Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself...
And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue...
WE all need a story of where we came from and how we got here.
Time that refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be lost. In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can ma...
Time for me had always been measured in terms of the rising sun, its setting sister, and the dependable cycle of the moon. but at sea, I learned that time can also be measured in terms of water, in te...
There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt.
Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys.
I close my eyes, a useless flutter. I open them, and I see you half a world away. I hear fever parting your lips. I feel your shivering, colorless geckos running down your spine. I smell the night swe...
When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: The French are all right in France. What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in the colonies they lose thei...
Obey,' like 'worship,' is a strong word. Her mother and father had told her so, and she believed them. They gave her life, they told her, so that she could give them grandsons. She had been prepared t...
We were forgiving each other for who we were, for how we came into this world, for how we changed or didn't change for each other.
Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them.
They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of th...
Lovers who have lived a lifetime together have the luxury of never having to say anything new.
Every day, Anh Hoâng was shoved into the ground by the weight of the vanity cases of French wives. They, with their government clerk husbands, were touring their colony, forgetting who they were, forg...
As if in grief, the bamboos were pressed to the ground. But within a matter of minutes, they nodded and waved. They shook off the rain and reoriented themselves toward the sky. My mother was impressed...
After years of the imposed invisibility of servitude, I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter. As...
Years of alcohol can do that to a person, make him dead but not departed, make him indelible to those who have had the misfortune of sharing his name.
She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous. Most of these girls, Kelly included, then adopted that slow,...
My self-righteous rage burns until I am forced to concede that I, in fact, have told them nothing. This language that I dip into like a dry inkwell has failed me.