23 And Me

Here’s an idea: 
a little bit of my spit will determine 
what language I could be speaking, 
what food I should be eating, 
what box I will be ticking. 
I have:
Borders pre-coded into my skin, I have passports
tattooed into the marrow of my bones, 
I have ancestral whispers twisted into the drumbeat of my heart, 
stories and smells and sounds
passed down in skin cells, from warriors
whose bodies are buried in jungles. 

I can fill a test-tube with chemical compounds, 
and mould my flesh into castles without windows for you sir, 
I can send the neurotic, joyful chaos that is ME
to a group of strangers. And pretend 
I’m not afraid. 
And they will map out the hieroglyphs of my history with pins and 
threads made of black wool, 
that stretch from ocean, to mountain, to river. 
They will rewrite the stories I have 
buried deep into the pit of my belly, 
until I am gutted like a fish with bulging eyes, 
and, 
I have, 
no windpipe, 
left to explain to people, 
all the percentages assigned to body parts- see – 
my left leg is from here and my shoulder, 
it’s from over there- 
like a butchers table I will prostrate myself and dissect 
where I’m 
free range and where I’m organic, 
which parts are mass produced and 
what of me is inedible. 

I will 
regurgitate the deaths, the births, the weddings, 
the celebrations I missed because, 
I’ve been trapped here, in the middle, on an island. 
And they have moved on without us. 
I will relearn the stories only half-told from my mother, 
repaint my canvasses until my colours
bleed together violently, 
so no one will ever ask again:
what are you?
Because I shall have the answers! 
Weaponised! Staticized!
and they will fix everything. 
yes. 
they will fix everything. 

Just a little bit of spit, it seems, 
will pull me apart at the seams. 

So, I will swallow my own tongue, 
and before anyone sees, 
I will exit 23 and Me, 
and in six months, 
Return and Repeat. 

---

Submitted by Monika Radojevic.

I wrote this poem after I caught myself doing something odd; repeatedly going to the DNA testing website, 23 and Me, and putting a testing kit in my basket, before backing out and closing the site. I did this every few months because I have mixed heritage and grew up never quite knowing how to explain myself to the many people who asked- because I myself didn’t know the answer. Inevitably, people would contradict my explanations based on their own preconceptions of what I should look, speak and act like, and I had an overwhelming desire to throw some numbers at them to satisfy both of us. 

But the fear of discovering that perhaps I’m not from where I thought I was – that maybe I had been telling myself and everyone else the wrong information – keeps me from taking the step of buying the test kit. When you grow up never clearly belonging to one place, and constantly being reminded of it, when you grow up with unanswered questions and patchy family histories, you build an identity based on what has been passed down to you through story, picture and memory. The incompleteness of that manifests itself in 23 and Me, which confronts both the ‘othering’ and the feeling of being ‘othered’ behind the question, ‘where are you from?’”