To be bi anything is a radical notion
But the irony is that the ‘bi’ in binary demands you choose one side
To be bi anything in anything in any other context is to be both
The meaning of biracial is to be both, to be biracial is to be mixed, blended
And ultimately, forced to choose the side assigned
Because to be bi anything is not admissible
My mother tongue
Spills into my dreams
Falling from my lips unstiltingly
But then I wake up
It cracks in my throat and stumbles
The few phrases to which I’ve so jealously clung
My English tongue flailing around the tongue my mother so lovingly imparted
Spoken like a foreigner through my English lips
Yet my English is British in its fluency
But when my eyes droop from tiredness
Its punctuated by my foreignese
My groping tongue trapped between forgetting and remembering
Because the land I grew up cut out my foreignese first tongue
And from the stump grew my English tongue
But the stump remembers the babbling stream of foreignese
Between the languages and the yawning silences of misunderstandings
My English still marked by its echoes
To be bilingual it had better be French, German or Spanish
Otherwise to be bilingual is incomprehensible
Or rather my face marks out the echoes
My biracial face marked Asian
The report of foreigner skewed against me before I speak
And so the conversations play out like this,
‘Where are you really from?’
Then,
‘Oh your English is very good’
Which translates ‘you don’t belong’
To which I reply through gritted teeth
‘Thank you. It’s my first language’
And once again their face scrunches in confusion
Be Asian
Be foreign
To be biracial is inadmissible
So,
I learned to trample the British flag in my patriotism
And don a foreign flag
And wield my chopsticks like a shield
So they can’t stab me with them first
To be bi-national is inconceivable
But when ‘Immigration’ and ‘Send them back to where they came from’
Is hurled around the media
I can’t help but think
Where else is there for me to go?
To be bi-national
Translates ‘return to sender’
Rae Parry is from London and writes poetry and short stories.
Photograph courtesy of your local bi-racial person Djemilah Gordon
Aloka 