Unlabelled, No Name Body

by Alyssa Gaylard Appleby College

“What’s your nationality?” she asks. I answer with Canadian, But this isn’t what she meant.

Because although in reality my nationality is defined by my country of residence, She wants to decipher the hidden meaning behind my tight curls and my figure that’s bathed with a tan complexion that she just can’t figure out. So she asks a second time, slightly annoyed by my interpretation of literal definitions. It’s almost like I’m being held for some sort of questioning inquisition. Yet again her ignorance clouds her intentions and she asks, “But, where are you really from?” I’m really from Canada, born in Mississauga, English speaking, yet she still seems to be critiquing this somehow not-up-to-her-standards answer.

After what felt like hours of questions being hit back at me like a game of ping-pong that I’m so evidently losing, She finally says “Since you’re being so literal, what’s your ethnicity?”

Before I can even get a word in, I hear:

“You must be Latina!”

She says the word Latina with her sub-consciously racist “accent”, The same one that plagues the “Mexican Man” costume sold to an everyday ignorant bigot from your local Spirit of Halloween.

I answer with “No, I’m…”

But once again, before I could finish she asks, “What are you then?”

I’m a living breathing person punctured by people poking at personal predispositions. But, I didn’t say that.

I was sick of the argument, so I lay it rest and told her what she wanted to know. My father is from Sierra Leone and my mother from Poland. Just as I thought that this timely talk had come to a close, She claims my very own identity as wrong, like it’s an incorrect answer on a standardized test.

“But you don’t look half black?”

I’m sorry that I don’t look like your ideal of a 50% mix of chocolate and vanilla like a soft serve sweet swirled ice cream cone.

Because according to you, my body don’t seem to suit your idea of my culture. Because according to you, I’m the colored shirts in a laundry load with your bleached ideals suffocating my vibrant pigments. Because according to you, the percentage of my racial definition is only determined by the fact that people would consider me as a white passing person of colour.

A person who struggles to have a say in race-based discussions because she’s just:

“A privileged upper-class white girl”.

So yes, I’ve got more of my mother’s skin tone and her straight hair turned my kinky-curled dream into one of 3d texture that I’ll never get over.

So yes, I wish I could told tell you which side of my family I could relate to. But, I can’t.

I will always be an unknown figure that society can’t put a label on. Just like on the census, I will always just be labeled Other.