Suspending Disbelief While Brown, Part II
We use ketchup because they laughed. And then they used our salt. And then our salt flecked gold. And then our gold was put in their museum.
Their books get newer. Our books miss pages.
Their mothers pay our mothers who come home too tired to mother.
***
What the anger is like:
You write, it reifies. It clots.
Our misery, it prints.
We commiserate: we pain and seizure.
They laugh. They spectate. They garland. They trophy.
***
What the sadness is like:
Tender word after tender word succumbs before it saves you.
***
What the sadness is like:
You are a sculptor and you cannot move your arms. The marble stares the way desire waits.
Copyright © 2022 by Hossannah Asuncion. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 17, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I’m seven when I first meet Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, and I learn to compel the discomfort away. I’m thirty-five when Adam on Girls says, ‘You look like a Mexican teenager.’ I realized then that racism is insidious even in moments of the mundane. For POC folks, suspending disbelief is different; it’s an ongoing act of pushing past disappointment to get to laughter, enjoyment, entertainment. In how many of these moments have I suspended my instincts to insist that the writer means no harm (even when they harm)? At forty-three, I’m reawakening to the moments I’ve quieted; this time, I’m listening.”
—Hossannah Asuncion
Hossannah Asuncion
Hossannah Asuncion is a Filipino poet and the author of Object Permanence (Magic Helicopter Press, 2016), winner of the Ted Hawkins Innovative Poetry Prize.