Written in Mist: Speaking of Safer Things
She rolled the cigarette between two calloused fingers, savouring the feel. A wisp of smoke from between her chapped lips floated into the air, a silent song of something.
'Vol vol vol.'
Indila's 'Derniere Danse' played in the cafe elsewhere, the melancholy song filling her ears and slowly falling into her.
This is France, she thought to herself, a twenty five year old Malaysian immigrant with a baggage of hyphenated identities sitting in an isolated French cafe smoking a Chinese cigarette listening to a French-Algerian-Cambodian-Egyptian-Indian singer.
As Indila works herself into a beautiful tragedy, she puts her head in her hands then takes a drag of her cigarette. There is a certain delicious irony in that ,she feels, especially with the rise of the National Front in France, people looking at her funny because of her name, the fact that she doesn't go to Church, mostly reads East Asian philosophers instead of Satre, eats neither pork nor beef, has a Muslim boyfriend, Jewish best friend, hair that she never combs and is a ungraceful 5"2- that such irregularities can be still found.
Sometimes she feels sorry that the world has made who she is seem like the enemy, sometimes she feels angry. Immigrant, they hiss now. They say somethings worse than that- words she has never used or ever will.
She wants to scream at them that she suffered too- but she talks about safer things.
It's as if her conversations start off with innocuous things like weather and sheep and temperature and babies of friends' and friends of babies' and whenever they veered off into more 'dangerous' and controversial things, they'd look away and start speaking of safer things.
'Vol vol vol.'
Indila's 'Derniere Danse' played in the cafe elsewhere, the melancholy song filling her ears and slowly falling into her.
This is France, she thought to herself, a twenty five year old Malaysian immigrant with a baggage of hyphenated identities sitting in an isolated French cafe smoking a Chinese cigarette listening to a French-Algerian-Cambodian-Egyptian-Indian singer.
As Indila works herself into a beautiful tragedy, she puts her head in her hands then takes a drag of her cigarette. There is a certain delicious irony in that ,she feels, especially with the rise of the National Front in France, people looking at her funny because of her name, the fact that she doesn't go to Church, mostly reads East Asian philosophers instead of Satre, eats neither pork nor beef, has a Muslim boyfriend, Jewish best friend, hair that she never combs and is a ungraceful 5"2- that such irregularities can be still found.
Sometimes she feels sorry that the world has made who she is seem like the enemy, sometimes she feels angry. Immigrant, they hiss now. They say somethings worse than that- words she has never used or ever will.
She wants to scream at them that she suffered too- but she talks about safer things.
It's as if her conversations start off with innocuous things like weather and sheep and temperature and babies of friends' and friends of babies' and whenever they veered off into more 'dangerous' and controversial things, they'd look away and start speaking of safer things.
Comments
Post a Comment