These are our stories, but these are my stories, too. Of course we made a genre of this experience—we had to. We needed it. We had far fewer words for prior to the advent of the diaspora poem, or essay, or story. I remember the feeling of first reading this kind of poetry, the shock of representation: the newness of seeing myself or someone close to me on the page. This is how I feel. This is how I think. This is a version of my mother and myself. I owe so much to this type of writing, I think, even though sometimes it didn’t fit. I loved it.

I have written both scenes about my mother, and in some ways, they are true. They are missing a lot of the banality of living: the boredom, irritation, the brattiness of being a child and not understanding the momentousness, the gravity, of our lives. I can write all of these scenes about her and about myself. But when I speak to her and we still don’t know each other, the product feels futile. When I think of her entire life I cannot imagine, I still feel so far away. The image contains more about the program that produced it than about the subject. At the end of any kind of writing, my mother and I are two different people with two different lives.

Inside the heart of that distance, I continue to operate as a functionary, creating the experience of nearness and knowing through the execution of a learned programming. And I think about the way the symbols, the technical images I generate, exist in an entirely different environment than my mother has access to. It’s not a bad thing—I have come to feel so close to so many others. But my mother, somehow, still evades me.

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