This is how to transcribe an echo

In trying to teach my friend Korean, I say that you have to let the language break in your mouth a little. She tells me that of the languages she’s encountered, mine sounds the most guttural. We talk of how we approach language as melody, collecting sounds and inhabiting them like homes. 

It’s clear to me now—belonging in this conversation has always required something of the body. But your books, your adaptations, they insist that I see blood first. That I taste it. Which buzzword will I see the theft of next. Tongue. Fluency. Labor. Daughter. They worry whether their trauma will be seen. I worry whether only my trauma will be seen. 

I once had the terrible thought that suffering is a privilege. What is the price of desire? What do I sacrifice to acknowledge beauty? Am I victim or perpetrator? In your narrative, would I conform to be forgiven? This is, perhaps, what you would call resolution. 

/ 

In trying to disprove invisibility, I am asked all the questions I am unable to answer. Visibility is a history that must be fluently captured. Only fluently. I want to be meaningful, you must understand, I want to speak in nothing less than blood-fattened prose, with the reddest tongue. 

I get told I’m reading too much into it. I’m interrupting, I speak too aggressively, I don’t know enough to deserve an audience for my hysteria. Worse, I get called disingenuous for all the wrong reasons. The violence of my survival against those who do not know they are dying. 

Write the dog metaphor for the fifth time—a dog that does not know it is a dog makes for the best meal. Think about what is eloquent in one language and antagonistic in another—powerful in their shrouding of true cruelty. True is to disrupt. To, necessarily, politicize. 

how certain words lose their substance when overused / why they might be overused / how we let ourselves be gnawed away in our struggle to be heard through the void / why I can say that you're a fucking asshole, but I’m afraid to call you racist. 

/

You ask for a question on subjectivity—let’s talk about power. In the conversation we’ll never have, I will tell you that I don’t think I can accept abstraction anymore. Those worn blue jeans. Those crescent bloated earrings. Those soured advocates for girlhood. Behind words, behind a name, obscuration—in what else might we know presence from absence? Religion, you might say. 

/ 

Meanwhile, we neglect our own autonomy and treat tragedy as abstract. Meanwhile, they encroach on a language borne of resistance against white failure–a language obfuscated when the argument is to escape annihilation. Where the stakes are children being slaughtered and stolen against adopting the language of the oppressors to acquire their pity. 

The pressures are always individualistic. The rest of humanity always an afterthought, always a moral weapon. Expendable. 

At what point do you say, none of this is unfortunate. None of this is a result of fortune. At what point do you ask, who or what is measuring the worth of a life? At what point do you acknowledge, disposability to a nation preserved by imperialism will never find you in favor. 

/ 

In trying to find a solution, we admit to each other our subconscious hunger for assimilation that ends the story there, nice and clean. 

Our not-so-secret desire for erasure conflated with our desire for entry—how best to reject the deception of visibility when i preen at being called doll-like. 

aww, your voice goes higher when you speak your native language.
 
aww, annyeonghasaeyo. 

aww, i love your Sanrio pencil case. 

Aww. 

Aww.