I’ve never really been that good with maps.
Could never differentiate East from West,
and I tend to protest when my friend puts me in charge of keeping direction.
I’ve often questioned my orientation,
my place in this world.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been lost in translation
bilingual by choice and trilingual by contagion,
and I can just barely read my mother’s mother tongue,
so how could I ever read a map?
My mother doesn’t have this issue.
Can tell you how to get to the nearest store
without once having to make sure
if her steps are too confident for her own good;
she has direction.
Black women used to use braids as a secret language,
would trace rivers and trails down each other’s scalps
like cartographers,
they could capture landscapes far before photographers.
And as my mother’s mother did to my mother,
she tried to make maps out of the uncharted land of mixed girls’ hair.
Took a pen to my scalp to trace the lines of the roads she walked to get herself to Canada,
my protesting cries bouncing off the bathroom walls
as my scalp was pulled and brushed and translated to a language I never understood
and in Kreyol—
My mother would sing me hymns of the stories of women who treaded cornrows
they never got out of.
My hair was always tangled.
So my mom would always have me in two braids—
a protective style,
worn by the first of my lineage
unaware of what I needed protecting from.
What a privilege,
she’d say,
to have such white skin.
What a privilege,
she’d say,
that my hair falls straight when it’s wet.
She says it almost like it’s armor,
having the opportunity to walk on this earth as pale and straight and white.
Like the parting she traced on my scalp.
Like the rivers that cut through land.
Like the paths only she knows.
Like the crack in my mother’s heart that breaks when I tell her I love my black side,
when she’s tried so hard to save me from it.
She says she’s travelled so far to make it where we are today, but
I never fully understand her because
she’s a skin-bleach-soap kind of white wash
And I—
I’ve never really had direction.
So I’ve always been torn between North and South.
No surprise because I’ve never been that good at braiding,
but I’m learning.
I’ve made the choice not to talk much to my mom anymore
and started to wear box braids a lot more:
A protective style.
Mellowdramma is a Haitian-Canadian slam poet based in Montreal. She believes that art is a medicine that allows people to connect with their emotions, others, and the parts of ourselves that rarely see the light.
Featured image by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash.
