Issue 58: Summer 2022

excerpts from tabula rasa

My brain is all I have. I let the white doctors cartographize, fret about/ my ’fro fitting into the MRI because the brain is all I have.

 

from tabula rasa

My brain is all I have. I let the white doctors cartographize, fret about my ’fro fitting into the MRI because the brain is all I have. Cannot risk some neural cog missing or a motor sleeping on the job. The brain was my express ticket, my key under the mat, my invisibility cloak shielding me from the invasion of someone else’s hands. For now. When we couldn’t rely on our skin or the expectation of what’s between our legs to keep us safe, we used our brains—in the way they wanted us to, at the times they wanted us to. Nothing is more dangerous than when they see, floating disembodied, only the war flag of our skin, the willing void of our cunts, the potential of our hands. The potential. 

In a sweltering classroom with a Union Jack seven thousand kilometres south of London, a schoolmaster beat my mother on the wrist until she believed she didn’t have a brain or mouth worth using. Just hands. Her country is land scalloped by plantations. The prime hand on a plantation was the original machine. My mother’s hands disassembled plucked pink chickens on a factory line. My mother’s hands scrubbed the gunk abandoned in toilet bowls, hauled platters table to table, refreshing the drinks of people who assumed their glasses refilled themselves. My mother’s hands rinsed white wrinkled asses while their puckered lips slurped obscenities in her ear and screeched ████ if the bedsheets had a rumple. My mother’s hands sorted, packed, stapled, stacked, carted millions upon millions of clean folded envelopes with return addresses from cities she will never see beyond postage stamps. Her hands so flimsy after twenty years of folding and stapling and carrying and carrying and carrying she couldn’t braid my hair without her arms trembling. All so I could have something in my belly and a pressed shirt in a classroom in this land of all white and not have to use anything except my brain. 

 

 

 

 

from tabula rasa

Our brains are feral. In Regent Park, at Jane and Finch, in Scarborough, in the South Side of Chicago, in Port-au-Prince, Harlem and Johannesburg, they believe we appear in their classrooms after a lifetime of swinging from banana vines, animal-hide loincloths hidden under the kilts of our uniforms. Too many of them delighted at the prospect of a Caliban of their very own. To teach how to drape the napkin across our laps, to select the correct-sized cutlery when spoon-feeding ourselves the language meant to unravel us. But you and I, decades-apart, alphabet soup’ed english, elbows on the table. Gnawed into the marrow-rich instances of their language (the byronic moor dramatics, modernist treatises like cryptic crosswords, fainting-couch sighs upon grecian urns) then let our gastric juices liquefy the plumage and imperial march that’s left.

Our brains are feral. Plotted mutinies in our everydays. Skipping Sunday school to read in bathroom stalls, tearing at our frocks and pressed hair our mothers hot-combed for hours. I imagine, like me, you didn’t sneak out, always did your homework, but we wanted to know everything we could, so they called us faas, fresh, smart-ass, rude gyal who eye-pass them. They tried—bless them—to keep us innocent. Mine never let me tie my shoes wrong. She never let me fall from a bike to let my cheek become acquainted with grit. At some point, hard experience stings less than the belt. Or the coat hanger. Or the pointer broom, or the rolled-up magazine, or the frying pan from across the room. We had mothers who were taught if they crossed their legs at the ankle and kept their figures zipped till their wedding nights they’d always be girls. Till they worked their first factory job or after the grope the entire bus looked away, and they recognized themselves as never blessed with girlhood at all. Innocence was an import from England they never had enough pocket-change for. 

And with huffs and slammed doors and suitcases pre-packed under the bed, we cussed them as small-minded though they were sodden with worldliness. Bless them. Knowing is an ache. 



About the author

Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese ancestry. Her writing has appeared in Arc, CV2, Guts, and Room. She is the curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, an English-language reading series with a Montreal-based and national audience founded in 2004. She was the inaugural recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship under Gillian Sze. She writes in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang.