Concentration

Maia Joy

Teacher asks who in the class
has an older sibling who has
taken their course before. Teacher’s eyes
scours the class for evidence,
trying to pick out the familiar turn of a smile,
or the crook of a neck at just the same angle
as some other child whose file of forgotten papers
makes up yet another headstone in the
cabinet graveyard under their desk.

Teacher’s gaze seeps through my skin,
penetrating the boundary that a book
and a bathroom pass can normally uphold;
teacher’s eyes lock dead-set on mine
with a bionic knowing that screams,
“I’ve done this before.” Teacher sees
the hook of my jaw that curves just the same way,
the honey-brown pigment that tints my irises
just the same shade, the wide-set, up-turnt nose
that settles too shallow to cast shadows
when the lights go out, just the same shape.

Teacher knows.

Teacher asks me if I have a brother.
Teacher asks me if my brother or I
are adopted. Teacher asks me if my dad
is away on business again. Teacher asks
what country we’re really from— and,
at the end of the day, teacher asks if the woman
frantically waving at me in the car pickup line
is my mother or the nanny.

Teacher pairs up students with fake husbands and wives
on a school field trip and pairs me with the only other
person of color in our class, not caring that
I have never once expressed interest in boys
at the ripe age of 9, but would do anything to hold hands
with the girl from table group 3 with the green sneakers
and knows how to braid her own hair from behind. Teacher
assigns us to books group and explains the n-word
by saying it aloud herself, dripping beads of liquid bigotry
off the tip of her tongue, sizzling with hatred when it
strikes the floor, evaporating into the air and spilling
across what is perhaps the most aryan collection of children
ever compiled into a single classroom. Teacher
tells us minutes later that gas expands to fill
whatever container it enters; teacher demonstrates by
instructing the molecules of the hot air that she expelled
straight out of her bright-white, bleached-teeth mouth
to find any pore, any slice, any wound they can, and
flood until they reach a state of unsustainable
hypertonic concentration of partisanship within us,

so much so that ten years later,
you can hear her words echoing in their own throats
so loud that, if you weren’t paying attention,
you might be able to make out the teacher’s teeth
tucking themselves into a neat grin upon the discovery
that the brown children in town can speak.

On ‘ Concentration’

As a biracial child in a hometown with an 85% white population, I learned early on what it meant to be “othered” in my classrooms. I questioned my identity frequently in my adolescence; in early adulthood, I realised that my experiences with race are uniquely my own, and each individual (including my own family) walks in different shoes. This piece, “Concentration,” originated from a project I compiled focusing on race in my privileged, predominantly white K-12 education, and how myself, as well as other mixed and POC students, have faced similar adversity and discrimination at such a young age.

Poetry-2jfa4 February 2021Comment