A Pain Such As This "Are you Indian? Or Egyptian?" Her voice is like a hot iron to the scalp, a feeling I've often felt before, tryin to hide my coils underneath the ruse of straight, artificial style. Wanting something that is not mine. But I push these thoughts away as I shake my head. "No. I'm Ethiopian." "And that's in...Europe?" "Africa." "Oh." They seem to muse over my face for a while, before staring at my hair, whispering, "You don't look African, really. Maybe mixed?" Tingles wash over my face, and I'm sure my smile looks bitter as I release a shaky, "I guess." My grip tightens on the pencil I have in my hand as I think, 'they don't know any better'. Every word that they utter comes from a blissful, deep unknowing, hidden away from the struggle of identifying that came with being from anywhere in Africa, really. In America, I was Black. In Africa, I was Ethiopian-American. In almost every country, though, what has never changed was being the Other. Not quite Black, I would see on their faces, and not quite African, because who can't even write in her own home language? Not quite either, and therefore not quite anything. I let myself be drained by standards. I hid myself under silk press after silk press, Americanized myself with fear of speaking my own language, Amharic, and silenced myself, never allowing anyone to know who I truly was. I buried myself underneath a mask of who I thought I had to be for so long, so long that my hair did not know of braids, my lips did not know of home, and I almost echoed "White." I remember when I was little, I was always a bit afraid of what my dominately White neigboorhood would think of me, what they saw in our Habesha kemis', as me and my mother covered our foot to toe in white and went to Beta Kristian. Would they find us weird? What would they think of us? If only I had known. My skin, my culture, my traditions, are for ME. They could say what they wanted to, if they wished. They could bully me behind their backs, bully my food, my dress, my prayers and my religion as a whole. But I will never, ever stop being who I am for someone else, because I am who I am. If I can help one other Black girl learn this, if I could guide her in the right way so she won't stumble like I have, it would mean the world to me. I've begun this action from tutoring at my school, and from there, helping disadvantaged Black girls using the knowledge I have so that we can get Black women into the best schools, and into every field men have dominated. Because we all know that Black women deserve it just as much as the men do, and no Black girl deserves pain such as this.