Questions
¿Como te llamas?
What do you call yourself? It’s how one might ask your name back home. It is a means of better understanding your identity, a test to see if you belong there. Will your name roll off their tongue with ease? Will it be sweet to taste? Or will it be riddled with trills that are foreign to the lilt of this region and bitter to the taste?
Me llamo Ora.
A conjugation of the Spanish word ‘orar’—my name translates directly to “she prays.” Borrowed by my father from a woman who joined the ancestors decades before he was even a twinkle in his mother’s eye, this name always felt foreign to me. Never quite mine and, as much as I wanted it to, never quite resonating with me. I never felt strong enough to carry this name. Prayer was never a strength of mine.
When I went home, they were struck by my name. Instantly understanding its meaning, its depth, its weight, my self-introduction was always met with a follow-up question:
¿De quien tú eres?
Who do you belong to? It’s how one might ask you where you are from back home. It is a means of figuring out who or what connects you to this particular space and time. What brought you here? Better yet—what keeps you here?
It’s a difficult question to answer.
Who do you belong to?
I belong to myself. Crafted where the gentle waves of the Caribbean Sea meet the harsh waters of the Atlantic Ocean, I am neither here nor there. Always in between, always too much of one thing and not enough of the other. I am the cacophony of sound that is created when you play too many songs at once. I am dissonant and confusing and leave you seeking a resolute chord that you’ll never find.
I am unrecognizable. Inimitable. I transcend—a being so far removed from this world’s preconceptions one might believe me to be an illusion. A figment of the imagination. Not real, certainly not human. Bigger than, greater than and—simultaneously—smaller than, less than. Something to be ignored, pushed aside, and ultimately discarded of. For that is what this world does with things that cannot be understood: annihilate.
And yet, despite this world’s greatest efforts, I am still here. A phoenix that has risen from the ashes countless times. A witch that cannot be burnt. I have not been resurrected nor reincarnated—I simply refuse to be killed.