Multilingual

 In this life‘s journey, I bring forth my inquisition with my Latin Flar denoted somewhere in Cuba, that I’ve never been, while holding onto the Jamaican heritage of Latino towns. My Latin heritage speaks loud as in me when I’m around people and music with such flare, though I have only a basic understanding of the language I do pretty well. My trips to Mexico have taught me there’s nothing more valuable than conversation, whether in English, Spanish Vietnamese, Japanese or Igbo.  My son calls himself bilingual because he knows Vietnamese, he sings songs, and other dialects and languages without knowing their meaning. For him they’re just melodies just another song, but for me, they’re more than that I feel bad now that I told him him learning, one song does not grant him access to fluency of a language. It takes far more than knowing one song to call yourself multilingual.

 My Jamaican food comes to me by way of African hands. The essence of the flavors bring joy to my mouth. South African flavors swirl about on my tongue for we understand the sacredness of food and its rarity in a country that we waste so much food. He fills my plate giving me every bit of my dollars for that I am thankful for. I think about South African lions craving a giant cow from one of Monsanto’s factories, I got so interested in food over these last few years. Because of my inability to source fresh foods on my own I found myself reliant heavily on the cultured sweetness of the hospital staff who prepared delicious ganders for my tongue. I wonder if the lions miss him.

My plethora of suggestions to the White House has clearly proved nothing more than I am just a normal citizen with a big mouth. No money to show for the words that I’ve created, no properties to both proudly about it. My mom has stripped my identity, completely leaving me with 1 acre of land in the town. I only knew when I was a child. I sound ungrateful as many other people do not have an acre of land to boast about. I think of the total Ness and its completeness of how much we actually should have and I am saddened by the lack of information that travels through my family. Wanting to make a brand of my own, but lacking the resources to call my own shirt made of cotton.