I’m Gonna Stay Right Here In This Becoming
I had another voice before this. I believe it to be true. Somewhere in some womb, forever unknown to me, I heard a mother-tongue calling. But that was in another life I barely remember. A life briefly lived where I stayed. I mean, I was kept and I was not a stranger to myself. But I live this life now in a language I have coopted as mine through assimilation. Rough out of my chest but easy out of my lips, I speak in fragments; I know myself enough to utter aloud tales of reclamation and am unmoored from my people enough to be forever adrift from continuous connection. What an uneasy way to live — floating on seas that never lead towards home, describing my people with a tongue that was not originally mine.
I study the history of a peoples I believe to be a part of through melanated ancestors but know to be other through colonized language. I am a stranger in my own history. Sifting through names and faces of people that look close enough to be kin but distant enough that I am sure I will never know. I examine traumas I have no business claiming and celebrate joy with a breadth of uncertainty. A part of the whole, it seems, but never wholly known.
I was… before this. My story did not start with erasure of establishment in community. I had another name before this one. One I no longer respond to for it belongs to a baby that did not travel down…
