redwood plaza;

prose from a child of diaspora

me circa the early 2000s

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she (larki, sowali)

scrunches her hair (bal, suli)

damp

from the shower she takes everyday

thirty minutes before bed

so that her feet keep pristine

to a chapping, saving from

floorboards’ dust-nothings scheming killshots

she learned this from her ritualized mother

who washed the children’s feet so often

no other lessons found space to be stored

her hair, bal, suli, she doesn’t know

if it is straight or wavy but she rubs

a mystery foam into the roots

to make it one or the other

she will not stand for the in-between though it is her birthright

& when they ask for race and ethnicity

she’ll answer well technically

what languages do you speak? if you add

fractions of fluency around two

and a quarter but don’t test her she won’t know to respond

& before she was a teen when her mother

slicked through her hair coconut

oil from the blue and green bottle copped cheaper

at the desi store plastic eternally slippery

she would beg

not to be sent to school

she’d seen the few other desi girls

that came with oiled plaits so stupidly brave

and not self-conscious enough

proud and uptight she knows

her self-preservation skills will avoid the future culling

& her mother will yank her hair in a scolding

so she will continue to sit still

under calloused palms bitter

because Mama will never understand

being eight years old and later

she will clutch close

the viper shower head hissing

water agitating

the scalp rose red

while coconut stubbornly hugs

like a love letter

•

why does the grease of her hair

and the rituals

of feet-washing dictate her survival?

Mama will never get it

because seeds of entitlement

were never sown into the dirt

that grew her vegetables (sabziyan)

never printed onto a birth certificate

[Mama is four months older in America

because of a typo in the paperwork

says, too flippant,

it is easy changing the seven to a three on everything that requires a birthdate

says,

she forgets sometimes that she is a cancer, not a pisces]

& her daughter is angry enough

for the both of them

fumes

at too many things she cannot find a name for

because she is not fluent

in any of the languages treading water in her head

does it matter if our feet are clean?!

she is loud only inside the immigrant run-through apartment complex

of course it does,

Mama responds,

in half English, half Urdu, the grammar of Assamese

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an old poem that i now find somewhat redundant of other diaspora kid prose. still, this is a piece that was produced from an inarticulate heaviness that had accumulated over the course of my childhood and boiled over during teenagerdom. also, still, this was to be written inevitably as a necessary catharsis. one day i may come back to this, or i may not.

anyways, i had both a common and unique experience as a first-gen south asian kid in the states. i was born into a community quickly growing with immigrants, many of whom were south asian. i was also the only one i knew (and still know) to be part indian, part pakistani, and ethnically part afghan. it was a bit isolating, but also enriching to have access to so many different roots.

i grew up with a slew of languages in my household, none of which i could ever properly become fluent in (to the dismay of my grandmothers), and was also socialized into being embarrassed by my cultural background while simultaneously being fiercely protective over it.

the guilt of it still bares its teeth sometimes. but now my identity is no longer so distorted and i can let myself sink into the warmth i used to keep myself distanced from.

maybe you’ll relate to this, maybe you won’t. either way thanks for reading.

take care, talk soon.

-sofi <3

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buy me a coffee! — if you’d like to support in another way! my hope is to write full-time, but unfortunately i’m not a nepo baby and therefore do not have the financial backing to support this dream currently. sending a virtual forehead kiss to anyone who’s able to contribute <3