“Essay” #8: Say My Name

I love names with accents. They make me happy to know that they are not assimilating to whiteness. I shared this poem with my younger cousin, because I needed her to know that she had to say her own name right, and not give up to assimilation.

What’s your name?

“Ariana”

Ar-iana?

“No, Ariana.”

Arriana?

“Closer, Ariana”

Can I call you Ar-iana?

Not sorry, I don’t let people butcher my name anymore

And i won’t apologize for that

I will not give you any other way to pronounce my name because

There is no other way to pronounce it

Ah – like the start of a song

Rrrrr – rolling because my tongue has talent

Ah – like a yell that my lungs can fill

Na – like the end of a song with no lyrics

My name is a song that i do not need you to sing off tune

I am not asking for perfect pronunciation

Because your mouth might not move like mine

But i demand that you try

I demand that you realise that not all names

Most names

Are made for your Anglo-AMerican mouth

There is no name that fits your mouth but your your own

So i ask you to respect mine

Its intricacies

And simplicities

 

I demand you say my name

Correctly

Because I cannot have my little cousin mispronouncing her own name

For anglo-american mouths

Mamas, say your name correctly!

Se pronuncia “Katarina”

I had to practice your name growing up because it was important

That your whole name was correct out of respect for you

“Kat-er-e-na”

You are mispronouncing your own name For someone

because you’re tired of them mispronouncing it anyway

But you haven’t given them the chance to try

 

Do not call me Ar-iana

Arr-i-anna

Do not make me relive white elementary school teachers

On the first day of class

And don’t even get me started on

my 16 letter last name

 

16 letters that are too long for anything

In this american education system

My own identity of a name is not standard

My name is quite literally chopped off at the end

In its standardization

its colonization

I spell my name for the starbucks barista

Because i don’t need both us

Embarrassing ourselves when they ask for my name

And then they have no excuse

I am monotone in spelling my last name

Because I am so used to people not knowing how to ask for it

I am not traditional in either my country of birth

Or my country of heritage

I am not traditional because ironically

My parents were trying emulate the system in our country of heritage

Where two last names is expected

Thus i am not traditional in my country of birth because I try to be

Proud of my country of heritage

 

Do not let others mispronounce your name for you

Teach them to attempt

Be proud of your own intricacies

Your own simplicities

The heritage that your parents are trying to pass down to you

Because no one should be ashamed of the word that is used

To call you out

Of the word that you most identify with

Because it

Is

Yours

So when i ask you

“How does your mother say it?”

I am trying to say “pronounce it correctly please

Because i am trying to respect you”

 

Dame tu nombre y te puedo pronunciar un mundo de belleza

Give me your name and i can pronounce you a world of beauty

Essay 7: I’m exhausted

I’m exhausted by being at school. The week before spring break was the first time I thought of transferring. I can’t wait to be able to not worry about assignments. I want to lie in bed with my partner. I want to sleep in. I do not want to feel guilty for taking a breather. I want to travel. I don’t want to talk to people for a week. I want people to miss me, to wonder where I am when I am not available to them. I want to read for fun, immerse myself in a new book, a different world where the only stress I feel is when the dragon that the character will befriend later is chasing them.

I am resentful about how much time school work takes. I am starting to become resentful of myself for coming here. Higher education is needed, but at what cost to mental health in this new societal standard where a Masters Degree is starting to look “only” like a Bachelors?

I want my assignments to be done already. I am burnt out.

Essay 6: Writing in Church, Continuing Decolonizing

How do I defend my religion? I don’t. I shine the light on the atrocities that Christians in the name of God and Jesus have violently converted brown, black, Asian, Native people. I do not defend Christians’ rights to do so. I do not like evangelizing because of this. I do not want to perform violence on oppressed bodies. Evangelism has been used to excuse violence. I continue to repeat “violence” because I need present [current] Christians to confront what some of our ancestors have done to others’ ancestors within our own faith. Christian sibling, will you support others who follow the same Higher Being? We need to support our Muslim siblings. We cannot persecute them ourselves. You may use God’s teachings as an excuse to protect them, but you must find some reason to protect them.

The person I do not know how to defend is the God I pray to. The non-binary, color of water God I pray to. How do I defend thee? How do I explain why you   let the violence happen? Why did you let it happen? Diosita, my love for you knew no bounds as a child, and I am trying to return to that state. I find myself turning to history, turning to my old, old blood. I turn to your own evolution n human eye, Diosita. The ealrist I know of is Tonantzin, in Nahuatl culture. Then you evolved to Coatlicue in Mexica/Aztec culture. Then the Christians came with more blood sacrifices than we knew was healthy, and you became la Virgen de Guadalupe. Juan Diego’s indigenous identity was erased, just as your was. Tonantzin, Coatlicue, Virgen Guadalupe. Your evolution has inspired my type of evangelism. The actual history of your son as a brown man has inspired me. To know that he also would not be safe in this country grants me a strange/weird comfort.

Anger should not be my fuel, how to I convert to love? My anger at racism is because of my love for people of color.

How do I confront the pain under my skin, flowing through my arteries? It is wise to turn anger to love?

Essay 5: Decolonizing My Body in a Colonizing Religion

[I wrote this for my college’s newspaper a couple of weeks ago]

How do I justify my religion to my own body?

My father claims that we are descended from the Mexica people, also known as the Aztecs. On my mother’s side, we are more recently and directly descended from the Spanish people and Yaqui indigeneity. My grandmother has green eyes (from the Spanish) and straight hair (from the Yaqui) to prove it. But I don’t like to recognize the Spanish. I don’t like to be called “Hispanic” because I don’t want to recognize my indigenous side’s colonizers and conquistadores. I try to give as little power to the colonizer in my blood as possible. (Yes, my current history class, I know we talked about the problems behind blood quantum, but these problems do not take away from what we have felt for our whole lives.)

How much power should I give to the religion that was used to conquer my people and wanted to “civilize” us with a monotheistic religion? How do I defend to myself that it was not Jesus’ fault that his followers were cruel? I turn to the identity and teachings of Jesus himself.

I teach 8th graders at the Youth Group of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Natick. I have heard that the best way to learn is to teach. I teach them about Jesus – or Yeshua (yesh-wah), Jesus’ actual name before translation. I am the Sunday school they go to a year before their confirmation class, and I take that job seriously. I am the source of Bible history for my class, however small and informal my education has been in Bible history. I try to humanize Jesus, his ancestors and his disciples for my 8th graders. Jesus was not humanized – incarnated – for me until I realized that he was not white, like all the popular representations of him show. (And no, looking white is not looking racially ambiguous, just like there are different shades of “nudes.”) I want to humanize Jesus, not to bring him down to my level, but because it is easier for me to follow someone on foot than someone on a pedestal.

Jesus is rightfully on a pedestal for dying for our sins, but he did not want to be on a pedestal; he wanted to carry us, he wanted to serve. The more human a person is, the more you believe in them. The more you want to touch them. You’re not afraid to break their image. Jesus’ image does not break, it is resilient, once you realize that Jesus was human, was incarnated and has emotions. He had anger. He threw tables because he could not believe people’s disrespect and their lack of love for God’s temple, God’s place of love. He had love; he was not perfect because he had emotions. Being sinless does not mean perfection. Perfection is stale and dangerous because then you don’t want to change the perfect. And yet Jesus wanted to change everything. He wanted to change the world as we know it. He was a revolutionary and a servant, and his history deserves to be learned. Unlike many revolutionaries, he sacrificed himself out of love, not out of anger. His love was of the world, not of a certain people. He revolutionarily loved his enemies and his neighbors as himself.

Ultimately, my brown body follows a brown revolutionary whose mother was shunned; I follow a brown man who died of torture so we would not have to. I follow a goddess with skin the color of water and a non-binary gender. I follow a brown man whose mother was brave enough to carry him even though she would be shunned. He was born out of love and died out of love. He teaches me to pray for those in need, the weak, the meek, the poor of spirit. Therefore, I pray for the colonized, the diasporized, the raped, the abused, the closeted, the shunned, the prudes, the sluts, the discriminated against, those who fear for their safety in the dark because they are dark.

Essay 4: Creation

What does knowing what to do with yourself look like? How will I look at protesting and socialism when my frontal lobe is fully developed? Am I this idealistic because of my frontal lobe still developing?

I organized myself today, which was a strange mix of being able to use markers for something useful and trying to deal with all the information I had to write down for the next four months. I am overwhelmed and it’s only the second day of classes.

I don’t want to do anything but sleep at the moment.

I just want the week to go by faster. I want to get all my syllabi because I want to know I have everything. I get anxious when I know something is coming but I don’t actually have the information yet.

I would have loved to have written about something more “romantic,” but I am trying to take to heart to just pour out what’s in my mind for this challenge. My mind is not always romantic, or just, or peaceful. Essays are rough. Writing is tough. There is a need for my body to write. When I get an idea, I think about it so much that I don’t focus on anything else because I cannot forget the damn idea. There is a yearning to create for me. There is a yearning to fall in love with an idea that I can commit to it. I am not a solitary kind of person, and I am not sure about spending time by myself with an idea/story for too long, but honestly the process excites me. Writing takes practice to be completely cliche. Some of the most helpful tips I’ve read:

• write 10 minutes a day
• read like a writer, write like a reader
• let the flow go

My best poems have come from me physically not being able to stop. The idea takes over. The idea is not done with me until it is done. It does not take me into consideration whatsoever. It runs and runs and runs until I am panting and my hand is cramping but I endure for the sake of creation.

“The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!” (RENT The Musical)

The only time I know what to do with myself is in this flow, and I do it for free. Poetry is Not A Luxury (I always think of you, Audre Lorde) for me, yet this flow is usually done when I have “free time.” Part of my metal health depends on making time to allow the flow to come if it would like. I can’t not write. When I am up worrying at 1 or 2 am, I have written letters that I will Never Send. My ideas accessorize my notebook margins in class. Writing holds on tight, and Never would I like to let it go.

Essay 2: Happy List

In the summer before my 8th grade year, a couple of my cousins from my mom’s side stayed with us for 2 weeks. I remember because we were in the house on Olive Street when we decided to make Happy Lists. Mine is currently probably hiding somewhere in my various journals. In honor of trying to think of what will make me happy this summer, I’ll make a new one, with no order of preference, at 20-years-old.

1. Spending time with my family, my partner, and/or my friends (also considered chosen family)
2. sleeping in
3. feeling comfortable in my own skin
4. feeling comfortable being alone
5. curly hair on anyone
6. babies with dimples for knuckles
7. flower crowns made of real flowers on my head
8. compliments
9. journals
10. the 3 colorful “posters” I designed myself next to my bed
11. feeling self-sufficient sometimes
12. being shielded behind my hood’s fur-lining when it’s snowing
13. warmth
14. desert landscapes
15. flowering springtime
16. people of color
17. people of color loving themselves
18. making others laugh
19. intersectional feminist books
20. books in general
21. speaking Spanish when chismeando
22. hugs
23. lots of hugs
24. cuddling
25. platonic hand-holding
26. being covered by 5 blankets
27. electric blanket
28. talking on the phone (?!) with my partner
29. puppies
30. posting pictures of puppies from the interwebs
31. receiving pictures of puppies
32. celebrating birthdays
33. receiving payment from work
34. iced coffee
35. making the perfect foam for macchiatos
36. platonic flirting
37. kissing friends on the cheek
38. when friends tell me they miss me first
39. funny group texts
40. having time to read for fun
41. memes
42. my saguaro cactus onesie
43. jeans that make my butt look good
44. crafting/anything that keeps my hand busy
45. freshly-threaded eyebrows
46. lipstick
47. food
48. tacos de carne asada o tripas, todo con queso por favor
49. owls
50. purple
51. cuddle puddles
52. sunny days with a couple of rainy days thrown in for perfect writing lighting
53. feeling the flow of writing that doesn’t stop until it needs to

Luckily, I could keep going. I could probably write devotionals to a couple of the things on my Happy List, which will come eventually. The things on the list excite my everyday life, keeping the daily of life bright.