Features

When I came back from my hiking trip with my family and sat on the hotel room's chair, I realized that I did not come alone. There, on the hem of my pants--which pooled onto my shoes as they were two sizes too big--stood erect a hefty number of seedlings. Needle-thin and forked at their ends. Ugly black against the faded beige. I did not like the way they clung with desperation--using me as a transportation medium. A conduit between the before and after. 

Cross-contamination, my brother called it. I wanted to tell him that he is confusing it with pollination but realized that it did not matter in the end.

Pollination or cross-contamination.

Either way, it is a primordial need to reproduce. To mark. To be. Because when someone asks me if I want to go back to Tajikistan I dig into the meat of my thumb. Because the reason why these weeds are labeled as “hitchhikers” all boils down to the instinctual need to survive somewhere better.

Your mother tongue is important, my father remarked, you're Tajik. Dushanbe is your home.

I wanted to tell my father that my mother tongue is an orphan rather than a parent. That somewhere between the flight to the second, or third, or sixth country it opted to deform itself into a fetal position, pliant and filial. A comma, rather than a period. The vernacular of silence.

Чи хел ҳасtи? I shamefully answer in Russian, in broken Tajik, in silence. My grandfather would regard me in between the pregnant pauses but his gaze would be lost in the pixilations and bad internet connection. Kulob was, after all, in the middle of nowhere. Tajikistan, to me, was bereft of everything. Its weeds scorched dry. The seeds didn't travel far.

My words are half-formed and wilted. I angrily pluck the rest of the seeds out of my pants and their carcasses form a semi-circle around my bare feet. I chew on my tongue and swallow the reflexive sorry.

How painful it is, to be a comma enforced into a state of being a period. Because it is not an accident that a fetus is in its vaguest form: a comma. The curve of its back, a continuation. My orphaned tongue is estranged. The placenta has long been removed by careful surgical hands.

I othered my language and yet, I still found myself on the precipice of the barrier formed between myself and them. Roll calls were the hardest. My name rolling off uneasily from the teacher's mouth and the hushed silence that would follow afterwards. The painful, you can just call me شاه, and the denouement of the moment as theirs were called with ease. The tongue, a funny thing.

I shortened my name --king's happiness--to just king.

How excruciatingly simple a language can be. 

The next day, I took out the pants out of my luggage to put them on again. Because I am a creature of habit. Because I start my sentences with an explanation rather than an imperative. My ESL teacher told me to never start my sentences with the word because, but it was never my intention to start a sentence in the first place. I noticed that there were still a couple of seeds latched onto the seams of my pants. I did not take them out. Because.

Shahnoz Sharifova's personal essay won second prize in the Eleventh Annual Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Shahnoz is a Sophomore who is currently studying Illustration at the School of Visual Arts. "As someone who is part of the Tajik diaspora, I love creating & consuming media that is centered around wavering identities," Shahnoz says.