Now that I’ve “survived” (but barely thrived in) graduate school, I found this poem I wrote the first week at McGill University on September 14, 2009 in response to Chickasaw educational activist and elder Eber Hampton’s essay, “Memory Comes Before Knowledge.” I was struck by the following quotation: “The mutilation of human beings in graduate school is a continuation of the mutilation that starts in kindergarten.”
Why am I here? ¿Por qué estoy aquí? Un poema de una Chicana perdida
I deserve to be here
Child of blue-collar laborers,
Pink-collar secretaries
Failed revolutionaries
In retreat
First in my family
To access, trespass
Academic borderlands
Trip-wire fences unexpected
Concealed by pristine lawns
Illegal entry
Tripped on uneven cobbled stones
Plastered over indigenous peoples’ sacred
Cemeteries, ceremonies lost
Underneath “pure” snow
Shoveled by the same people
Mi familia
Haitian Caribbean “security” guards standing
Waiting for rain, conducting bicycle traffic
Guarding buried treasures underneath the Earth
My new found privilege barricading me, marking me
As separate than, invisible to both camps
An intruder, a phony, a petty thief
I can step on scrubbed passageways fragrant with
Bleach
On my way to class to learn to forget
Now I climb ladders
I proceed laboriously
Will I fall?
The burden is heavy
Sweat blinds my vision
Seeps into my parched mouth already
Silenced by a baleful of white cotton
Mutilated
