By Adeeba Rana
She is re-learning Spanish from her students.
-¿Dame un late pass?
-Escribeló.
-Gracia(s).
Conversations take place between hairflips and swagger, language swirling through the hallways, bouncing off murals, settling upon eyelids and lips.
-I told you, she is a t.h.o.t.
-You think everybody is a t.h.o.t.
-Dique, they are.
She lets the words wash over her, Spanglish clashing merrily into staccato beats, it is only when her students realize she doesn’t understand every syllable that there is a jarring note of discord.
-¿Habla espanol?
-No, pero entiende “some spanish.”
-Pero ella es hispana, ¿no?
She has heard all of this before. Her curls spell Latina more often than Desi. Sometimes it is her hair, sometimes the simple cadence of her words. Even the grocery store clerks argue about her ancestors. At school, she is careful about the information she lets slip out.
-Miss, can you dance?
-Yes. I get together with my cousins to choreograph dances for family weddings—it is a South Asian thing.
-Miss, you’re that?
-I’m what?
-I just thought you were, dique, Spanish. You don’t look like that. You don’t talk like that neither.
-Oh.
-Miss, that means you can belly dance, right?
She has never hidden her silver bangle, the star and crescent in her nose, she says Alhamdullilah after she sneezes, brings daal chawal for lunch.
-Miss, what’s your nationality?
-American.
-No, Miss! Where were you born?
-I was born and raised in Boston.
-But where was your Pops born?
It is always here that she trips, exposed, raw, unnerved; raza, etnia, nacionalidad. Otra. A student yells out gibberish in ululations,
-If I saw you walking down the street, I would have thought you were a habibi in that scarf, Miss.
-What is a habibi?
-Miss, do you speak Asian?
-You don’t look Chinese.
She is used to it with white people, but this othering in a community she calls her own is like a layer of wax thickening on her skin, a stone pressing on her chest. Cold dead weight. She keeps tilling the soil of her heart, overturning the growth in hopes of new harvest. She fashions pitchers for her ears, collecting thoughts, funneling them through, prodding her heart to stay malleable like soft pitch.
-Miss, aren’t women treated badly over there? asks a fourteen-year-old student who recently shrugged, saying
-I’m keeping the baby because my mother made me feel so guilty about it. My father already told me he won’t talk to me no more. He won’t buy me food or clothes. He told me that my boyfriend should pay.
-Is there a place where women are not treated “badly?”
On Día de los Muertos, she comes early to set up the altar, spreading yellow fabric, stringing marigolds and papel picado, placing sugar skulls, pan de muerto, paper flowers, chocolaté, and poems. She says her own prayer for the dead. Eats a tamale in the hallway. Students stop to show her the red dots they painted on their foreheads.
-Where is yours Miss?
-I’m Muslim.
-But I thought you were Asian, miss.
-I can be both.
Last year there was a Muslim student who asked if he could pray in the library. When she offered him a prayer rug he looked utterly perplexed;
-Miss, your boyfriend gave you this? He is from Yemen?
She knows how to write an ofrenda, she knows how to lift her hands in dua, she knows how to make mangú and biryani. She can relate to the overbearing parents, the disgraced sister, the hardening heart against school, against men, against love. But she can’t seem to climb over this fence, this feeling. She is wedged between the links, squeezed, squeezing.
