Nostalgia Negra, and: Inventing a Lineage on the Day My Mother’s Mother Is Buried

Abstract

Nostalgia Negra, and: Inventing a Lineage on the Day My Mother’s Mother Is Buried Lauren K. Alleyne (bio) NOSTALGIA NEGRA How easily it happens, the slide into your adolescent self: at a party the music romps through the air and you’re standing there, drinking a beer, the beat unwinding you. The first boy (no, these are men) comes by, sweeps the pretty blonde onto the floor; next the willowy hippie with her sideways smile. The other girl refuses the two men who try to pull her onto the floor— I don’t like bachata, she says, flits away. You swallow more beer, and the words I do! They go away, disappointed. For hours and beers, you smile and small talk with your friend who buys you another beer, and then takes the pretty blonde out for a spin. Everyone melts into the music and each other, a tangle of arms, sweeps of legs, and face it, you know your abandon —sweaty, unmuscled, thick and black— has no legible beauty. It jiggles. It is the opposite of lithe. It lacks grace. The dance is light and swirl and lift and everything you are is too wide, too heavy to be held. You have learned this lesson before. You’re still learning not to care. [End Page 98] INVENTING A LINEAGE ON THE DAY MY MOTHER’S MOTHER IS BURIED For my mother, 2/4/16 Today I am conjuring my mother a mother. She has long fingers & thin wrists like my mother does, a wicked right hand—in spanking & cricket—it’s genetic. When my mother was only a meager armful of howl & flail, my mother’s conjured mother would pick up her baby girl, trace hieroglyphs with her lips into her infant daughter’s skin, so when my mother has me twenty-eight years later, she does the same thing, the memory etched deep into her. My mother’s imagined mother would not be perfect, of course, but she’d be pretty close. There’d be bright-lit birthdays, Polaroid-captured Christmases; quiet afternoons she spent teaching my mother, her hand wrapped around her daughter’s, curling the letters of her name. When my mother says like this, & shows me her perfect cursive flourish three decades later, she can say your granny taught me how to write my name like this, too. My mother’s mother will have flaws, of course, small ones: her rice is too sappy; she makes my mother drink bush tea when she doesn’t want to; she picks fights when she’s tired; she isn’t very good at budgeting, & is too proud for her own good. When my mother visits me she’d say you are just like your grandmother. I’d groan & roll my eyes & know she means I fuss too much: I wouldn’t mind. When my mother’s mother dies, this imagined version of her, anyway, the Monday isn’t like any other with school and bills— I don’t forget it happened; my mother isn’t wondering if now that she’s really an orphan she’ll feel more or less abandoned, illegitimate, mistake-made-flesh. A punishment. [End Page 99] The mother I write my mother is worthy of mourning; when her heart stills, the grief cuts generations deep, severing us from something—call it memory, call it love. My mother is gone, my mother would say of her, & a whole, real history would unfurl to comfort her. I’d kiss her brow, close my fingers around hers, & by God, we’d feel something. [End Page 100] Lauren K. Alleyne Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014). Her award-winning work has been widely published in numerous journals and anthologies. Alleyne hails from Trinidad and Tobago, and is a Cave Canem graduate. She currently works at James Madison University as assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an associate professor of English. Copyright © 2017 Center for Literary Publishing