Where are you from?
by Shreerekha Pillai
A question immigrants are often asked and often annoyed by is the one that starts with the simple, “Where are you from?” It seems benign enough to the average person, but to the person being asked it is an assumption of not belonging, foreignness, of being from elsewhere, as if the person being asked cannot be from right here in Houston, or some other locale in the US. I’ve wanted a quick glib response, something cheeky a garden variety desi comedian might come up with, but instead, for me, what is an authentic response from the core of my being can and will be a poem. Thank you to our SAYHU community for giving me a place to speak, share, learn and most importantly, belong.
The poet with her mother, Santha, and daughter, Sumana.
I am from a mother whose mother raised a girl child alone in the dawn
Of pre-independence India on the diet of rice congee and free books,
A woman I call the Goddess of Infinite Melancholy and Compassion
Who knew enough of patriarchy to vow suicide if asked to re-enter it
In marital bliss. Like the monkey on the crocodile’s back
In that old Panchatantra story, she skips over the misogyny of
Ritual and tradition to eat mangoes alone on the tree back home.
Migrants from birth, my family is from villages that remember a place
No longer on maps, borders that cast kith and kin to the other side,
From people who find home in 500 year old poems, from dancers
Who tell epics in gestures delivered at dusk by temple lights.
Our land, Kerala, defined by coconuts, and the sea, is brushed
Aside now by cash crops, rubber farms, cashew factories: a land
Once dotted with algae covered ponds veiled by old Banyans
Is now pockmarked by tar roads, roadside toddy shacks,
Stores selling gold and skin whitening cosmetics to turn us,
Beyond what we can afford or desire, into ideals of ashen whiteness.
I am from a home that deifies my very existence: goddess
By birth marked by monthly cycles that cast me outside the purity
Of home, temple, and sacred rituals.
I am from ‘Education is the key to our success’ and ‘What you do models
For others in the family how to be good’ and ‘All these years in America
And you are still so black’, ‘No one will marry a girl so ugly so yes, education
Is the key to your success’, a circular mantra that begins and ends
In education. We are an ‘educated’ people.
I am from Kathakali dancing dolls, fragile figurines in papier-mâché,
Black Atlas bicycles on which rode entire families of four or more, Adoor’s
Film, Elippathayam, in which the man goes crazy just sitting still caught as if in
A mouse trap as his sisters bustle about keeping it all together, laboring
And loving as women do without credit, in anonymity, through time.
I AM ALSO From Arundhati Roy’s seditious writings, Kamala Das’s story,
Anticolonial poetry, decolonizing theory, feminist revolutions,
A brown/black woman who is proud to be/long.
Shreerekha Pillai is a faculty in humanities at University of Houston-Clear Lake, and teaches UHCL students both in the free world and the prison. She has participated in the SAYHU cohorts from the first year itself by speaking on the prison teaching program and anti-blackness in the South Asian community, and plans on remaining a steadfast member of the SAYHU community.