“Being” — Ala’a Tamam

TPT Essay Contest Winner

“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us — that’s where it’s at.” — Jesse Owens

Describe a time in which you saw or experienced a struggle/injustice. What was your biggest takeaway from the event?

“Being” By Ala’a Tamam

When you’re a child no one warns you of the hate that awaits you

Questions asked are hushed quickly by a finger held to your mouth by the man or woman you love most

The greenest grass ive ever seen is the grass that makes up the park that I played at as a child

Why do these memories appear through stained glass

Not biblical stained glass, with hints of color and depiction of holy figures

But glass stained with “you don’t belong here” and “you are not like the other blacks”

Glass stained with scornful eyes and the fear you wish you did not have

The fear that is in your heart, in your mothers heart and your fathers

Stained, dirty, immigrant made in sudan glass so opaque you can barely see the girl at the park anymore

As I walked into the gymnasium of school that did not contain a single child or adult that looked like me I anxiously pulled at the two braids my mother had sewn into my scalp.

I ascended up the bleachers and sat in my previously assigned spot and hoped that if I slouched down enough, that I might fade into the oak that I sat on. Become one with my surroundings and fade away into blissful isolation.

As I absentmindedly continued pulling on my braids, I felt foreign hands stroking my hair. I turned around and realized that I had become a petting zoo for white children who had never been allowed to intermingle with the enemy.

Curious hands continued to discover and pillage what had never been theirs, pulling as though they were trying to take piece of myself with them to proclaim on the playground “look what I found” so that the attention would drift off of the child who was shaking on those bleachers to the discoverer of something new.

Something foreign. A thing and not a person. A thing who ate food at lunch that smelled bad, and did not look like the lunchables they were lined up with. The thing that came to school with a new hairstyle every week. The thing that a certain 3rd grade teacher could swear looks just like Shirley temple except….different.

Those hands left imprints on the mind of a child who quickly figured out how to duck when curious hands would reach again. How to discreetly eat lunch in the bathroom and say that she was full at lunch. How to rid herself of all the attractions that would not allow her to sink into the oak in the bleachers. How to rid herself of every single thing that made her absolutely, unmistakably and fundamentally perfect. And become wood.

Somedays I long for the smell of grass and the feeling of the hot sun that defined my childhood, others I curse my skin for looking like but not being wood.

Today however, in this moment that you and I share I am neither. I am bukhoor.

Noun: wood chips soaked in oils and perfumes, that when burned create an aroma that reminds me of home.

Incense that floats around my house, from room to room occasionally out a window left open, just like me it takes up room and ventures into places unknown and that is how I stay brave.

It is not easy to exist as an object, despite legislature telling me that I am lucky for what I do have, but if I exist as smoke I am untouchable

I can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, I can remind a young girl on the playground of home

I can give her the heat of the sun, the smell of grass and bukhoor mixed providing the cultural experience that I never had

The one I long for

The one I am creating for others

For a life of struggle, the strength that I have but did not ask for would have all been worth it for that very moment.