a literary playground

By: Namitha Rathinappillai

I met my ex-boyfriend in a coffee shop.

Both colonized and colonizer,

he is half Sri Lankan and half White.

He introduces himself:

says his name is 

unexpected

It is honey that I am spoon fed 

instead of licking off my fingertips,

It is suburban house stacked nice and neat;

he will get the job he applies for.

His name is the white tablecloth over the wooden table that we sit at:

an ivory veil concealing the brown bark beneath it.

His name is

ashamed;

His name is 

melanin trapped in an ivory tower;

His name is the sound of my jaw clanking against the silverware when I pretend to 

not be surprised 

when he tells me he is Sri Lankan, too.

I come to find out that his name sounds a lot 

like the silence he speaks when I am attacked for my brownness.

I swallow my pride and instead, 

we begin our feast.

We tuck white napkins beneath lips licked

and above entitled white dinner plates,

only to be served by brown hands

who spill the piping hot tea 

that brown has never had a seat at the table.

He is the coat he wears to the date:

taking it off when it is convenient to do so 

and using other women of colour as a coat rack.

Using other women over colour as a doormat,

wiping off his shoes

on our backs,

why am I not surprised 

that you want no trace of brown to be seen?

This body is a home 

that you have no business being in,

but I should have known that colonizer blood runs through your body.

So as you can imagine,

I heard my ancestors’ counsel,

their voices vaulting off my tip of my tongue

before being smothered by his lips

as I kissed him for the first time.

This is the story of epigenetics:

the notion that some trauma is so deep,

that it is passed down for generations.

DNA strands twisted 

like my mother’s braids

into white ribbons during primary school,

There is something so painfully ironic about her school uniform 

being all white 

in a sea of brown faces.

This is the story of epigenetics:

that when I went to a yoga class taught by a white woman,

My mother laughingly scolded me 

and I swear, I heard an army of ancestral agreement behind her.

“How do you have white women teach you what we created?”

This knowledge is as deep and dark as the blood that runs through my body,

Is it true that the blacker the berry,

the sweeter the injustice when he licks the juice off his lips 

after we kiss?

I walk past the coffeeshop three years later 

and it has been renovated and it is unrecognizable.

The seats have switched sides

and I can barely conjure the image of the two of us sitting inside,

I walk past the coffeeshop and it has been renovated.

So have I.

About The Artist:

Namitha Rathinappillai (she/they) is a Tamil-Canadian spoken word poet, artist, and writer who has entered the poetry community in 2017. She has been involved with Urban Legends Poetry Collective (ULPC) ever since her engagement with the Ottawa arts community, and made ULPC history as the first female and youngest director.  She is a two-time Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW) team member with Urban Legends Poetry Collective, and she published her first chapbook titled ‘Dirty Laundry’ with Battleaxe Press in November of 2018. She has been involved as a performer and a workshop facilitator within the Ottawa community at spaces such as Urban Legends, Tell ‘em Girl, Youth Ottawa, the Artistic Mentorship Program, Carleton Art Collective, The Fembassy, Youth Services Bureau, and more. Learn more about Namitha at www.namitharathinappillai.com/.