As Armenian-American, I generally have considered myself a person of color with a caveat: If people of color have a range of experiences with discrimination, then I’m at the privileged end of the spectrum. Though self-doubt has often tugged at this determination, I have gone for years—decades—without the subject of my race being called into question by others. Recently, however, over a period of several months, I encountered a rainbow of people who kept telling me that I was white.
What the heck is “voice”? By this, do editors mean “style”? I do not think so. By voice, I think they mean not only a unique way of putting words together, but a unique sensibility, a distinctive way of looking at the world, an outlook that enriches an author’s oeuvre. They want to read an author who is like no other. An original. A standout. A voice.
Think about your favorite author’s voice. Can’t you recognize their writing immediately? Why? Because of how it sounds to you when you read it. Because you know they’re going to speak of certain things and do something that is trademark theirs.
In 2014, my living space is a bedsit on the rooftop of my mother’s top floor flat, where I live and work in the city that was home, to help care for a woman who no longer knows who I am.
For awhile, my sibs and I had contemplated the China Coast, the only English speaking home for the aged in Hong Kong. Mum’s Cantonese has never been fluent, and, as the prions continued their maniacal play doh twists and turns, her tongue lost more Cantonese—her fourth, mostly illiterate language—than her literate third one, English.
Photo credit: Paul Hilton
My mother was raking leaves in the front yard one late December afternoon, just after a light, sneeze-like rain had fallen over Los Angeles. The sky was pink on account of the sunset, with grey, billowing clouds piled up on top of one another above us. They covered the entire sky, except for a patch or two of dull blue that would uncover itself before being swallowed by the rolling grey.
“You see,” he began, releasing the last wisps of smoke around the words. He walked over to where we were. I didn’t look up, but I could feel him standing beside me, wedged into the small space between Jennie’s chair and mine. “It’s true that all niggers are black, but what a lot of people forget is that not all blacks are niggers. Africans are Africans. A completely different breed, straight out of the jungle. You guys aren’t like the common black folks we got here. And I’m sorry to say, a lot of them are niggers, just no good. Nah, if you hear us talking about niggers, don’t think twice because we’re not talking about you.”
Photo credit: Lyle Ashton Harris
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