by lei molis
I never took my essays to my mom. I always asked my dad to look over them. He was the English major, the White Man, the writer. It made sense. What never made sense to me was the uproar from my Samoan mother. “Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” she would ask. Naively, innocently, stupidly, invidious I would reply, “Oh, well I didn’t know you wanted to.” But it was more than that, and we both knew it.
It was my little winces each time she spoke in church. Her words choppy and backwards, just slightly the wrong shade of palagi. White, but barely. Eggshell, perhaps—the color she painted my brother’s room after he moved out. She had wanted a fresh coat of white to cover the doodles he had added in his stage of teenage individualism (brought to you by: America in the early 2000s). How she had not realized the paint she chose was not the white she sought, I do not know. And it really shouldn’t surprise me. After all, this is the woman who bought sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free ice cream, sugar-free oatmeal, not because she wanted to lower our sugar intake, but because she didn’t notice the giant red letters on every side of the carton that read: “SUGAR FREE.” And you know you really couldn’t get mad at her for it. Of course, I still found my ways, but no, not when she would so innocently and honestly admit she didn’t realize it was sugar free when she bought it.
So eggshell and sugar free, these were just the versions of White I had to put up with. And that’s how I saw it, really: something to be endured, to wince at. Order order order. Ironic, isn’t it? How desperately I wanted to stand out, and yet how strictly I could police her for making us different from the sea of White who surrounded us.
“Why don’t you ever ask me to read your essays?” It wasn’t even something to consider—ridiculous, laughable. “Well, I didn’t know you wanted to.” It was more than that. It was how I seemed to zone out every time she started talking during family scripture study. Speaking vaguely. Repeating phrases I assume she heard in church. Attempting to paraphrase, summarize? the verses we had just read, but it only came out as regurgitated scripture. Plagiarism. Like those Christian missionaries had indoctrinated her ancestors’ tongues until they became a broken record for their whitewashed daughters to roll their eyes at. No, I wasn’t playing the apathetic teen card; dad would chime in and immediately my ears would perk up. As if grace were only legitimate if starched. Dressed in a suit and tie. Spoken in perfect English. As if principles were only principles if pronounced in perfect succession. Correction. It’s just because we are grammar geeks, we tell ourselves. We the women molded to police other women. The children trained to correct the parents who were once children in a new land, miles from their island home. The children of diaspora. Peoples of the pacific relocated to America, trained to be the very mouths that called them cannibals.
Like the woman who sat in our dining room. Messengers of God, our faith would have us believe. And we did. One from Hawaii—American. Another from Tahiti—not. We had just shared a meal with them. I was 16 at the time. Confused at my direction. Impressionable, listening. Listening as the Tahitian poured her soul into new American English that felt clunky and awkward in her French-trained mouth. But she was a messenger of God, and a good one. She would not let grammar rob her of an opportunity to speak of God’s goodness to a family trying to live in the shade of His grace. And yet her companion—a child of Oceania in some ways, too—would. As she spoke of love and grace and truth and hope and beauty, her American counterpart with brusqueness inserted “he” or “her” or “him” each moment she stumbled through her pronouns. Thinking back, I am annoyed all over again—if the meaning is delivered, what does it matter the format? Aepeita’i, in shame I realize, I am no different from her.
We dress grace in shirts and ties. Declare a love that is intended for all. But is it grace still if that all refers only to those who can fit their mouths around American words? Well-versed in a selection of Mormonic phrases perfectly polished and performed? “Please bless the hands who prepared it,” “nourish and strengthen our bodies,” “I’d like to bear my testimony,” “I know this Church is true.”
I know this Church is true.
So, life is full of hypocrisy, and I stand before you, asking you to acknowledge the beauty of a populace I once scorned. Gently, inwardly, but scorn nonetheless. A populace I am half a part of. Which part?, I ask myself. If not the leg or the arm, the eyebrows, the mouth? Perhaps somewhere someone knew this mouth could do damage to ‘Western legitimacy,’ so they bent it and twist it and teach me to tell myself, “I just love English. I love grammar and spelling. It’s all that I’m good at.” I’m an editor, I love editing. Correcting. Making you more like me. Isn’t that all a colonizer does, really?
High maka maka, mama called it. Shook her head at her brother whose college education and affinity for palagis turned him White on the inside. Or eggshell, maybe. Because the words, though big, which he weaved into his prayer, were right, but barely. Or because he said them with such authority no one dared question his usage, maybe. Not a round hole, but a square peg with a surface area two digits too high. Maybe.
Even Dad scolded me for my constant corrections. Compared me to the neighborhood connoisseur of grammar and language. She was just a daughter like me, seasick from the shaking of her head against the grammar-ignorant phrases of her father. But not sick of the sea, as I was. Sick of the boat my mother should not have been fresh off of. How many decades had passed since she set foot on American soil anyhow? Was the soil she stepped on too Hawaiian enough to be American? (Hence the terms like “high maka maka” and “hanabuddah (or hanabata)” or “shi shi in a cup.”)
Losing a mother changes your perspective on the world. “To lose your mother,” writes author Yann Martel, “well, that is like losing the sun above you.” In the years since losing my mother, my sun, I have sought her in any crevice, any corner, any crack in the cruel fabric that separates my reality from hers. And while I know my sun is not interchangeable with the light that pours all over Oceania, over le atunu’u o lona fale, there are rays that overlap. It was these areas of overlap I craved. The way an aunty would roll her eyes, click her tongue in disapproval, mutter, “Oka fefe,” under her breath. The way any Samoan would laugh—a music book of memories to my grief-stricken ears. The way the mouth of a sacred Samoan aunty, with her hands lifted in prayer for me, carved over and around the letters of her prayer, forging new paths through English pronunciation—new to others, perhaps, but not to me. Sounds I once might have scorned. Sounds that are now reminders of a mother’s love for her child of diaspora, who didn’t ask to be diasporic, who didn’t ask to be lost in a world where someone who pronounces “bowl” like “beaux” can’t possibly have opinions, much less wisdom regarding the role of nihilism in Crime and Punishment or the nature of God.
There’s a line to a song I sometimes think about. It’s not a song I think my mother would have liked, but still, it reminds me of her in some ways. “There's no point in trying to take ourselves so seriously,” the singer croons. And the drums kick in.
And I think of her laughing. I think of the time the two of us curled over, almost in tears from the laughter that rocked us. The laughter because of her English that broke mid-sentence. My hands deep in half-moon pie dough, seeped in sticky and tired from kneading with all my afakasi strength (which wasn’t much). “Eh,” she had said, “haven’t you ever heard of,” a pause as she searched for the words, “...da kine too much?” She finished weakly, wavering, but not with confidence, with laughter. And the dam that broke. The laughter that ensued. How we roared and wheezed at her English that broke mid-sentence. At the seriousness that gave way to her utter love for life. At the joy that spilled all over her words and into my heart through my fingertips into our pies and everywhere else between. How Dad had turned his head from the computer screen, confused, what was so funny?, he asked, but no words could explain.
And that is perhaps why this lesson took me so much to learn and still I keep unlearning: because it is a space without words. Beyond them. A space where laughter tells you all you need to know. A space where my mother—with her smile, with her love for God, with her ability to fit the pain in her pocket long enough to be present in those pews, with her quiet reminders to an elder sister to not let bitterness eat you up inside (reminders auntie would cling to and think of every time she spoke wrong, every time she looked up at her dead sister’s picture), my mother with her refusal to stop caring, stop loving, stop fighting for a world for her children to thrive, with her jokes of death and ‘chemo brain’ because what’s the point in taking ourselves so seriously?, with her smiles at the doctors and nurses who prodded her for the second half of her life and in return she gave them something to laugh about, a reason to smile, with her refusal to be anything but who she is—a land beyond words where my mother resides. This place I cannot find. This space so foreign to my displaced, Western-disciplined, grammar nazi me.
A land it took her dying for me to seek.
So, I suppose it’s a loss worth smiling about, for in searching for my sun, I found the darker parts of myself.