igating social situations meant to stay small and not bring much attention to myself. Above all else, be polite and have some manners. It was in Virginia that I learned about slavery and how its legacy continued to affect me. I learned that slaves, my ancestors, were banned from reading and writing. At my afterschool program we would read poems by Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. The fact that there were people who didn’t want people like me to read poems by Angelou and Hughes sparked something within me. People who didn’t even want these poems to be written. In Virginia I found my love for the written word. I read as many books as I could get my hands on and reveled in my growing vocabulary. It stuck with me, that learning to read and write was the most important thing I could do; that educating myself was my birthright. If Western colonization and trans-Atlantic slavery meant keeping my people illiterate and dependent, I felt strongly that it was my duty to combat that.
In New York, I found my independence and love for the arts. Thanks to my mother, I found a sense of community at my elementary school, PS 321. Even though she commuted to the city for work, where I lived and went to school was especially important to her. She knew that the neighborhood we moved to, Park Slope, prided itself on being racially diverse, and inclusivity was at the core of ethics for PS 321. A place I consider home, Park Slope was also where I experienced the devastation of 9/11 firsthand. It was during 9/11 that I was reminded of my Afghan side. Even though I knew the customs and the people and the language, what that meant to me and what it meant to the world were not the same. I watched the news and I listened to the adults. I realized it may be better to just let people continue to assume I was Dominican. After 9/11 I had a feeling of actually being protected by my Blackness. It covered up the terrorist stereotype that I felt the world would view me as. Television and media in the early 2000s were littered with stereotypes of people from the “Middle East”. The stereotypes ranged from submissive women covering themselves head to toe to crazed gun-toting Islamic extremists. Places like Afghanistan were portrayed on the news as being a third-world country in a desert wasteland— a far cry from the stories my mom would tell me of playing in a river full of iridescent multi-colored rocks or the smell of fresh bread and jasmine flowers in the mornings. If you were to watch a recording of the next decade or so of my life, you would see a young girl consistently navigating new spaces and being brave in the face of adversity. A little girl who wanted to dance and sing on stages and be a really good friend. A little girl who did her best in school, but was never encouraged or seen by those who were meant to nurture her.
Third grade photo day, PS 321, Park Slope, 2001.
When I was getting ready to enter the second grade, my mom’s producing job at BET moved her to their new studios in New York City. Despite my desperately wanting to stay in Virginia with my father, my mother made the decision to take me with her. New York was a world where I navigated custody battles, a new school and driving about eight hours from Brooklyn to Arlington and back again for summers, holidays and weekends. I split my time between the states and eventually adopted two personas. Telah (my first name, meaning “gold” in Arabic) would play with her cousins and watch movies with her grandma Kay. She would grow tomatoes in Gramma’s backyard and spend summers cooling down in museums with her dad. In Brooklyn, however, I decided to adopt my middle name. Sabriyya (meaning “patience” in Arabic) was the cool kid. She spent her days at school doing art projects and plays in class, and she spent her afternoons with the adults who worked below her brownstone, helping them at the cash register or cleaning up whenever they needed.
Once again my mother packed us up in pursuit of her profession and we landed in Southern California. I had to leave my performing arts middle school (that I auditioned to get into) only to spend the last few months of my sixth grade year watching soap operas at my grandmother's house. Eventually I found my way to a new school for the last month, and graduated from elementary school
Places like Afghanistan were portrayed on the news as being a third-world country in a desert wasteland— a far cry from the stories my mom would tell me of playing in a river full of iridescent multi-colored rocks or the smell of fresh bread and jasmine flowers in the mornings. again, yes again. Because I went from a junior high in New York to an elementary school in California, I wasn’t able to get back to middle school until seventh grade. For an eccentric kid, being forced to leave Brooklyn, middle school and high school in the suburbs of Glendale, California sucked. 22
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