Rhina P. Espaillat
“Home is the place where...”
No, more than “where they have to take you in,”
and no, not undeserved, nor where you go
because there’s nowhere else. Where you begin,
of course, but also where you end. And no,
not where your dead are buried, any more
than where they are who are not anywhere
yet, but whose names and faces you explore —
invent — inscribe in manuscripts of air.
The land that, like my mother, fed me first
and taught me the “true names” of everything;
this other, at whose breast I never nursed
but learned, instead, a second way to sing;
both, both are home — and where those call me from
who are already mine, though still to come.
רנא
My name, in Hebrew, with a cast of three,
all facing left: one waves and moves on, striding;
the second — upright, as if gravity
nailed down that big flat foot to old abiding
ground — may move, but slowly; and the last,
leaning to look ahead, is neither still
nor moving, but alert, as if to cast
cold vision forward before chance or will
can lure on or compel. Their names are Resh,
Nun, Aleph — R, N, A — which, although terse
because one vowel’s missing, somehow mesh
to the way Hebrew spells me, in reverse.
The friend (poet and artist, both) who sent
me this can read the script, and knows the sound
conveys no plot and harbors no intent,
but I enjoy the joke her eye has found,
which tells a truth by accident, sheds light
that one-eyed reason calls the poet’s sin.
Of course, I read it wrong, from left to right:
how does it say I end, and how begin?
Choices
We gave my father what he wanted:
a grave in soil his love had haunted
because it held his elders’ bones.
He sleeps at peace beneath worn stones.
My mother straddled a thin line.
That side was his, and this side mine:
the dead to whom his heart was true,
the young whose names she barely knew.
Here in my house, whose sunny rooms
are nothing like ancestral tombs,
I gave my mother what she chose:
Her ashes in their urn repose
where they are seldom left alone.
Three generations past her own
disturb her sleep with games and toys.
I like to think she hears the noise.
Life in the Plural
Here go three very personal responses to the theme of expatriation, and more specifically the meaning of “home” and the nature of identity. That, in my case, is multiple: I arrived in New York City in 1939 from the Dominican Republic as the child of political exiles, and grew up in the city’s public schools with the children of immigrants from everywhere, and later, European children fleeing World War II and trailing their languages, their customs and their misfortunes. My early years in this country taught me how much we resemble each other and how much we owe each other.
My years as a teacher in the same New York City system reinforced the lesson: my students included teens from Asia, Africa, Latin America and every corner of Europe. The teaching experience added many layers to my identity, which I think of as a growing collection of expanding loyalties, as well as the individual memories of who we are and have been.
I think it’s a mistake to force individuals to choose between identity X or Y, whether the choice is demanded by the surrounding society or by group X or group Y. Such a choice presupposes the possibility of “purity,” although experience suggests that purity — ethnic, racial, emotional, ideological — is all but impossible. Those of us who come from the Caribbean, for example, know ourselves to be the product of the many peoples who have crisscrossed the area in search of wealth, opportunity, adventure, or freedom from persecution, those taken there against their will as slaves, and the various indigenous populations. The little boxes in printed forms that ask us to classify ourselves in terms of specific categories are meaningless to us, as our answers, in order to be truthful, in most cases would have to be “More or less.”
That kind of imprecision is sometimes perceived as a disadvantage, as if impurity made us somehow less than those who can define themselves narrowly. But I think it makes us more, because it enlarges the circle of those with whom we acknowledge ties. The experience of growing up as a mixed, hard-to-define, deracinated person forced to reconstitute the missing community of “home” is painful, to a degree, but it’s also enriching, in that it breaks down the thick skin between ourselves and others — if we let it. If we also happen to be writers, we have an opportunity to speak to — and through — that experience as citizens of something larger and more complex than both the home we lost and its replacement.
Rhina P. Espaillat has published three chapbooks and seven full-length books, most recently El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory: Cuentos/Short Stories, a bilingual collection of her narrative prose.
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