Between Foreign and Familiar by Tania Pabón Acosta
The day after the 2008 presidential election I woke up in my bed, achy and throbbing. It’s a morning I haven’t been able to forget, the follow up to a proud day. Despite being United States citizens, residents of Puerto Rico are not allowed to vote in the US presidential election. But during Obama’s campaign, I was a resident of New York City, and was owed a vote. On Election Day, I accompanied my American friends to the polls and cast my first vote. Then we hit the bars until decision time.
I got up from my bed the next day, one limb at a time, and went for my purse. I hadn’t lost my phone or wallet—a feat, in comparison to my other hazy nights out—and had somehow acquired about $150 worth of blow. I managed to make it to the bathroom, my muscles strained, my skin stretched tender. As I took off my clothes, I discovered bruises, one by one, strewn across my body. A swamp green one gripped my waist at its dip, another sprawled mauve on my thigh. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten them, whether I’d fallen, who I could have met. After a hot shower, I slept, on and off, through the echo of voices taunting and commanding orders I wouldn’t fulfill. The following morning I went to see a therapist at my school’s Health Center; half an hour later I was on my way to Lennox Hill Hospital.
I turned myself in to a psychiatric unit my senior year of college, in two-day jeans and tee. The male voices that followed me had reached new cruelty, my everyday felt like I was watching a movie, with me removed from my own body. My drinking and cocaine use had gone from recreational to necessary. I’d started to use substances to quiet the voices and gain clarity, not expecting them to come back louder. I was admitted shortly after my evaluation. Told I was going through substance-induced psychosis, I spent eight days at the unit detoxing and going through rehab.
On my fifth morning there, I agreed to be interviewed by a med student, in front of a small class, in lieu of attending my usual art therapy class. A group of five 20-somethings sat in our chairs in the Life Skills classroom, facing the head of the room, where a handsome student-doctor motioned for me to settle in.
The interviewer smiled his most empathetic smile and began by asking me to remember three words, “Sandwich. Yellow. Kangaroo.” I got through questions about my parents’ mental health, my drug use, my moods. I was committed to the truth, real or imagined. He asked, “Have you ever wished to inflict physical harm on someone else?”
I responded, “Like you’ve never wanted to punch someone in the face?”
The class huffed subdued laughs, he smiled and nodded, “Ok.”
As the questions began to poke at my thought process, the less answers I could produce. “Please explain the following phrase,” the student-doctor paused, “people in glass houses should not throw rocks.” He waited for my response, and, after a few seconds, he repeated, “People in glass houses should not throw rocks. What do you think that means?”
I could only picture myself inside a glass house, throwing a rock and shattering a window wall; I couldn’t inform the picture with any connotation. The phrase sounded like a colloquialism, but I’d never heard it before. I approached the question as a literary puzzle, my studies in English the only resource I had. “I feel like it has something to do with opinions? Maybe don’t be a hypocrite?” My nerves were visible in my fingertips, fidgeting with each other.
“It’s ok if you don’t know,” the student-doctor made a note on his notebook. I almost opened my mouth to explain that English was my second language, that I was doing the best I could, but I knew that wouldn’t have any sway. I imagined that, when you’re an inpatient in a psychiatric unit, everything you say is tied together by a silver strand of doubt. “Last thing,” concluded the student-doctor, “What were the three words I asked you to remember?”
“Sandwich. Yellow.” I knew the word that followed, it bounced eagerly in my mouth, “Kangaroo.” Despite the effect of the language gap, my brain was fine. The implication, of course, was that my mind was not sound. My issues were psychological, invisible to neurological medicine. “Great. We’re done.” A quiet nurse escorted me to the group therapy session I attended every day. I sat in my usual spot, and waited for the other members to trickle in.
§
I had spent my high school years swallowing up books and equations, working through the animated objects around me, so I could leave home and study at NYU. I did my best to perfect my English, perfect my idea of being American so that I could execute it in a thriving city, the likes of which I had barely ever visited. New York offered privacy amid the crowd, to be lost and accounted for at once, something I wanted desperately—to keep to myself, to not be asked what was on my mind. You don’t want to know. I had been studying English since second grade, when I was accepted into a private school, under the condition that I improve my skills in the language. The school suggested my parents get cable, “Best for her to train her ear.”
To start my learning, my father and I sat together to watch Saturday morning cartoons, beginning with my favorite, Pinky and The Brain. The show followed two lab mice, one of them an evil genius and his sidekick, a necessary idiot. When we clicked on the television, I expected to hear familiar voices, but instead was faced with distorted ones, one oddly deep and the other suddenly nasal. The words were all wrong, too. The mice sounded garbled and stoic, almost insane. I looked up at my dad, scrunched up brow and quivering lip, “What’s happening?”
“It’s in English,” he answered. “I can help you understand it.” He confused me as much as the mice did.
“But why do they sound different? Fix it!”
“Give it a chance. Pinky y Cerebro is made in English and is translated and dubbed into multiple languages, for a variety of kids. Just because you know them in Spanish doesn’t mean you can’t know them in English too.” We watched the full episode—something about a laser beam and maybe secret agents. I didn’t understand much and depended on my father for plot translation, but by the end I understood something greater that I did not yet have words for. There were full-grown universes in the English language, all of which were ready to welcome my exploration. With every new English word I learned, I realized that connotations in Spanish that were lost in English and vice versa. The same words meant different things. Knowing more than one language taught me we were all living subjective truths. Truths influenced by your idiom. Truths that we shaped, inherently, by putting words to them.
By the time I graduated high school, my vernacular in English mimicked cable TV and my fondness for macaroni and cheese was at its peak. I’d been eager for distance from the island. Not yet diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Puerto Rico never felt stable or safe. I didn’t know the instability and danger lived in my chemistry. The specters that appeared in the corner of my eyes, the undulating walls trying to swallow me—I lived in awe and in fear of my surroundings. I perceived myself to be special and chosen, magical and cursed. The connection between my mood swings and the island solidified with every vision and each incoherence. My dream to attend New York University fulfilled, I left San Juan for the United States mainland with no intention of coming back. New York was the promise of a more stable life, one filled with purpose and potential. But, as they say at home, la fiebre no está en la sabana. Literally, the fever isn’t in the blanket; I couldn’t run from myself.
§
Four years after my inpatient stay, I moved back to Puerto Rico as a result of an intervention. My stay would last as long as it took to get me back to my senses. New York City had mixed with my hallucinations and erraticism concocting a cocktail that had dizzied me. In an especially reckless manic episode, I disappeared off of my friends’ and family’s radar for one week. I had flown to California on a whim, had not told anyone, did not answer calls, did not text back. My parents met me at JFK upon my return, after I finally answered one of their phone calls. In Puerto Rico, my new doctor gave words to my moods—manía and depresión. Just as he warned, once settled in San Juan, I choked on the depressive crash for the first few months of my new life there.
I hadn’t been able to see outside of myself until forced to do so. My eyes opened to Puerto Rico, once the place of my discomfort and now the place for healing. The waves welcomed me back, but I wasn’t ready for their siren song. La fiebre no está en la sabana; I had left the orchestrated chaos of New York, but erraticism lived in me. I missed who I could be in the city, indulgent and carefree. In the United States I was not manic, I was young.
Over coffee and pound cake one tropical morning, an old friend pointed out, “You have a New York accent now. Do you remember Spanish?” She asked me in English. I answered in Spanish, “No creo. I don’t think you can forget your first language.” The words were right but my voice sounded eerily unlike me. It’s not that I didn’t remember the language, it’s that I had forgotten who I was when I spoke it. Spanish was no more a fit than San Juan was. I had left that girl behind.
One morning about a month into my move, I took a seat at the bar of my old favorite cafe and ordered from memory. The barista returned with my ham, egg and cheese on pan sobao—a soft, heavily-kneaded bread—and my iced coffee. Setting down the glass she asked, “Tu vives aqui?”
I told her that, no, I didn’t live here anymore, but had grown up four blocks away. “Vivo en Nueva York.” I live in New York.
“Ah, Nueva York,” she suddenly understood something that escaped me. “Con razón.” Her “No wonder” landed on my iced coffee and floated there. Cold coffee was not common in Puerto Rico outside of American chains and coffee shops in tourist areas, like mine. The idea that you put ice in your coffee was unheard of, and uncalled for, even in a humid, tropical island. The waitress smiled before moving on to another customer, leaving me with a single English phrase, “Welcome!”
My skin had returned to its cinnamon hue, my hair had rebelled against the straightener. But that was not enough to be taken back. New York had seeped in through my pores until city lights blinded me from palm trees.
§
Living in the island, I was never aware that I was a person of color, the same way I never realized I was going insane. There was only one mind I could inhabit, there was no other point of reference. I resided in the country of my parents, and their parents. We were all natives, except for the tourists, noticeable by the language on their lips and the accent in their tongues. Upon moving to New York, people were quick to let me know that I was a minority. No visa, I’m a natural born citizen. Yes, I have a passport. What do you mean “fresh off the boat”? No, I won’t say something in Spanish. La fiebre no está en la sabana; I could not strip my ethnicity off of me, I was foreign by nature. I had spent three years in recovery, rediscovering who I was in the story of my heritage, only for it to be used against me, to be brought to my attention as if I did not know that I looked different, sounded different.
During my freshman year at NYU, a friend asked if she could record me telling a story in English and then again in Spanish for a linguistics assignment. I sat cross-legged on her bed and calmly told her about my parents missing the beginning of my prom. That my prom was a family affair, almost cotillion-like, was already a point of interest. My experience of prom in Puerto Rico was ripe with memories of my parents dancing, me dancing the waltz with my father, and my classmates accompanied by their siblings. I told the story as best I could in English, simultaneously trying to tell the narrative while also adding the right cultural context. Then, I told it in Spanish, hands flinging about, voice reaching new volumes.
“You’re so animated when you speak Spanish!” my friend exclaimed.
Glimpsing the foreign side of me seemed to excite those around me. In a sophomore year writing class, my professor had us write an essay in footnotes. We were to create a bibliography of the works of literature and music that had impacted us, and the footnote descriptions would read as an essay. As we tackled the prompt, she kept circling around to my desk, “I want to see lots of Puerto Rican sources in there!” I secretly worried that I wouldn’t have enough material. The music I listened to, the shows I watched, the books I read had all been in English, from middle school onward. American culture was in my muscles and my words; I feared that my written work would be deemed unsatisfactory and invaluable if it didn’t indulge in my perceived exoticism.
The more the bipolar in me sharpened, the more my identity relied on linguistic cues and stereotypes to create its baseline. One night my second year in New York, in the crowded living room of an acquaintance squinting to listen over music, a lanky white guy in an army jacket told me that I, in fact, was not from Puerto Rico. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you say ‘like’ like an American girl.” He raised his eyebrows as if he’d caught me in a lie.
I rolled my shoulders back. “Excuse me for studying the English language enough to assimilate to you people.” I looked him up and down, gaze deliberate and narrowed, and walked away. I would never be rid of the rolling in my tongue, the curl in my hair. Tell-tale signs that I was made of something else, firmly between foreign and domestic.
I learned how to mold my identity for preservation. In being unable to be fully Puerto Rican or fully American, I toggled between a caricature of each. In Puerto Rico, I waved my hands in rhythm with my talking, I let my voice reach new volumes. With my American friends, I scattered curses and “like” amid my words, I kept my voice even. Chameleon-like and lost, I darkened or cleared depending on those around me. I fell through cracks of my own creation, and my sense of self became more and more malleable. Meanwhile, my hallucinations were developing throughout different senses—through vision, audio and taste. Reality already felt like a dream and dreams felt like memories. There was no telling what was real and what wasn’t, what happened and what didn’t. Not knowing who I was became a part of who I was. I switched my selves with the snap of a finger, with one language or another, with one mood or another. There was no center point, only pendulum swings.
§
A few months into my move to Puerto Rico, I decided to apply for graduate school so as not to waste my time. I began a Masters’ program in English Literature at the University of Puerto Rico and spent my evenings in classes of six or seven, discussing relevancies such as the original English dictionary. Upon finding out that I did my undergraduate studies at NYU, most of my classmates suddenly perceived me as foreign. I had been raised in Puerto Rico but, as far as they were concerned, I had not grown up there. Immediately, I was considered American and, usually, a sell-out. Puerto Rico once again felt temporary.
Even though I planned to leave Puerto Rico after my degree, I still had to create a life there. For the first few weeks of my move I hadn’t left the apartment unless necessary, I said little and napped often. Once settled into my treatment routine, I took to accepting more of my friends’ invitations to go to dinner, walk through Old San Juan, sunbathe at the beach. We drove from San Juan to Guanica, two hours across the island, to visit a sunflower farm and buy flowers. Puerto Rico opened itself to me in a way that I hadn’t seen before. With a tank full of gas, I drove to Ponce, San Juan’s rival city, for famous mofongo; I took a tour of the art museum, in and out of halls, skipping through time like stones: I got coconut ice cream across the street from the historic firehouse, its original structure preserved, painted in stark red and black. When driving felt taxing, I put on sneakers and walked the four miles from our home to El Morro in Old San Juan. I’d stop for coffee in a fan-ventilated cafe and sit facing the window, watching withering folks taking in ocean breeze from their balconies. My friends and I tried new restaurants and bars, we found new beaches and shaded alcoves. Through my tourism, I earned my stake in Puerto Rico, maybe for the first time. I saw the island for what it was—no ghosts or moving walls, no disembodied voices to drown out the coquí.
As stability spread through me, my surroundings crystalized. My loneliness and feelings of exclusion dissipated. Twenty six years after being born in Puerto Rico, I finally felt Puerto Rican. I made plans to return to the United States to obtain a degree in creative nonfiction, this time with more solid footing in my identity. My mood had been stable for over a year, the voices had dissipated, walls were steady. I didn’t have consuming impulses, and I was quit to put out the embers of those that did ignite. Having cleared the clutter from my head, I could fill the space with sticky sand, radiant sun, pasteles and mangoes. I filled it with the things I hadn’t been able to be when actively sick. My citizenship, disorder, and culture were often at odds, but upon leaving the island a second time, I better understood how they related to each other. The salty air of Puerto Rico in my lungs, I carried my new-found sense of self to Westchester County, New York, to attend Sarah Lawrence College for an MFA.
In an attempt to wet my feet in a new life, I went on a date with a guy from Boston my first week back in the mainland. I hadn’t dated while in Puerto Rico, finding my treatment and recovery to be my focus, but I was ready to go back to the boys I’d gotten to know my first life in New York. I knew American boys, I understood them and how to relate to them. I met my first date back through a dating app, a new technological development since the last time I’d dated. We had not spoken outside of text messages and chat boxes. Upon hearing me speak for the first time, he leaned back with a slightly raised eyebrow and said, “I’m kind of turned off there’s no accent.” Stunned, my sudden silence sat between us, an almost apology for being Puerto Rican, but not enough.
I had forgotten the fluency of my own foreignness, it had left me when I became Puerto Rican and had found me again as such, with feet on different land. Finally, I simply answered, “I learned English when I was young. I have a Masters in English lit. I study writing for a living. Yeah, I speak it pretty well.” It was our only date.
The polarity of my moods, the ancestries in my languages, my citizenship—these were mosaicked in me, painting me in parts, in full. I could not choose one self over the other, there was no choice to make. But, in the eyes of others, I could only be one of my selves. La fiebre no está en la sabana; there was no escaping my duality, I would only ever teeter.
Originally from San Juan, Tania Pabón Acosta holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Pigeon Pages, Great River Review, Catapult, The Rumpus and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others, and was chosen for AmpLit Fest’s Emerging Writer Showcase 2018.
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