My Self-Portrait: What My Mother Swallowed
A Poem
Dreaming of one day being as unbothered as a breadfruit.
As sharp as a fresh blade on a sound system.
Realizing I hate the question where are you from
because it always wants one answer.
I say my father is from one place, my mother from another.
They look at each other across the room
and call the other side savage.
I have watched this my whole life.
My mother speaks in tongues when spirit hits.
She does not speak about the women she looked at too long
in the market, at church, on the television she pretends not to watch.
She prays over me every night.
Lord, deliver her from confusion.
I am not confused, Mama.
I am very clear.
She is the one swallowing.
She calls my father’s people heathens.
He calls her church a circus.
They are both pointing at the other
and calling them savage
when the only separation between them
is one boat.
The same boat.
The same water.
The same chain.
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They will be simpler than me, my cousins.
The ones who did not inherit two pointing fingers.
They will plant themselves in one soil
and grow straight as palm trees.
I have trouble imagining what that could be.
A breadfruit that roots in two yards.
A blade that cuts both ways and refuses to apologize.
A daughter who makes her mother swallow
not her curiosity but her prayer.
Do not ask me to choose.
Do not ask me to sip from one cup.
I am not a mango or a tomato.
I am the rotten sweet thing that happens
when two fruits too far apart
decide to fall from the same tree.
I am the child of a woman
who has swallowed so much she forgot she was hungry.
Beautiful, impossible, still standing.
Still the thing they point at
when they need to prove
they are not each other.
I revised the original poem because it left out what I actually missed growing up: my mother’s queerness. Pentecostalism taught her to swallow her desires and call it holiness. She was devoted to men, devoted to denial. Never to me. This self-portrait is what came up when I stopped looking at the flags and started looking at her.
