Third Worlds

Ajani Hickling

Instructor’s Introduction

“When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks,” says Sonya Huber, author of Voice: A Manifesto, “when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice.” My guidance in WR 153: “Every Life, A Story” is that students read and write selfishly, searching out works that stretch the bounds of creative nonfiction both in terms of craft and source. For example, students can draw from interviews with musicians or from Instagram posts in war zones, the kinds of accounts that may not make it to literary magazines. This inclusive approach serves our efforts to decolonize craft—to embrace compelling voices, regardless of platform.

Ajani Hickling’s “Third Worlds” represents the last paper in a sequence that comprises a group craft paper, an individual research paper, and a personal essay on any topic. Students workshop their essays in small groups and conclude the semester with a week or more of in-class readings. Cell phones go away and all eyes turn to the podium, where, one by one, students bravely share their most intimate work. Ajani’s voice leaps from the page with vivid details and wry observations, at turns playful, curious and wise. As a member of the journal’s editorial staff says, “Your compelling, disarming voice tells a story I wanted to keep on going!” However you encounter it, that is what great writing should do.

Melanie S. Smith

From the Writer

Before writing “Third Worlds”, I hadn’t seen myself as a writer, or a poet. But neither had I truly seen myself as many of the identities I reflect on throughout this piece, prior to its creation. I hadn’t seen either, in my years of photography, the impact that capturing my own story could have.

Taking WR153: “Every Life, A Story” was my intro to writing personal essays. The course simultaneously marked my departure from a long streak of academic writing, and my first time really shifting my creative focus inwards. Writing this piece led me to write my first poem—a spoken word rendition of this memoir. This in turn, led to my first reading—soon, the first of many. I found people listening to, identifying with, and being impacted by my words more profoundly than I had ever expected.

“Third Worlds” is a mélange of seemingly disconnected moments interspersed throughout my first year in college, and in America. Each expresses an aspect of my intersecting identities. Altogether, the story does not capture my entirety. Ultimately that is the story’s essence. “Third Worlds” is about looking, living, and learning. It is a piece about reflecting, rejecting, and accepting. More than anything else, it is the recognition that there is always more to be seen.

Third Worlds

My first year of college introduced me to the communal bathroom experience. Over time, I would learn that the rightmost shower had the best water pressure, and as such was the most sought-after stall on Floor 12. I found that the leftmost shower hardly received any light, that the middle right shower had a broken showerhead, and that the middle left had a handle that had to be rotated twice for hot water to flow.

In my first month of dorm life, however, I didn’t know the intricacies of this bathing system. So, when I spun that middle-left handle one full rotation and cold water rained down on me, I thought “I suppose there’s no hot water today”. I would use this shower from time to time, and from time to time, the water would simply be cold. One day, when I heard water running from the adjacent stall, I decided to ask if this neighbour of mine had warm water. He seemed confused. Of course the water was warm; why would it not be? Fiddling with the handle led me to discover the secret second rotation, and since that day, my showers have always been warm.

Growing up, sometimes the water would be cold. You could stand under the shower and wait, and wait, and the water would not warm. Other days, there wouldn’t be any water in the pipes at all. Periods of drought meant Mona Reservoir’s water reserve running low, and the National Water Commission announcing when the city could use water, and when they should expect what we called “lock-offs”.

Days like these meant boiling water in a kettle, or on a stovetop pot, and mixing it with cold water to get a warm ‘wash bucket’. Days like these meant taking a cup and pouring water over your body, and soaping and scrubbing yourself. As a child, days like these meant impatiently awaiting the end of your shower so you could lift the wash bucket over your shoulders and pour its contents over your body with joy, catharsis, feeling like you were at a water park.

My new neighbour would not think to ask, “is there water today?”. He wouldn’t think to ask, “is the water warm today?”. I soon learned that these answers are unchanging, and so the questions aren’t asked.

…

When I tell people I’m Jamaican, they ask me where I’m from.

It’s a standard ‘getting to know you’ college question, but the first couple times I heard it, it seemed silly. I say I’m from Jamaica, I grew up in Kingston. I only moved to Boston a few months ago. And at this point, a piece seems to click into place in their minds. “Wait… you’re just coming from there?”, or “Wait, you did high school there?”, as though Jamaica was a foreign, untouchable world.

I’ve since learned that “Jamaican” has a broad definition in America. I’ll meet Jamaicans who have never set foot on the island, Jamaicans whose grandparents grew up in the country, Jamaicans with one parent who migrated when they were a teenager. I meet Jamaicans from New York, Jamaicans from Alabama, and Jamaicans from California. You can be Jamaican, yet not from Jamaica.

The question of ‘where are you from’ was never one I would think to ask. To introduce myself as Jamaican was to answer both “who are you” and “where are you from”. But here, where the label is claimed across communities, and spans space and generation, it becomes relevant. The one answer splits, migrates, and becomes more than just one.

…

Before being seen as Jamaican, I’m seen as Black here.

I was never really Black in Jamaica. Back home, if you were Chinese, you were Mr. or Miss Chin—regardless of your last name. If you were dark-skinned, no racial nickname would serve to differentiate you from most. So large black men were “Biggs” and thick black women were “Maamz”. Tall men were called “tall man”, short men were “short man”.  If you were older, you were “auntie” or “uncle”, and if a Jamaican man didn’t know your name as a woman, you were “miss”, “princess”, “empress”, or “babes”,…depending on how much they wanted you. And since I had a lighter skin tone than the average, I was “brown man” (and had I looked like a woman, I would’ve been “brownin”).

See, race carried as much significance, as a descriptor, as your height did, or your weight, or your age. So, I was never Black in the way that I’m Black here. I was never what my aunt called “Blackity-Black-Black”—the Black Americans I found myself befriending, who manoeuvre life with chips on shoulders, and for whom race was a major part of their identity. I was never the kind of Black person who faced systemic discrimination. I did not grow up like the Black people who had to question how to talk, question how to act, and question how they would be perceived around white people. Though they looked like me, I could not see myself in them. Growing up where Black was the default, these were never questions that had to be asked. Nowadays, these are the questions I ponder from time to time.

…

Because you’ll get close, and you’ll get comfortable, and one day yuh jus deh yah a siddung inna dining hall and yuh jus a chat to yuh friend dem, a tell one story bout how it bun yuh when yah try walk pon di people dem crosswalk and di people dem inna dem car a try turn like seh dem nuh see yuh, and like seh dem wah lick yuh dung like yah roadkill or supm, an yuh jus a chat and yah chat and yah talk and yah talk and yuh realise seh yuh fava one bloodclaat poppy show cah yuh jus a look pon dem and yuh see…blank faces.

You know the questions that they’re not asking—“what do you mean?”, “what’s a bloodclaat?”, “Could- could you say that again? Maybe a little slower?”. You’ve heard the questions before. Their faces speak clearly, though their mouths remain silent.

You’re used to saying “hush” instead of “sorry”, and “sorry” instead of “excuse me”, and morewhile you haffi just siddung an’ hol a medz an’ tell yuhself jah kno, a dirt—because you don’t know how to translate “morewhile” or “jah kno” or “if a dirt, a dirt”. So instead, you speak the Queen’s English—Standard English, as we’d call it back home. In doing so, you standardise yourself. You lose a layer of your own self-expression.

You become one of those Jamaicans, whose Jamaican-ness is hardly visible. Hidden. Secondary to your blackness. The kind of Jamaican whose heritage and culture and language can be turned on and off, if it can be turned on at all.

And after that shift, new questions come up. The chef at the dining hall asks you “¿Eres Latino?”, because to him, you seem Dominican. And a man at Walgreens trying to buy a gift card asks “ou pale kreyòl?”, because he thinks—hopes—you might be Haitian. Standardised, Black before anything else, you become so easily mistaken for your neighbours.

And when you go to Toronto over spring break, to get a break from it all, and your aunt asks if you want to canerow your hair—sorry, cornrow, your hair. Since you now live in a country built on corn and cotton, and not cane sugar and molasses.

Your aunt offers to cornrow your hair, and you return to Boston, and realise you look exactly how you’re expected to look. And when the style deteriorates, and you don’t have the time to undo the braids and you don a durag for a duration of time, you fit the part even better. They don’t need to ask any further questions.

…

Traversing these worlds makes you more aware of where you fit into them. Going back home, briefly, you visit your family. Auntie Dans comments that “you know I don’t really like canerows on men… they really are more a girl’s style”. Auntie Bobo comments on what a great person, guy, no, man, you’ve grown to be. She’s reluctant to use the word because you’ve always been her little boy, her nephew, the first boy pickney of the family.

You’re reluctant because you realise “man”, “boy”, and “male” are labels you’ve more accepted than assigned. Just as you weren’t racialised as Black Americans are, you don’t gender yourself as others do. You’d sooner call yourself a photographer, or a Jamaican, or some other aspect of your identity to which you are more attached. Canerows were just a hairstyle, one available to you now that your hair was long enough. Earrings, which your aunts similarly disapproved of, were no different from rings, or necklaces, or shoes: items, accessories. For most, they were relics from one world. For me to don them was to be a Martian amongst Earthlings. A Jamaican amongst Americans. Foreign, not immediately understood, not easily categorised.

…

Those same aunts used to think I was queer for that same reason. They were not the first to ask, or to wonder. Growing up, where men wore skinny jeans and polo shirts, and listened to dancehall, and ran in cliques talking about being gunmen and how dem would bun battyman, for me to not emulate these traits—to read, to take photos, to make art, having queer friends—indicated to many a citizenship to a foreign, taboo world. To others, I was seen as a “gyallis”—meaning a man with many women. Because I was brown skinned, I was seen as attractive, more closely aligned with a Eurocentric beauty standard than most. And because I spent my time with more women than men, we must have been involved. It was never a question to be asked.

And so, I never asked myself where my attraction lay. I knew I wasn’t interested in men, so I assumed I was interested in women. If not one world, then the other. So, when a friend expressed interest when I was home between semesters, I decided to explore that world. Sex was more like a game than anything, and I loved games. It was never passion, or desire… It was a question of what to do with the joystick, and what buttons to press and in which order, to get the other player to level up. It was a question of how I could play the game better.

See I’d never understood celebrity crushes, and while I could recognise when someone was hot, it was in the same way you’d acknowledge the artistry of a painting or a photograph—admiration of beauty in features, and in aesthetics; but you wouldn’t fuck a painting.

…

Living in the first world, coming from a third world… too often means adapting your nuances and experiences to match expectations of the first. Adjusting. Assimilating. But in walking between worlds, I’ve begun to become more aware of my place, my privilege, my perspective in each of them. This year, I’ve learned Java and Python, and enough French to help the Haitian man buy his gift card. But perhaps, my most important lesson was learning which questions I never thought to ask myself.

Ajani Hickling is a sophomore, studying Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. Ajani was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, currently studies and works in Boston, and looks forward to wherever the world may take them next. As a photographer, programmer, and poet, Ajani finds themself stepping between different worlds and finding themself within each one. Their immense gratitude goes out to Professor Melanie Smith, who encouraged them to explore a new path during a time where they were seeking, however unknowingly, a new form of self-expression.