Letter to My Daughter
My body is the first language I learned to speak. Eyes crinkling, stomach a flutter, the ache in my throat. Hunger, of course, for love, the pain of knobby-kneed bruises, and the satisfaction of saffron on my tongue. You can forget it, the way the body talks to you. It's ways of knowing. I've forgotten how to translate its messages, overflowing like voicemails on a dust covered machine. I hope you stay fluent.
My body is the first language I learned to speak. Eyes crinkling, stomach a flutter, the ache in my throat. Hunger, of course, for love, the pain of knobby-kneed bruises, and the satisfaction of saffron on my tongue. You can forget it, the way the body talks to you. It's ways of knowing. I've forgotten how to translate its messages, overflowing like voicemails on a dust covered machine. I hope you stay fluent.
Like my high school French, the conjugations are blurry. My memory too scarred from years of yearning and exclusion. Eyelids laden with defeat, I'd lost sight long ago of the woman I wanted to be. My neck, heavy with gratitude, kept me focused - head down - on the scoreboard. Tek wuh ah telling yuh, your grandmother would chide, there is no room for complaining in this house; dem wan tek er'ting but dem cy-ant tek yuh education. The stiffness of my neck trickled down to my fingertips and authored the image of perfection, the allegory of the outlier.
I would make it, for her and for you, to the finish line. Flat-footed legs would carry me to the end, arms outstretched to the embrace of Otherness. A sea of white men and women welcomed me to the table and I did not hear my body screaming. With earned credentials, I breathed in triumph and opened my lips to sing my freedom song. I thought I made it. Yet the stiffness of my neck tightened its hold across my throat and left me voiceless. I tried to sing, but silence engulfed me. I did not remember how to listen to this body, these limbs that knew the truth. That embrace of Otherness meant trading in my "sighted eyes" and "feeling heart" not for a seat at the table, but for a place on the menu.
Ignoring these harbingers of fate, I contorted my body into palatable morsels for consumption, a symbol of perfection- spine curved in subordination, grateful to be tokenized, a smile affixed to a numbed and unthreatening Brownness, and eyes perpetually focused on the floor and away from an authoritative gaze. This shrinking game of silence did not sound like freedom at all.
I did not know how to honor my body, one borne of immigrants and lullabies of patois and Spanglish. I did not know the steeliness of my chest or how to refrain from bending my backbone rendered from the fingertips of our ancestors. I wish I remembered, was able to redo this path so you may never be led astray. I wish, for you, to listen to these warning signs and never fill your lungs with the weight of acquiescence.
For me these lessons came later, wrapped in rainbows and sandalwood. Loneliness drew me away from the table for a room of one's own, and bell taught me how to build my own table and how to sit at the head. Black women, our sisters, met me with hands outstretched at the precipice of defeat. They are your aunts, your cousins, your mother, our family. I learned to listen, exhale, and memorized the glides and fricatives of forgiveness. In worn pages found in old bookstores, I found Alice and Beverly, and stretched myself in the warmth of our people and of Blackness long ignored. With your Aunts, I cradled your future in my hands, and learned to confront the wells of my fear. These muscles strengthened with the stillness of my breath as it escaped a once mangled throat. These bones cracked with the discomfort of accountability, and kept your mother upright in the face of anti-Blackness- once disguised as the safety of Otherness, now rejected as a tool of White Supremacy.
I want you to wrap your cinnamon arms around the fullness of your body, to forgive the times your silence, like my own, sound safer than your own voice. With patience, I hope you find your way back to yourself, to listen to the map of your own heartbeat. I want so much for you, to traverse this journey in tune with your body - never wavering in the allure of Otherness; to never feel the stifle of gratitude because I know that being visible is not the same as being seen. Remember your softness, readied by aloe vera and cocoa butter, when external definitions want you to be hard. Remember that this PhD did not save your mother.
I hum now, the melodies of my freedom song. Its simple notes so familiar, they sound like the syllables of your name. I hope you listen to your body; I hope this life lets you sing.
