Spoken in Slams

On 16th November 2024, I performed, for the first time, my poems in front of an audience. It was a nerve-racking experience but I knew it was something I had to do for myself. Both these poems were written about two years ago. In that time I submitted other poems from the collection these two come from, but never sent On My Own Since 2009 and I Am anywhere to be considered for publication. I knew they needed to be heard, not read. 

On My Own Since 2009

It’s 2009, I’m fat and my mummy still has reign over how I dress, do my hair. I am naïve, born a blank page. Easy to blemish. And the earliest ones leave the greatest impression. Brown-bodied, I stand out. Brown raised, I act so. Oil in my hair, it’s split into two, braided tightly. Roti rolls with aloo ki sabji wrapped in aluminium foil sit next to new books blessed by Saraswati Ma and my ma; sindoor on her right ring finger make swastikas on first pages of new notebooks and on my wrist, tied are saffron, amber and maroon threads.

It stains. All of it.

My silence is taken for compliance. A little brown girl, slightly overweight, at moments her brain attempts to compensate for she cannot communicate nor fully understand the language in which they tease and ridicule.

It’s the language in which I write and speak today.

Devanagari, oily red smudges and the scent of tadka. I erase it, with all the might of a nine-year-old, but the र etched and creased my page, the oil made it opaque and heavy-handed imprints stood their ground so I dowsed it all in correction fluid. Its smell rendered me light-headed; but the sight and scent of white could make me a companion, I could become familiar.

Instead they smeared the blank slate with charcoal, the colour of hate. Ripped off the threads on my wrist and used it to measure my waist. I would go home and mummy would scold, not knowing what I had endured. 

And so, with my mutilated page, since the age of nine, I’ve been all alone.

I AM

I am hairy-legged, spice-eating, bad at math—

which might be disappointing, but...

I am multi-language speaking, bright shiny clothes wearing, after-school tuition going, more than just male loving—

which could get me disowned, but...

I am colonised country born, Holi/Diwali celebrating, oldest daughter in brown family, generational trauma ridding—

which is okay, I’m capable...

I am model minority, relatable but unique, token brown friend, bondable over shared histories yet alone when in need, too emotional for your ease, not desi enough to understand slang, too brown they tell me to go back to my land

 I am no one you’ll ever think me to be...

I am trapped inside my own head, bound by traditions and culture, the same that give me reason and structure, I am migrant child with feet for sake of stability, a nowhere home and a lack of linear identity.

I am

me.

Dream Girl and the HE-brain

I’ve been having dreams about this girl. No, not in that way. I meet her, and we talk. I tell her how I’ve been talking about her, singing her praises—all while the knot of not hating, not being able to hate her, tightens in me. I aspire to be like her. I never aspire to be like anyone; I just start despising them. I grow angry and resentful that someone has it better than me.

When I was younger, even up until a couple of years ago, I truly did believe I was destined for greatness or something. I just felt special. It was probably something undiagnosed or delusional, but I just knew I’d ‘make it.’ Not anymore though—that feeling has died out. Not that the mental illness has died out; it’s just been replaced, suppressed, overtaken by something worse, something parasitic.

But wanting to be her—to be someone else—out of admiration has been grounding. The absence of my hatred must mean I’m not that bad. Not that bad of a feminist. Not that bad of a team player, bad sport, bad person. Just bad.

Is that enough? Should I let it be enough? Should I be satisfied with the sufficiency of this enough? Cue Naomi Wolf, holding the hourglass pictured on the front cover of The Beauty Myth. The sand trickles down. "You haven’t picked me up in years. You know you need to, before you become a cautionary stat. You know I spoke about women like you—jealous, competitive women overtaken by the patriarchy. Women who will never be happy, nor free." I know, Naomi, but it’s hard to get rid of old habits, I’d reply. I wonder if she’d look at me with disgust then. A fat, lazy piece of shit who can’t even do this much—for women! For humanity! For herself! (Tbh, I’d probably assume it was because I'm brown. See: I won’t kill anymore.)

But it’s true. Old habits die hard: forgetting to floss, gossiping, overeating. I know that much. I wonder if she, the Dream Girl, has vices, things she knows aren’t good for her but can’t stop. Things she knows will inevitably cause her downfall. Or maybe she exercises her free will. Where does that come from though?

I used to have this so-called free will. But nowadays, I’m just my brain. I feel HE can only be addressed with such pronouns when speaking of HIM. HE is dominant, off-putting, egotistical. Unlike the she-brain, which wanted to believe, prayed for tranquillity, and was drenched in the indisputability of greatness and success, this current HE-brain is gluttonous and dream-shattering. I’ve had pretty good male role models in my life, so I don’t know how HE made his way here, infiltrating every aspect like an abusive partner. He crept up on me like narcissistic men creep up on vulnerable women. There may be a remedy, an evaluation, or an eviction process for the HE-brain within the pages of Tolle’s work. But HE knows that’d be detrimental to his survival.

Does Dream Girl feel anything comparable to this? I can only imagine she does, but in a much more nuanced manner. It would be informed and valid. It would have good reason and cause. It would be humanitarian, deep, and Pinterest-y. Some girls get sad and become Sylvia Plath; I get depressed and end up fat. How is that fair? It can only be self-error induced. What’s the point of blaming it on trauma, PTSD, class, colonisation, or some diagnosis? In the end, when I submit my piece, all that matters is if I did something with all that sadness—something monumental, intersectional, and all-encompassing in a subtle, incomparable, non-replicable way is what I need to achieve. Instead, I ignore the incoming call from my friend’s mum from the hospital, asking me if I want to talk to her clinically-dead-for-15-minutes-and-now-recovering-but-hasn’t-been-the-same (no shit) daughter.

In the end, when someone on the other side is sitting and reading this piece, deciding whether: 1.) My choice of words is distinct and impactful; 2.) The order in which I’ve arranged those distinctive and impactful words is distinctive and impactful in and of itself; and 3.) No one else has arranged their distinctive-er and impactful-er words in a more distinctive and impactful way—it won't matter whether I’m in pain or suffering. I can still write about it, so it must not have been that bad. Art only takes on value when the cause of it results in death, marking the end of a hypothetical recovery. In death, we (and you) strive to find reason and meaning.

Exhaustingly yet unsurprisingly, the egotism, selfishness, and self-serving lens of the HE-brain have taken over again. Above, we can witness the infestation of HE-ness (sounds similar to heinous). The HE that, in a world of tragedy, focuses on greatness for the self and the sustenance of personal dreams. It’s disgusting, honestly. Of course, Dream Girl deserves my dream life because Dream Girl cares about life. Plath cared about life, right? Until she didn’t. But that’s when we started caring.

See, I just don’t get it. I have all the components, all the right pieces, to construct and become and enjoy the embrace of my HE-brain aspiration puzzle. The pieces just don’t seem to fit together, though. Their edges have been sanded down, manhandled, manipulating the ease with which they would otherwise fall into place.

I can see it as a product of lacking the she-brain touch. The lack of she-brain sensitivity, which made Plath stuff towels and cloth in the gaps between the doors and floors of her kitchen before she placed her head in the oven. The she-brain gentleness of allowing myself to believe in good. The she-brain generosity of Dream Girl.

Imagine if this whole thing was simply just gay panic… a do I want to be her or do I want to be with her dilemma. It’s probably in the making, up there. My she-brain puts HIM to what never felt like work to her.

I won't kill anymore

It’s 4:56 p.m. My partner and I have just completed a roughly four-hour work session at the local library, which, illogically to me, only opens from 1 to 5 on Mondays. We walk out the door minutes before closing, and the librarian, an androgynous but well-fitting Brunswick resident, in a paperboy cap, nods their head at us slightly as we squeeze past.

Across the road, we wait for our tram. My bag is taken out of my hand, and kisses are placed on my cheeks—the warmth and kindness of my lover never fail to sweep me off my feet, nor induce anxiety when in a public setting. I try to enjoy the love and admiration, which I still cannot fully accept, when the street lights turn red, cars halt, and I catch the eyes of two girls in the backseat of a silver Camry.

No older than 16, I think to myself as I stare back at them, deciphering their gazes. Were they looking so intently out of envy? Admiration? Desire? The way I had, just eight months ago? While waiting for a friend under the clocks at Flinders Street Station, watching lovers meet with warm embraces; while on the tram home, sitting across from those hand in hand; while standing in line at a restaurant, annoyed and jealous that the two in front of me were so involved in one another they didn't realize it was their turn to order... I wanted to believe so—that I could get what others wanted.

But there is a knot in my stomach. I glance away, hoping they’ll do the same, but I look back up and now their faces are contorted. They bulge their eyes out, scrunch their noses, and push their ears forward; they maintain their eyes on us. On me.

I nudge my partner, gesturing towards him, the scene he clearly hasn't noticed, amidst admiring me. Confused and a bit taken aback, unsure how to respond, we break into laughter. Teeth and all, on display. I make a point of having interpreted the girls’ mockery as stupidity and childish play, but I do not make eye contact again. I hope they can see I’m unaffected. That their measly adolescent immaturity hasn't ignited a rage so searing in me, it burnt away the lid on years of pent-up self-hatred- that pleading ignorance has somehow made them feel ashamed for acting so stupidly, as they sense my bliss.

The tram creeps in, slowly inching towards us behind the piled cars in the forever crimson glow. We walk towards it.

*

A week later, I'm still at that tram stop. My feet too heavy to walk towards the tram, the sides of my mouth pulled and taped towards my ears, perpetually smiling, perpetually performing. I feel too ashamed, too humiliated, to be my 24-year-old self when I've acted like a child- I regress back to infancy. I keep replaying the incident in my head. I keep reimagining what I should've done. I keep hating myself for my cowardliness.

Hadn't years of introspection and reflection taught me to stand up for myself? Hadn't those countless waking nights where I'd thought back and realised the pain I had suffered as a brown child in a Eurocentric environment, left me wanting to assert my dignity? Hadn't I learned to not fear white people? Hadn't I become a strong POC, queer, angry feminist who hated and called out white people on their bullshit?

Then why couldn't my gaze hold itself instead of shying away? What was I so afraid of? The thought that if I had been white, it wouldn't have happened, wouldn't leave my head. The same thought that sneaked up on me in my late teenage years as a fool-proof antidote to what I’d suffered for years in South Africa.

If my brownness had been the reason behind the bullying by classmates and teachers all those years (alongside a childish naivety, which kept me from standing up for myself as it did from understanding their hate at that time)- If I thought of myself as no longer naive but am still unable to stand up for myself, or perhaps even misunderstand the root of their hatred- then how far had I really come, or overcome, any of it?

I couldn't help but conclude that I would be okay with being looked at, with being laughed at, with being ridiculed even, if I knew I was on equal footing with those girls. If I were white.

My inherent brownness keeps me caged because the idea of being othered again, and that too because of something I cannot control, never fails to regress me back a good 13-15 years, where I still haven’t fully grasped the languages in which I’m supposed to defend myself, nor ever had the stability or safety to express what I'd experienced.

How do I know what they did, and why, wasn’t an act of racism? How do I know it wasn’t motivated by my brownness and my partner’s Chinese-ness? How do I know it wasn’t because we, non-white people, were happy and in love and in our own world? How do I know I’m on equal footing with them if they’re white in their white environments and I’m brown in their white environments- even if they’re 16 and in a car and seemingly being stupid and childish? And in the greater scheme of things, does it really matter? Wars are being fought, people are being killed, worse things have happened and are happening, so why does this one silly little incident remain etched into my brain?

If I've misread and possibly even othered myself in this situation, the blame still lies on me. Their eyes are still on me. But how am I to believe there is another reason for it, when I was dubbed unworthy of love before puberty, a curse of my brownness and fatness, in a world of pale angels with wispy golden hair? I couldn’t compete, let alone win.

*

On countless nights since the incident, I thought about those girls. I didn't remember their faces; they were simply splotches of paleness. I tried to find solace in the fact that no one ever says white is their favourite colour (sometimes even disregarding it as a colour at all—ruining the fun as it translated to me: white as the ‘normal’ race, or white at the centre of things—extinguishing, just like that, the hope of hidden word-play solace or an inside joke I could find some cheer in).

Faces I'd imagine turning red and blue if they’d known I’d killed before. Many times. The corpses of which lay embedded in the walls and ceilings, mattresses and floorboards in houses across Naarm. Remain buried in playgrounds and stored away in suitcases around Surat, Jaipur, and Hyderabad. Sit at the bottom of the ocean near Johannesburg, in the trunk of the company-provided white Getz. I’d imagine them petrified, unable to meet my eyes as I revealed to them that most of those I’d killed, remain with me. Inside of me. And that they couldn't imagine the burden, the pain of having done so and that it was why I deserved respect, to be their equal.

I’d strategically leave out the part where the victims were myself at different points of my life- I'd had to kill, to fit in, to make palpable. Devouring and digesting any proof of my previously unhighlighted brownness to be on par with their simple white selves.

I'd hope and wish that then they’d see me not as an Other.

*

This pain is one that often feels redundant and pointless to speak about, even among those carrying the same, if not heavier weight. When I show my partner a draft of this piece and discuss my writing, explaining how the incident made me feel, he responds (with slight embarrassment and hesitation), “Yeah, but what does it really matter? What does this do?”

As if keeping it all in is comparable to not doing so. In assuming that our experiences are annoying, or over-felt and over-saturated we do the labour, the injustice of censoring ourselves in a way which then perpetuates these very experiences.

Maybe those girls didn't see my race; perhaps they didn't target our ethnic backgrounds. Maybe their actions weren't fueled by racial hatred but were simply children teasing. However, refraining from expressing my interpretation of the situation—the immediate thought in my head that they hate me because I'm not white—isn't overrated, nor a mark of shame that I need to bury. The associations my brain makes are a fair response learned for self-protection, from circumstances that were racially induced and fueled. It's not like these things don't happen-

Why should it solely be our burden to bear? Why should only our fellow people of colour and therapists hear about it? Why should we feel stupid or whiny about relaying incidents through our colourful lenses—about things that happen constantly and are so widely felt in our day-to-day lives—as a piece for others (white people) to read and reflect on? I refuse to think of it in that way—this version of myself—I refuse to kill off.