SOREN LIT Podcast- Episode #3
Podcast Host & Founding Editor, Melodie J. Rodgers
Aanika Eragam - Summer Issue 2021
Aanika Eragam is a rising senior at Milton High School in Milton, Georgia. She is the 2021 Atlanta Youth Poet Laureate, and her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Bennington College, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been published in Teen Vogue and Atlanta Magazine, among others. Outside of writing, she is passionate about history and politics.
ON HOME (OR THE LACK THEREOF) by Aanika Eragam
In the dry, carpet fiber syllables
Falling like maple leaves from
It’s scary carrying culture in this country.
I remember the time I wore a kurta
To school and got teased mercilessly
By incarnadine children who bottled
Venom in their veins and ice in their eyes.
Last month, another set of snake tongues yelled
“Fuck Indians!” while my mother and I
crossed the street. To them, our fear was funny.
To them, our fear is always funny. I think it’s funny
how quickly this melting pot reached its boiling point.
I think it’s funny how quickly I learned to hide my dal rice
and starve silently at lunch instead. Mother would hold up my
Untouched lunchbox with shaking hands, fury
Rolling off her in heat waves, ask me if
We should leave, go back, her eyes pooling
Over like the village well, fists grasping
At my arms like chipped rocks.
Everyone tells me who to be.
Grandmother balks at my hairy knees
Tells me to cover up, gives me a long-sleeved
kurta and leggings suited for hibernation,
As if the raging heat only applies to the boys,
Who choke on dust and smog
Untangling the village labyrinth.
Girls in two braids even like rice crops
They ask me what it's like in America.
They laugh each time I attempt to speak in our mother tongue,
and I realize to them, our language is more sacred
I feel ashamed. I feel like a butcher
flattening each syllable to make it palatable.
I feel that there, too, I am a spectacle.
There too, I only fit in when my mouth is shut.
But these girls, they smile like me,
and I want them to want me.
Packs up the tattered suitcase
Smelling of jalebi and jaggery.
I tell her I want to see the girls again and she
says no, we are leaving soon anyway.
I don’t want to leave, I tell her,
But the crows chuckle from
The telephone line and the
Thunder cracks out a roar.
America tells me I’m Indian
And India tells me I’m American
And when I try to be both I
Find out that I am neither,
Too foreign to be native so I
Must only be alive in the ocean-clad
Expanse between two countries,
