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.
Aruna khilanani race full#
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.
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