By Hannah Elizabeth Bowling
no sabo kid
I know I do not belong.
It’s obvious from the name,
the accent,
the apologetic “white” tacked onto “Latina”
that even I am aware of my inheritance,
Brown skin, white tongue.
I am that woman
that your mother warned you about,
a Latina whose brown skin is far too white.
She will take from you, she tells you,
the way white women do,
and she will leave you with nothing that is your own.
Te estás poniendo negra
has never been said to me;
nunca fuiste morena
is what I see reflected in
my same brown eyes
living in your face.
I am a no sabo kid
whose Spanish does not roll off the tongue.
My white father passed his white tongue down to me,
a tongue chained so tightly to my mouth
that my words do not roll
but plop,
like frijoles cudos (frijoles crudos? O solamente frijoles?)
from between my teeth.
I am a Latina
for whom Spanish was never meant.
in a world where skin color
and language mark you,
quien soy, una niña, no sabo.
Of course, we are polite about it all.
So fucking polite
In the way that only academics can be.
English is a language that takes, and takes and takes,
We politely agree under fluorescent white light,
Seated in plastic chairs that pinch the ass
And deaden the legs.
Decolonize English. Reconnect with yourself. Explore your mother tongue.
What if I do not have my mother’s tongue?
What if my mother’s tongue was ripped from her mouth,
bloody,
raw,
by her father.
Habla Inglés, niña.
El mundo es peligroso
para una chica morena como tú.
What if all I have is my father’s tongue
in my mother’s brown skin,
with white teeth that
cannot hold in these small, round beans?
yo no sabo.
yo no sabo.
yo no sabo.
Hannah Elizabeth Bowling is an alumna of Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas and Texas A&M University in College Station. Her dissertation examines African diasporic and continental adaptations of Shakespeare as articulations of the Black experience. By using historical, cultural, performance, and textual methods to read novels, films, and drama, her work elucidates how Black storytelling serves as community-building, -sustaining, and – withholding praxis. “No sabo kid” represents her first major creative publication. Her creative work wrestles with community formation and identity, particularly in her own context as a white Latina academic working in a predominantly white field on ethnic/racial studies. Her days are spent teaching literature and composition courses, and her nights with her husband and two small dogs as companions.