LAFFIETTE
My last name is French.
I don’t speak French.
I’m not sure I have even met
a full-blooded French person.
My first name is English,
and though I speak the language,
the language doesn’t speak for me,
or my mother and father.
My skin is black—
or dark brown—to be more precise.
And my hair draws in on itself
at the slightest cloud-kindled cue
of impending rain.
Yet I belong to no tribe,
no clay-strong village.
My tongue has never
uttered the click of name
or smiled in the face of a Ghanan sun;
but instinctively, it calls sweet potatoes “yams,”
having never known the difference.