Alexandria

When I was younger, I read a series called the American Girl Diaries They were books about girls with red hair and freckles Girls with wealthy grandparents they had to dress up to visit Girls who daydreamed about becoming artists Their lives were recommended reading, on display front-and-center in my county library Those books taught me to speak I learned to narrate my life like it was a movie A black and white film, ink and paper I kept a script of everything the leading lady did But when I signed my name at the end, I wrote “Alexandria” Because girls who kept diaries didn’t have African names From grade four to grade ten, I recorded every speck of humdrum with posterity in mind My eldest daughter, my sister’s son, some kid digging in his backyard for time capsules, I was writing for all of them But one day I stopped, because I thought, I wouldn’t read my own story if I had the choice My plot had no action, the setting, no majesty And I only ever traveled on the magic carpets of dog-eared pages I figured magic was playing hide-and-seek with me in the stalls of school bathrooms Or the muddy craters of backyards Places I would never think to look—that’s why I never found it One day, there would be barbeques, tennis practice after school, family vacations I would finally have everything my friends thought was ordinary See, I wasn’t praying for a plot twist, just waiting for normal, For the life I saw printed and reprinted in every story I read See, my kitchen smelled like palm oil frying in a pot of stew on Sunday afternoons On autumn evenings, my dad would tell us to go outside and kick a ball around And declare that with six more kids, he’d have a whole soccer team And the only locale we ever summered in was the library I’m only an “American girl” until you get to know me In middle school, I could discuss lunchroom gossip as blissfully as the best of ‘em While at home, we built our lives from scratch Scraping at the soil of this country to find our footing My dad tucked his PhD into his back pocket It was thrown back in his face too many times by people who didn’t believe in Nigerian universities He had nowhere to hide his accent, though, no place to go when policemen wanted to peer into his car My mom, who named my baby sister “Nwakaego,” “A child is greater than money,” Had to choose between leaving her to be raised by day care and keeping food in the fridge And I, I claim my birth in a country as foreign as a world news headline My parents speak a language that sprang from its dust I don’t understand a sentence, but whenever I speak, I remember that it could have been my mother tongue I read the stories of American girls and learned that I couldn’t even be myself in my own diary I would always be stuck in imitation Stuck taming my hair Stuck buying jeans that never fit right, left to assume they weren’t made for this body type Stuck reading a hundred issues of Girlslife magazine, before realizing that when the makeup section said “fair complexions,” it would never mean me My sisters, my brother, and I barely know how to pronounce our own names We have swallowed them after every homeroom roll call Melted them down like used gold and remolded them to fit this country’s palate, to taste sweeter on American tongues Now, these deformed syllable songs are all we know These days, people call me a writer My pen and I have forgiven each other I am writing what I know exactly as I know it I am learning to sing my name like gospel Like it was my first word Like even if I have no mother language, I know this name, and therefore I can never be an orphan I have stopped writing “Alexandria” in my diary Stopped holding in my dark-skinned life like underwater breath I will sigh my story every time my hand touches a page I am the only one who can tell it And I will write it so loud, the world will have no choice but to listen