Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 4

Our mothers carved veins into the sea
with reinvented air, wrists scarred in rows and rings

octopi and coral—legs scissoring against the sun,

the space between their thighs profound as trenches.

Arirang, our mothers say patriotically, and cities
bloom from our spines, rooting us to cartographies

We are the pearl divers’ daughters,
our sisters’ skirts are hemmed in coral

Change meant leaving one’s memories, one’s sins, one’s ambivalent pleasures, the room where one was born.

A southern child’s basic lessons were woven of such dissonant strands as these; sometimes the threads tangled into a terrifying mess; sometimes archaic, startling designs would appear in the weaving; sometimes a design was left broken while another was completed with minute care.

A southern child’s basic lessons were woven of such dissonant strands as these; sometimes the threads tangled into a terrifying mess; sometimes archaic, startling designs would appear in the weaving; sometimes a design was left broken while another was completed with minute care.

The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that “all men are brothers,” trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male.

We learned the intricate system of taboos, of renunciations and compensations, of manners, voice modulations, words, feelings, along with our prayers, our toilet habits, and our games.

Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British.

With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels.

At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass.

And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.