This is a re-write of a poem I wrote for the Familial Migration documents assignment. I would love feedback and am also interested in moving it into my body soon!
Words NOT Teeth
1. I tried a little reference to water and borders in the 6th line, not sure if it's enough?
2. I tried to make the ending a bit more complex while still being a political statement. What do you think of this ending? In case you want to compare to the original: https://postnatyam.blogspot.com/2017/03/shys-borders-resurfacing-response-3.html
3. Any other thoughts?
Words NOT Teeth
I delicately examine my birth certificate, a frail ink-stained, yellowish paper.
My Father’s name squeezes itself neatly into the tiny box, whose creator didn’t anticipate the Jagarlapudis with our plentiful syllables.
His birthplace: India.
I imagine the huge watery border he crossed and wonder how he was received when he arrived with only $26, a student visa, and his dreams.
The box for “color or race” is not filled out.
I smirk as I observe that it contains a single horizontal line as if to mark the very category itself irrelevant.
43 years later, my year-and-a-half old son, soon to get his passport, perches curiously on a stool, pointing at the camera flash.
We love the smiley picture, but the elderly black man who runs the dingy store warns us that the rules have changed: no smiling.
We choose the one where he looks puzzled instead.
He is wearing his favorite color, orange, unaware of how this color is infamously linked to the 45th president of the United States. Unaware of the president’s travel bans. Unaware that the world’s borders are tightening and that he may never experience the freedom that I have enjoyed with my American passport and my Overseas Indian Citizenship.
This ¾ desi child who knows more Spanish than Telugu, who loves Salsa as well as Bollywood music, and who, like any almost two-year-old, simultaneously tests boundaries and clings to security.
He knows you don’t need a big wall to feel safe. But, like many other almost two-year-olds, he still needs practice with using words instead of teeth.
1. I tried a little reference to water and borders in the 6th line, not sure if it's enough?
2. I tried to make the ending a bit more complex while still being a political statement. What do you think of this ending? In case you want to compare to the original: https://postnatyam.blogspot.com/2017/03/shys-borders-resurfacing-response-3.html
3. Any other thoughts?
1. I like the addition! If you wished, you could name the specific body of water, though it might not be necessary.
ReplyDelete2. I like this new ending – it feels more nuanced without hitting the reader over the head politically. I did like how the embrace/smile in the earlier writing signal the need for warmth and physical human connection to create the conditions for safety (also, it doesn’t set up a verbal vs. physical hierarchy whereby words are somehow more civilized/superior than the body) – but all of that might be a lot to pack into one sentence.
3. These is mostly feedback/observations about the differences between this version and your first writing. For some reason, this writing has a more serious tone for me, whereas the first one felt more casual. I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s how each sentence is often given a stanza of its own, which creates more weight to the words. I get a fuller sense of a chronology of familial migration from this writing, whereas the first felt more like quick notes. I enjoyed the addition of the first stanza for how gives context as well as evocative imagery. For the fourth stanza about your father’s arrival, I found myself wondering who you meant when you wonder how he was received (by immigration authorities? The community he landed in?) and wanted a little more specificity than “his dreams” (what were those dreams?), since that turn of phrase feels such a typical way to talk about immigrants to the US, kind of like “to make a better life for oneself.” Some small grammatical and word-logic questions: why are father and salsa capitalized? Who is “we” (I assume it’s Kash, but would an unfamiliar reader know that)? How do we get from “year-and-a-half” to “almost two-year-old” in the course of one poem?
Lastly, when you translate this into your body, assuming the text is said or otherwise conveyed to the audience, I think that certain parts could be streamlined or cut because they might be obvious from the movement or your expression (for example, instead of saying “I smirk as I observe,” you could just smirk).
Nice work!