Kimberly Coffman
TCCS ’20
Stream of consciousness prose:
Sometimes I am tired. I wonder if anyone else ever feels like a nomad in their own body. Stopping at a space that feels incomplete, dilapidated. Is this the journey or the destination? My mother gave birth to the struggles of her people’s diaspora through the intergenerational trauma that was inescapable for my brothers and sisters and I. Where is home? Is home the California chaparral – hot, arid, frustrating, yelling, crying? It wasn’t the California coast – cool, distant, dreamy, aloof. Apparently, “home is where the heart is.” But how many times have I removed my heart to make a home for a tall, white man’s emotional labor? Colonization.
Sometimes I am tired. My people are crying. My people are hungry. My people are poor. My people are politicized. My people are vulnerable. My people are paternalized. My people are researched. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out who my people are. Am I that much of an anomaly? I am the product of anomaly. M I S C E G E N A T I O N. Tragic and confused, and, of course, undesirable but so desired. I’m so exotic. I lick my lips with the tongue that will shape words that taze you, they run through your body like electricity and you cannot deny them because you don’t want to. I don’t play hard to get I am hard to get, and when you think you’ve gotten me, you haven’t.
But I am tired. Sometimes I feel alone, and sometimes I am not okay. I don’t know where I belong. My mother speaks of home as a place where she used to eat fried grasshoppers stuffed with peanuts and smell the tobacco from her father’s pipe. But she never describes it as the California chaparral. “Forced migration.” Explain to me how we can take trauma that is so acerbic it tastes of metal in your mouth and then turn it into the word “diaspora.” A word that sounds like a whisper, so innocuous. Explain to me what isn’t an imagined home, because that is the only home I know and the only home that my mother, my home, knows.
Sometmes I am tired. But I still can’t find a home where I can rest.
