On the Futility of Defying Extinction
Always, when my father spoke to me in words I could not understand, my guilt spoke back.
...more
Posts Tagged: heritage
An East African Girl and Her White Troubadours
I was a lonely, dreamy, occasionally silly girl.
...more
How Langston Hughes Inspired #TweetYourThobe
Langston, I am finally at the table, eating with everyone.
...more
Smoke Screen
I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
...more
Death and Rebirth: Armenians in Jerusalem
When I was young, my grandma told me that Armenians are distant descendants of Noah.
...more
Grape Leaves
Comfort and memory and grief commingled in the dish.
...more
Love, Marriage, and the Bicultural Identity: Talking with Huda Al-Marashi
Huda Al-Marashi discusses her new memoir, FIRST COMES MARRIAGE.
...more
The Fraught Business of Identity: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know
All You Can Ever Know insists that the stories we use to understand ourselves should be allowed as much complexity as the truth dictates.
...more
Seeking Terra Firma
To truly know a land is to become it—to embody its storms in your bones, taste its dark soil beneath your nails, know the tangled history of the people who walked before you.
...more
On Making Wishes
It is true that I’m talking to a photo, but I’m not crazy. Neither am I a durochka. Fools are oblivious, at least those from my childhood fairy tales. I, on the other hand, am perfectly aware of the problem.
...more
Mothers of My Diaspora
It paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
...more
TORCH: Lessons From My Grandma on Language and Silence
The sounds I made were pleasant to my ears, but that’s all they were to me. I was too young to understand what culture and heritage meant, too young to understand the reasons behind memorizing ancient poems.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 1
The violence came in and we were not just in danger of being victims of it. We were in danger of being violent ourselves.
...more
Falling into Fear
I knew that just as the country was reverting, so was I. Every face now seemed a potential enemy and these were feelings I had not felt in almost twenty years.
...more
Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: On Documentation
What is it like to be you? he was always asking, in his way, and it seemed a stupid question then. I didn’t know. I could lie better than I could tell the truth. I hadn’t left yet.
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Torres’s Family Portrait
I’m constantly making up stories, and writing histories, even when I’m not putting them into songs.
...more
Michael Derrick Hudson, Before You Steal My Chinese Name
Know that you are trying to steal from a naming ritual and culture that goes back five thousand years.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: White Boy Boricua
The tanner you are, the darker the features, the more people ask, “What are you?” or tell you that you look “exotic,” hoping you’ll be prompted into telling them why your face looks that way.
...more
The Weight of the Future, the Emptiness of the Past
I am reminded of how we know something is there, sometimes, by its absence, how dark matter is said to exist because of so much missing mass.
...moreAn Awesome Resource for Kids and Everybody
The International Children’s Digital Library is providing free access to books, hoping to collect books from all cultures and languages in order to preserve a sense of family heritage and promote free access to information that extends beyond language barriers. It’s an awesome resource. Here is more explanation from their mission statement: “A fundamental principle […]
...more