Separation anxiety, mother tongue, and chickens

Mar 01, 2021

Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.

Mother Tongue

by Olajide A. Omojarabi (art by Pedro Gomes)

While children my age, eight or nine, were gossiping about the raggedy clothes of their peers, I already knew why everyone avoided an auntie at the family party, which auntie eschewed her religion to marry a rich man of another religion, which father abandoned his children for another woman in another country. She didn’t swear me to secrecy, but it remains unfathomable how, in my childhood years, I’d managed to keep those stories to myself. She owned a photo album, my mother, the size of an encyclopedia, and I’d rearrange the photographs of people in the album according to their stories, scribbling vague, incomprehensible words like Abanishe studio living goddess or RIP mama full rubber beside them, leaving much to the imagination of visitors who pored through the pictures.

Say “Bread and Butter” and Stick Together

by Dorothy Bendel

The sidewalk leading to my son’s school is too narrow for us to walk side by side. Pillars jut out from storefronts, cleaving our path. He walks on the left side, and I walk on the right so that my body is a barrier between him and the cars zooming by. As my son passes a pillar, the briefest of separations occurs, and I whisper “bread and butter” under my face mask, too embarrassed to speak louder. There are fourteen pillars on the sidewalk. I whisper “bread and butter” fourteen times over, to stem the anxiety percolating in my stomach and rising into my chest, to feel a moment of ease.

A Place in the World: Growing Up Mixed-Race in a White Family

by Georgina Lawton

It’s safe to say this was not the reaction I’d been hoping for. I’d only waited my whole life to put a name to the country responsible for my appearance; I’d only been trying to piece together my identity on my own for over two decades, straddling the borders of a racialized existence outside my family and a nonracialized one in their presence, all the while dealing with projected ideas from strangers about what I looked like, who I resembled, what I was. I’d just found another piece of the puzzle, I’d worked it out on my own, but there was no support from the one person I needed it most from. My mum refused to hear me, to understand why this was so desperately important.

Cooped

by Natalie Ponte

Just before it all begins, the dog gets out of the house and kills one of our chickens. He shakes her until she goes soft and limp and then he drops her body on the ground. My husband gets rid of the body so I don’t have to look at it.

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