In writing workshop, I was introduced to a new kind of frenzy, where I learned to speak about sentences and lines like the characters in that Jonathan Lethem story, aiming for the oddball and the experimental.Aruna Khilanani is a Psychiatry specialist from New York, NY. They wandered, they doubted themselves, they double-backed, and frequently, they disappeared. My thoughts, it was clear, could not be corralled. To resist the need to corral my thoughts into the metered verses I read in secondary school. This compounded my desire to write about race and perform my work aloud, even though it terrified me. I didn’t realize that it could also mean disinterest, struggling to articulate myself as real in a world that either saw me as not worth its time, or wanted me to really know how guilty it felt for seeing me this way. Before I arrived in the US, I thought that racism meant that people hated you.
I peeled back memories of those long summers in Brooklyn, memories that held truths I’d blocked out, back then, as I experienced racism for the first time in the company of people I’d thought I liked. There was a reason why I knew, instinctively, why the people in my classes would not be interested in the Caribbean books I brought from home, or why I knew that my role with my white male friends would only ever be one of friendship. My mind could relax because it was telling the truth.
In my more lucid moments, and among my Black friends, I could admit that what I felt was real. There was an inherent shame in discussing my discomfort, in clarifying even to myself whether it hung in the atmosphere or whether it languished in my head-if it was the latter, all the better to deny its existence. This is why “man” translates to “mon” for Americans when Caribbean people say it, I realized, as people called me A-mon-da and I blithely smiled along.īut what I experienced among the white people at school was difficult to articulate. The woke and good-natured would imitate it the way I said it. But even when I said my name it caused mild confusion.
I’d recount all the ways I saw people who’d come back to Trinidad with a slightly American accent after time abroad-a “fresh-water Yankee,” we call them, hilariously-would be treated with disdain. I’d go to bed promising that I wouldn’t lose it, that I wouldn’t slant my vowels and bend my hard consonants just to be understood. I wasn’t just hyper-aware that my education seemed to have no place here-I was aware that my accent didn’t, either. That I would develop habits around my anxiety, pausing whenever someone spoke to me so that I could translate my response in my head. I never thought what would hold me back would be psychological. I’d originally gotten into Oberlin, but couldn’t go because of the money. A belief I didn’t realize I’d still had, since I’d spent all of my first degree reckoning with things like cultural hegemony, and Black respectability, eventually cultivating a pride in who I was and where I was from-despite myself. It was as though I’d already been primed to see my culture as inferior, a thing I’d absorbed and held in my head. She’d carved away at the report until all that was left felt like gasping breaths. In a small yard, NourbeSe Philip performed poetry that was not poetry at all. Zong was a slave ship that had thrown its cargo, 130 enslaved Africans, overboard. As she read from Zong!, an erasure of the Gregson v Gilbert case report. NourbeSe Philip, born in Tobago, living in Canada, but in Trinidad for a spell. I was told that the writer was celebrated in the experimental poetry circles I would soon meet, though I only knew her for the YA novels she wrote long ago, included in my literature curriculum.
I picture a depression.īefore I left for Los Angeles, I was invited to a last event in Trinidad. It is a bus that will take me from LAX, where I think I’ve just seen Jennifer Garner and her Dimples, to Van Nuys, a place someone near me has termed “The Valley.” It is my first time in Los Angeles. I am in the bus, and the bus is full of Americans, most of them white. But here I am, a Caribbean woman with English as my first language, unable to use it.