on your feet.
It’s staying quiet when you should be speaking up.
It’s speaking too
much, when you should be listening.
It’s putting up borders for safety, and not
bridges for healing.
Comfort is celebrating diversity, but
never discussing it.
As if a black president is enough.
As if a heritage month is enough.
As if Ethnic Studies is enough.
As if this poem is enough.
Comfort is sitting in the front of the class
forgetting that we’re sitting right behind you.
Wanting to tell you that the warzone still exists.
Wanting to tell you that
this isn’t comfortable
for any of us.
Terisa Siagatonu
The Day I Realized We Were Black
my brother Hector was four hours late coming home from work
when he entered the house He was angry I was holding his pet
rabbit in my arms watching The Godfather—which part I can’t remember
did I mention he was angry sixteen and angry
and he said his legs ached like what the wind must feel against a
tumbleweed
and he said he was tired like death seemed easy like rice and beans
and whatever meat we had that night was too hard to swallow
and he said he wished we were white
and I stood up startled my much lighter skin than his
could not wrap my coarse hair around the idea that we were not that
because my mother is Cuban with grey eyes
because my father had an afro once but I had not noticed then
because my grandfather once said “I wish I were King Kong so I could
destroy Harlem and those fucking black cockroaches”
because my godparents were Irish-American
because I had suppressed my blackness
because my brother shook me when I told him he was stupid we were Latino
because he had missed his Jersey to Port Authority bus
because he was walking to the nearest train station and lost his way
because he was stopped by the police
because he was hit with a stick
because he was never given the right directions even though he begged
because trash was thrown at him from the police cruiser’s window as he walked
because he was never the same
because we’re black
because we’re black and I never knew I was twenty-two
Yesenia Montilla
quaking conversation
i want to talk about haiti.
how the earth had to break
the island’s spine to wake
the world up to her screaming.
how this post-earthquake crisis
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