YVANNA VIEN TICA
Postcolonial Secrets
When I tell my mother I want to be white
she gives me papaya soap & tells me to wash
my face with it twice daily. When I ask for my hair
bleached like the pretty white girls all the boys google after,
she takes me to Party City and their back
shelves of costume wigs. The manager gives her
an odd look because the day was nearer
to Christmas than to Halloween. I told her then
that I changed my mind and wanted
to go home, aware of what a sight we must
have imprinted into the workers of the store:
a weary brown woman shaking a Princess Peach outfit
woven with plastic blond hair at her
brown daughter. I didn’t bother asking
my mother for a new tongue either, one washed
and dry-cleaned of the gritty, bitter taste of papaya
soap. Some mornings, I try to forget the mountains
I’d wake up to before moving to America, but their darkness
still haunts me. It has been almost
seventy-five years since the Americans left
the vestiges of post-war trauma in the Philippines, and yet I keep
trying to forget the models lining the supermarket aisles,
stuck to the most inconvenient places like the corner
of a pasta box or a deodorant’s lithe curve, how large their eyes,
how thick and clean their hair
with blonde highlights, unlike sooty-looking
black hair under the sun.
A white girl once told me how beautiful
my spray tan was, and I didn’t bother
correcting her or myself for being disastrously happy
at our conspiratory ignorance.
When I was a child, my mother always warned me
not to scrape my knees against the tile floor
or else they’d get so dark no man could love me.
Now, dark-kneed, I laugh
or at least try to. Fake it
‘till you make it pure and pearl-like
in your womanly prowess. How we mutilate ourselves
and to what end. Some days, the old habits possess me
and force me into the bathroom, papaya soap in hand, in my mouth, a prayer
for it to work a miracle more
in my saliva than it ever did on my skin.
Poem in which I explain what the world is like without my hearing aids
The world spins a little
different when it’s quiet—sunlight heaves
into its younger self,
disrobing lifetimes the way a bird jumps to escape
its own kin. At this point,
birdsong is nothing but a word I imagine hearing
through the news reports
telling viewers to seek peace at all costs.
Everything is accentuated
by sorghumed blood rushing lazily
into the ears like a whisper,
and for once, my fists loosen their clasped mouths
shaped like hunger. Even if
a war starts over my head, I will hear nothing but the faint
wisps of smoke. Well-meaning
people always note how empty I must feel when deaf
and clouded over, ears just
glasses hung by mist. Isn’t silence so demanding, waiting for you
to reveal yourself as
a casualty of survival to the world, they explain. Outside,
I imagine the birds still
singing for their lost children, the guns still readying
for another sharp seizure
of laughter. Listen, there are some sounds better left
adrift for a moment, for the sun
to claim as it grazes the horizon, searching,
and leaves for home.
Previously published in Up the Staircase Quarterly
Yvanna Vien Tica is a hearing-impaired Filipino writer who grew up in Manila and in a suburb near Chicago. She has been recognized by The Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, The Kenyon Review, The Young Playwrights Festival, Princeton University’s Creative Writing Department, and The Poetry Society UK. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EX/POST Magazine, DIALOGIST, Hobart, and Shenandoah, among others. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day. She tweets @yvannavien.