In the winter, Jason and I try to finish a puzzle together. We only take it out after the kids have gone to bed and we are watching Lady Dynamite on Netflix.
Out of exasperation this morning, I thought, what they hay, I'll put together a puzzle while my kids watch Madeline.
Tilia took out her rage at being excluded by busting up the puzzle with a Tinker Toy while I worked, and destroying the puzzle when I stepped out of the room. Admittedly, I saw it coming.
And then there's Wanda.
My quaint life in the basement, my heart and mind heavy.
the children of immigrants
Out of exasperation this morning, I thought, what they hay, I'll put together a puzzle while my kids watch Madeline.
Tilia took out her rage at being excluded by busting up the puzzle with a Tinker Toy while I worked, and destroying the puzzle when I stepped out of the room. Admittedly, I saw it coming.
And then there's Wanda.
My quaint life in the basement, my heart and mind heavy.
the children of immigrants
BY LENELLE MOÏSE
When I am a toddler, a child, a tween, a teen, and a young
adult, I am called an ancestral soul, a ti gran moun, a little old person.
Adults study me and decide that I am wise beyond my years,
mature for my age, emotionally ripe. I am told it is unusual to meet a
five-ten-fifteen-year-old girl who does not slouch or mumble or speak in
monosyllables.
When I do the things that come naturally to me—when I hold
my spine up erect, when I wait my turn to speak, when I speak having listened, carefully,
when I enunciate, when I look grown-ups in the eye—I am told I must have “been
here before.”
"How do you know?" one college professor asks me
after she has seen a psychologically violent play I have written at age
nineteen. "How do you already know?”
In high school, I charm my teachers. They encourage me to
write speeches about feminism that I recite for International Women's Day at
City Hall or deliver as part of conference panels at local universities. “If
you were older," they tell me, "we would probably be friends.” One of
them even flirts with me.
Among my peers I exist somewhere between amicably mysterious
and irrevocably dorky. The popular kids greet me in the hallways, but they
never invite me to their beer-drenched parties. I will never play Spin the
Bottle. I will never play Seven Minutes in Heaven. My mother tells me she is
protecting me from boys, but the truth is, after I do my homework, she wants me
to type up another family friend’s résumé or resignation letter. At home, I am
a bridge, a cultural interpreter, a spokesperson, a trusted ally, an American
who is Haitian too, but also definitely American.
The children of immigrants don't get to be children. We lose
our innocence watching our parents' backs bend, break. I am an old soul because
when I am young, I watch my parents' spirits get slaughtered.
In Haiti, they were middle class. Hopeful teachers. Home
owners. They were black like their live-in servants. They donated clothes to
the poor. They gave up everything they knew to inherit American dreams. And
here, they join factory lines, wipe shit from mean old white men's behinds,
scrub five-star hotel toilets for dimes above minimum wage. Here, they shuck
and jive and step and fetch and play chauffeur to people who aren't as smart as
they are, people who do not speak as many languages as they do. In the 1980s,
they are barred from giving blood because newscasters and politicians say that
AIDS comes from where they come from: Haiti, the poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere, a black magic island that spawns boat people and chaos, a place of
illiterate zombies, orphan beggars and brazen political corruption.
When I am a child, my childhood is a luxury my family cannot
afford. Their dignity is not spared, so my innocence is not spared. They are
humiliated and traumatized daily, so I become a nurse to their trauma. I am told
too much, so I know too much, so I am wise beyond my years.
When I am six, my mother tells me she found out she was
pregnant with me at age nineteen, she “tried to kill the baby." She says
"the baby," as if it isn’t me she’s talking about; as if I am not the
expensive, scandalous daughter who forced my way into her world despite the
abortion-inducing herbal teas she drank and her frantic leaps off of small
buildings.
When I am sixteen, my father calls me on the phone to,
inevitably, weep. He says, "Living in this country, I have learned not to
hope for things. Only you are my hope. Only you."
So—yes, I grow up fast.
Lenelle Moïse, "the children of immigrants" from
Haiti Glass. Copyright © 2014 by Lenelle Moïse. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books,
www.citylights.com.
Source: Haiti Glass (City Lights Books, 2014)
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