Dirt Brown Roots and Turmeric Stained Tongues

Published in Entangled in What We Chose Chapbook in April 2020

When you say you like your girls independent -

gaze into my blazing eyes, taste my blood,

swallow your words, because if you looked you would see

generations of women who rearranged their bones

to make room for the ones they love, sucked tears back

into their sockets, worked tirelessly for decades in countries

that criminalized their brown skin, simultaneously exoticizing melanin

Peeling back skin in search of assimilation

begging our colonizers to let us into their nation

we traded chaa for earl grey,

pashminas for parkas,

turmeric for salt and vinegar,

colour and intricacy for monochrome misery

and now they plead for us to be the representation.

charming us like snakes to recall the identity they

sucked out of us, so we can be their exotic flowers

their perfect caramel-coloured girls, adhering to tropes

they curated, the representation-

no one can call them racist

they plaster our faces on posters

look, this brown child we love!

A glowing icon for multiculturalism

though she cannot speak her native tongue

though she has never seen the lush fields in her homeland

though she mispronounces the names of her grandparent’s village

she is our representation.

She has two passports, one Canadian, for she is a relic of multiculturalism,

the other British, for colonialism permeates deeper than cultural roots.

When you say you like your girls independent -

gaze into my blazing eyes, taste my blood,

swallow your words because if you looked you would see

generations of women who rearranged their bones

to make room for the ones they love,

strength, independence, valiance

they intertwine themselves in the guanine,

a fighter resides beside cytosine,

adenine nestled in resilience forming bonds with thymine

infusing that intrepid will to live in every cell.

That is my DNA, invisible to the passer-by but

look deep enough into my eyes, and you will swallow your words.