Amanda Joshua
I'm tired of telling people about myself on Hinge dates
The world takes things away from you as you get older. The fresh excitement of driving by yourself. Just to the shops, just to the shops, like you used to beg your mum. I’m tired of telling people about myself on Hinge dates. I’m tired of listing things I’ve done, things I hope to do. I don’t want to tell the story of when I was 4 and I was too scared to walk down the hallway to the bathroom so I pissed in a cup and the next morning my dad thought it was apple juice and he took a sip. Worst of all, I’m tired of looking for the small wonderful things about people. Not that they’re not there. All people have worlds inside them. But I’m tired of looking and I’m tired of finding. Once I’ve seen it, I won’t forget. It will stay lodged halfway down my throat forever, while the people themselves have this god-unfortunate habit of leaving. I don’t like calling my grandma. Every conversation we have now is garbled and lost to the lag. ‘I was looking at the cards you wrote me when you were a child,’ she tells me. You said in one of them, ‘Grandma is perfect but she doesn’t wear earrings’. I try to tell her I’m directing the Auckland Law Revue and she asks me to repeat this three times before we both give up. I don’t bother trying to work out if it’s because she can’t hear me or understand me or simply because there’s no equivalent for a dumb theatre-slash-comedy-show put on by law students in Tirunelveli. She tells me about my cousin’s new baby and I cry softly so she won’t hear. I think about how much of my life she knows nothing about, the men and women I’ve hurt, the ones who broke me and carried along their way and I tell her that work is good, thank you and yes I’m enjoying the courses I enrolled in this semester. I ask about grandpa and she hesitates before telling me that she supposes they’re just getting old and that they’re feeling all the things that come holding its hand. She’s getting old and I’m getting old-er and neither of us got to grow into our newfound age with each other. She tells me grandpa isn’t reading much anymore which I take to mean: he’s getting worse. I tell her I’m going to visit soon but I know as I’m saying it I have exams and a manager who won’t let me take the time off work and I couldn’t afford the plane ticket anyway and I tell her I have to go start my Contract assignment now. I tell her I love her though I know she won’t say it back. It’s not the Brown way. I think about how the White way is to move your grandparents into nursing homes and I think about how we’re no different because we’ve packed our things and moved across the world and I’m not there to change her pillowcases when her tired legs won’t make it up the staircase to get new ones. She’s never seen any of my published poetry. She doesn’t know how to work the links I send her on WhatsApp. I hang up before I can blurt something stupid like I wish I could hold the painfully soft end of her thinning braid and tell her twenty things that happened in my day because she already knows what happened to me yesterday. As you get older every day feels like you’re walking through your old primary school and you’re wondering when did I get so big and when did everything get so small and why won’t the swings hold me anymore? Takeaways aren’t good no matter how hot or inviting they smell. What is it you’re missing? What are you trying to taste again? I don’t start my Contract paper like I told her I would. I sit on the floor and open the book my English-professor-of-a-grandfather gave me when I told him: I’m going to get an English degree too. The inside of its cover says: to my granddaughter, your love for words will give you worlds.
goodlittlebrowngirlsong.mp4
Being brown in white world means
make your terms young
Decide how much you are okay laughing at yourself
Being brown in white world means seeing white
acting white hearing white till one day
you pass by a mirror
feel surprised to see brown-skinned-woman gaze back
Being brown in white world means one day in the shower you pictured you were
pretty white girl everyone in year 8 thought was beautiful and it was
the best shower you ever took
Being brown in white world means the teacher will call you by name
of the only other brown girl in class
at lunchtime neither you or your friends will know exactly
why it was so awful
but you will keep crying and saying ‘we’re different shades of brown entirely’
You have come to be scared brown is only thing defining you
Use being brown in white world to buy
what little you can afford
Start waltzing by teachers out backgate, doe-eyed-smiling
They; unblinking, unassuming
good little brown girls would ever skip classes
Good little immigrants worked so hard to put them in
Being brown in white world means one day wake up
With realisation (horrible, freeing)
You don’t want to be white you just want to be
treated the way white is treated
Being brown in white world means you are both
crisis and relief (you have no other choice)
Being brown in white world means path you walk is wonky
those you host in your private space
glimpse your experience, but
They never feel it fully, it’s lonely
Brown-value-living, trying to build community
when white-instagram-advice whines incessantly
‘put yourself first, first, first’
Am I a madwoman or do I live in a madhouse?
Being brown in white world my vulnerability
feels natural and permissible to me
let me be spiced and strong like mum’s saagwala
If that is too spiced and strong for your tastes, clamp your mouth
Shut, take yourself elsewhere
Won’t add butter and cream to myself
to fit menu at a restaurant for cowards
Amanda Joshua is an English Lit & Law student/staff writer at Craccum with work published in Starling, Takahē, Tarot, Craccum, foam:e, London Grip, Blackmail Press, Kate, Turbine|Kapohau, Sweet Mammalian, The Friday Poem and Poetry New Zealand. She likes long walks on the beach, reading, and reading whilst taking long walks on the beach.