Coming home after a long day of being pushed aside in the hallway because I don’t exist, I longed to been seen. I flipped on the tv, searching for a comfort show. I realized then my comfort was not a soft embrace, but a smother. A smother from all the whiteness around me. I was a stain on a feathery pillow. I do not exist in Pretty in Pink. I am the brunt of the joke in 16 Candles. Comfort tv was too comforting, it’s suffocating to the point where my only release has become another form of strangulation.
Coming home after a long day of reading King Lear, I felt hopeless. How many more days do I have to exist in this Eurocentric school that tells my story or eats my story or forgets my story with the rhetoric of “Why do you care?” “We’ll read this story where you are in it, Naomi.” “We told your story through the way we see you, Naomi, because we see you.”
Stop saying you see me when you don’t.
I’ll take back my voice so I can speak.
For a person of color Orientalism is more than a theory, it is our life.
It’s why we don’t come to school.
It’s why we don’t speak in class.
It why we group together, strength in numbers. Maybe a collective whisper will make a sound to be heard.
We struggle to find our voice, to escape from the hands OPRF, riddled with the Anglophile flesh of former students of color, the lost skin of Left Behind kids. Surviving off of forced Orientalism. Shoved down all of our throats.
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