A memory of difference

This semester I’ve grappled with W.E.B. Du Bois’ harrowing works, and a wealth of Black Radical scholarship that has followed in his footsteps. I have also spent time getting more in touch with my Puerto Rican roots, discovering my mother’s story, her mother’s story, and her mother’s mothers. This piece is a part of a creative exercise to grapple with that knowledge and truly encounter myself, and others.

Me in Puerto Rico with my great aunt, Julia, and grandmother, Pura

A memory of difference.

You.

Five years ago, almost to the day, you left the United States. You remember this day vividly. Tears and embraces at JFK. Sweaty palms tracing TSA-long lifelines. Champagne and a lie-flat bed. First-class luxuries borrowed on one-percent lifestyles. You arrived in London on a sleepy Easter Monday, sliding past immigration officers with ease. You silently thanked the consulate for fast-tracking a work visa. You thumbed its bumpy canvas that took up a whole page in your second passport. That passport paid for by the very company shipping you and your expertise from one metropole to another. Expertise. What wonders a job at a multinational corporation and an Ivy League degree do to dress up six years’ experience into “expertise.” 

No, you arrived in the United Kingdom as no expert, but as a twenty-eight-year-old wise to playing the system in front of you, yet naïve to its farther-reaching machinations. Funny, isn’t it, though? That the home to empire and Thatcherism – the very schemes that brought you across the Atlantic only this time not below it but above it – that this land whose language stands so familiar yet strangely accented, this land would begin your undoing. As if it only took tilting the thing nearest you a few degrees to see properly its strangeness. 

That thing nearest you? It was you.

Five years ago, you didn’t know what agency could mean, if it didn’t mean that place where you worked to contour human need into consumer desire. You didn’t realize intersectional could refer to identities and people, not just Venn diagrams on a PowerPoint. You didn’t understand that classism, racism, sexism, and every other -ism could be plotted on an experience map built out the real-life stories of each of your colleagues, and that you might find yourself as victim and victimizer in different stories.

Then a thing happened. You went to church. Though you didn’t know why, really, you went to these awkward services with these unusual people, you went. You tried the old one, the young one, the nearby one. You tried until you found one that was familiar enough to hide its strangeness, but that made all the difference. And its difference changed you. You became the difference that changed your family because you were strange enough to hide your familiarity.