home.
i. compromise
I do not speak my father’s language. I am constantly grasping to keep pieces of my
mother’s Trinidad with me. You ask me where I am from and the first parts of me to
fall are always my eyes, who have learned how to shame silently. How to disappear
inside a moment that cuts. I breathe slow to balance the stutter and listen to my
pulse when it whispers pick one, even if it’s the wrong one this time and it always is
and this is how you teach a transnational body to recoil from itself. Sometimes you
ghost the voice and watch as the blood runs free from the lip, a quivering river.
Sometimes I dream up alternative autobiographies in which my dad and mum
migrate from the same country and I rest cozily with the colonizer’s tongue. In
which the most difficult choice I must make is never my own: this time I am black
girl. this time I am clipped wings, or, whoever makes you comfortable.
ii. devaluing
in every ending, I leave myself to bleed
belly empty, hands trembling,
an unjust labour that I misname ‘self-love.’
maybe multi-ethnicity is a war between phantom limbs,
each dream unmasking yet another exit wound.
iii. acceptance
The secret is I have crossed three continents,
each introduced to me as ‘home.’
This blackness, flexible with the colonized tongue
you condemn as being unable to claim.
As if I am not child of the Diaspora.
As if these oceans have not linked
hands to haul me freely across them.
As if my body is not liaison,
powerful with ancestral blood that welcomes me home.
even if you won’t.
Lydia Koku
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