I Know Why Pecola Wanted the Bluest Eyes

By Decolonial Passage | March 5, 2026

Lauren Washington Creative Nonfiction March 2026

In Fall 2022, I took the course Women and Minorities in Mass Media for my graduate curriculum at Jackson State University. During the second week of class, we discussed how cultural hegemony affects society today, what it shows us about minorities, and how they are represented. After some discussion, our instructor asked us to name a character we saw ourselves in and why, and to explain the relevance and importance of this character in our lives. More specifically, a character we saw on screen. The question got me thinking about any character I have ever seen in which I saw myself, or a version of myself. After honest reflection, I admitted not only to the class, but to myself, that the character I saw myself the most in was Pecola Breedlove, from Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.

I first became acquainted with Toni Morrison after reading Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim. It was the summer before my senior year of high school. My English syllabi throughout grade school never mentioned the Nobel prize author. Not only was I introduced to Morrison, but I also learned of many other Black authors I had not heard of. Edim made the books sound like classics, and yet every book I considered a classic had a White author behind the pen. So, I went on a mission to read more Black authors and found myself holding a copy of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I have read this novel many times since, and I did a study of the novel in a critical analysis theory course during undergrad. I wrote two papers on The Bluest Eye in the 2020-2021 school year and still consider it to be one of my favorite novels. It wasn’t until hearing my professor ask the question about characters that we saw ourselves in that it finally clicked why I loved this book, why I kept writing papers about it, and why it was my response to my professor’s question: I saw myself in the character Pecola Breedlove because I was Pecola Breedlove.

Pecola Breedlove is a dark-skinned Black girl who grew up in Ohio in the 1940s surrounded by White people and their influence. She has only one wish in the world: to have blue eyes. Pecola lives in a world of Eurocentric beauty standards and is criticized every day for lacking those characteristics — dark skin instead of milky white, kinky hair instead of straight, brown eyes instead of blue. What a world it must have been for eleven-year-old Pecola to see how life treated those who had everything she did not? To hear comments on the playground about her skin color, to be picked on because of her hair, to never hear that she was beautiful because the world decided that description was only meant for people who looked nothing like her.

Pecola felt familiar to me because I was a dark-skinned child on white playgrounds. I grew up as one of three Black kids in each grade throughout elementary school, and I attended predominately white schools throughout middle and high school. Among my teachers, classmates, and in extracurricular activities, I was one of the “only ones,” and I began internalizing negative perceptions about my own appearance. I know how Pecola felt when she looked in the mirror and thought she was ugly because her nose was wide and her lips were big. I remember how much I wished, just like Pecola did, that the world treated me like every blonde-hair-and-blue-eyed girl who stood beside me. I never realized I was different from those White girls until my parents told me, and, as I got older, the world continued showing me the same. Seeing how White people were treated and knowing that it was because there was something fundamentally different separating me from them didn’t make me angry. It made me wistful. A world catered to them exactly as they were. How could I not wish to have everything they had?

I saw that beautiful meant straight hair instead of kinky and asked my mom for a perm because all the White girls had straight hair. I saw that beautiful was light skin instead of dark and learned about skin bleaching because all of the pretty girls had lighter skin. I started learning those differences and applied them to my life, and no one was there to tell me not to. Pecola thought that beautiful was blue eyes instead of brown and made it her mission to get those eyes because all the beautiful girls had blue eyes.

I know why Pecola wanted blue eyes … because I wanted them too.

My relation to and identification with Pecola Breedlove wasn’t solely based on a shared wish for blue eyes. Rather, I related and identified with her because I knew Pecola’s exact thought process when she determined having blue eyes was going to make her beautiful. Outside of my own home and church, I was never in areas where I was anything other than the minority. I don’t think anyone truly considers the mental toll this can have on a child. Growing up immersed in a culture different from your own encourages assimilation rather than differentiation, especially when you are lacking positive reinforcements for your own experiences. It is a powerful thing for the world to tell you that you are not enough. We are not stronger than the world by ourselves. How was Pecola supposed to fight off the world’s influence? How was I? Both young, both impressionable, both yearning for a place where we felt loved. Pecola did not grow up loving her blackness because the world wasn’t telling her to. Our society encourages and compliments whiteness and tears down anything that doesn’t fit into that paradigm. Pecola wasn’t told to love her hair, skin, or features; I know that feeling. I wanted to be beautiful, too. I wanted to feel pretty. I wanted what everyone else seemed to have, but they all had the one thing that I didn’t.

I have spent so much of my life wishing to be something other than what I am. I remember thinking I’d be pretty if I was lighter. Maybe if I was slender instead of having curves. A smaller nose instead of a wide one. When everyone around you is different, it is only natural to want to assimilate. When the world is telling you what it deems acceptable, it almost becomes a necessity. I sat in classrooms with White kids and teachers, and I sat in many rooms where I was the only Black kid. Being around them it never felt like a good thing to be Black. Around them, Black always felt like a burden. Until I got older, it didn’t occur to me that there might be an experience different than mine.

For others, blackness was natural. It wasn’t until I was in college that I finally had a Black teacher. I was in graduate school the first time I sat in an academic setting where there were only Black people at the table, and Black women at that. I know why Pecola wanted blue eyes. I know why she was ready to risk her life to fit in. I know why fitting into the white stereotype was at the forefront of her mind. I know why she would rather feel insane in whiteness than sane in blackness. Pecola was a victim of circumstance and had no one to advocate for her blackness. Ultimately, the one thing that saved me from Pecola’s fate was learning there was nothing wrong with my blackness; there was something wrong with my surroundings.

My early years were spent hearing how my education would not be worth as much if it came from a Black institution, and that to hold true to the label of being smart, I had to be educated in white spaces. And yet, I am writing to you now from the campus of my HBCU where I am pursuing my master’s degree. I’ve seen and experienced being Black this past year in a way I never have before, and I have fallen in love with a large part of myself I spent too long denying. The world made me feel like it shouldn’t exist, but I realize now that the society I was exposed to was never meant to encourage me to be Black. Instead, I was supposed to suppress anything that discouraged me from what a white school of thought deemed acceptable. This is why I know Pecola’s struggle, and why I connect with her.

Cultural hegemony influences ideologies about groups of people. We are subjected to a paradigm which both consciously and subconsciously affects our lives. Our racially biased media encourages some things and discourages others. Because the world convinced Pecola that her blackness was not enough, she succumbed to believing that whiteness was. I spent most of my life thinking that Black people had no spaces in which we were safe from the white gaze, and that we would have to spend our lives assimilating into a white society. Because of my surroundings, I knew nothing else. Yet here I am, living and realizing that is not true. I held onto the belief that when I found myself immersed in different circumstances, in different surroundings, and with different people, it would change me. I am happy to say that I was right.

There are many things I learned and am still unlearning. I had many perceptions and misconceptions about being Black, all of which shaped my views about Black people. I often think about how different my life would have been if I had had a Black teacher when I was younger or if I had seen a Black heroine in the stories I read. Where would I be now if I had been introduced to more images of blackness and told it was okay for me to be me? Pecola Breedlove was not exposed to positive images or affirmations regarding herself or other Black people. Unlike Pecola, I am now at a point in my life where I know all the things that make me Black also make me beautiful. And I know that my experience of not having as much Black culture does not negate my blackness. I am all of my experiences, and I remain Black through them all. One of the hardest lessons in my life was learning that is okay. I fought the societal belief that I had to be something other than who I was in order to be successful and accepted. And I won.

Coming from predominantly white spaces to now existing in spaces where being Black is a footnote in my life rather than a defining characteristic, I am grateful for my journey. People will spend their whole lives wishing to conform to the world instead of living their truth. I conformed, but now I am free. And this is the only space I desire to exist in now. I know why Pecola wanted blue eyes. But I no longer do.

Lauren Washington is a North Louisiana native with a passion for reading, and rediscovering her passion for writing. You can keep up with her reading and writing journey on Instagram at @laurenreads.alot.

Crafting “How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky”

By Decolonial Passage | March 1, 2026

joanne godley creative nonfiction march 2026

Growing up in the Motor City (aka Motown) during the sixties, I was a politically precocious child. My parents had been Black members of the Communist Party when they lived in Greenwich Village, a decade before moving to Detroit. McCarthyism had been at its height, and Americans, Black and white, suspected of being pro-Communist were publicly rebuked, blacklisted, jailed, and, sometimes, had their passports revoked. The country frenetically searched for Communists under beds and behind closed doors. I can only imagine that the raging anti-communist sentiment of that era contributed to my parents’ decision to remain close-mouthed about their political beliefs, even to their own children. Fortunately, two Negro graduates from the University of Michigan, my father from the medical school and my mother from the school of nursing, who both hailed from unassuming southern families, were not high on McCarthy’s radar. And although they never shared their political history with me or my siblings, the books they made accessible to us, the television programs we could and could not watch, and their discourse about the Civil Rights movement and of Black historical events, all helped shape my worldview. My father established a large medical practice in Detroit, where a majority of the Black populace had migrated from the South and where the labor union movement was robust. He exposed us to values and practices he hoped would give us a head start in a society he knew did not nurture Negroes.

As soon as I was old enough to hold up a sign, my mother drafted me to accompany her to labor union rallies and civil and human rights marches where we protested nuclear bomb testing, demanded an end to the Cold War, urged the legalization of abortion, and called for freedom for all political prisoners.

Each time we attend a march,

she clasps my hands around the wooden handle

to demonstrate how I should hold my sign

as we join fellow protesters . . .

My mother is a patient teacher in the art of protest

and explains the how’s and whys of saying “no”

to the Establishment, her word, not mine.

Among my childhood friends, mine was the only mother who was a self-proclaimed existentialist and whose bookshelves contained authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, and Bertrand Russell. I do not recall seeing bookshelves in most of my friends’ homes. My mother also made clear her intentions to visit every socialist and/or communist country on the globe.

One of the most interesting aspects of my mother’s parenting style, is that she did not simply read existentialist philosophical theory, she embodied it. When I left home to attend Stanford University for undergraduate education, she said, “If I don’t hear from you, I will assume that everything is alright.” That became her mantra. While my freshman classmates were fielding calls from their parents who were anxious for an update about classes, or adjustment issues, or grades, my phone was silent. My mother believed in the singular freedom of the individual to grow and follow his or her own path. When she accompanied my brother, Paul, to Yale College for the start of his freshman year, she kissed and hugged him at the quadrangle gates and then walked past other students’ mothers carrying supplies to decorate their darlings’ dorm rooms.

The ideologies of my parents were best reflected in the music they played in our home. During weekday dinners or on weekends, their vinyl records filled the house with a rich mixture of folk protest songs, prison work songs, Negro spirituals, and classical music. My mother’s record collection included Odetta, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and Harry Belafonte, along with a smattering of blues singers. My dad was a classical music aficionado. He also shared with my mother a fondness for Paul Robeson’s deep tenor and his unrelentingly passionate songs highlighting the plight of the oppressed. It made sense that their firstborn boy, my first sibling, was named Paul, in honor of Mr. Robeson. Paul Robeson was blacklisted on charges of un-American activities during the 1950s. I knew that story inside and out, like some children knew the story of Hansel and Gretel. I had a vague awareness that my parents were oddities compared to my friends’ parents and that our household was not your typical Negro household.

Immersion in books was my solace, my joy, and my retribution, even when I could not comprehend all what I read. My parents had a large library to which I was given free range. No book in the room escaped my perusal. They possessed a bound copy of the petition presented to the United Nations in 1951 entitled We Charge Genocide. The book was compiled by William L. Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress and charged the United States government with genocide against Negro Americans. Page after page of this document contained black and white photographs of Black men hanging awkwardly from trees, each with a synopsis detailing the circumstances that resulted in their murder.

Curled up on a plush sofa in our family room with the book in my lap, I peered at the photos, pondering them with morbid fascination. I traced the dark figure with my finger and tried to imagine the scene. What did this man feel when the crowd held him down? Did the smells–of chewing tobacco, putrid sweat—make him recoil? Did the crowd jeer or was there anticipatory silence as they slung the rope tight around his neck? Did he flail and kick in anger until some rednecks beat him into submission? Or did icy fear prevent any resistance on his part? In those last seconds before his neck snap-popped, did he ask himself or his God, “Why me?” I asked this question for him and for each person pictured on those pages: Why? Who would do such a thing as string another human being to a tree by his neck?

Who does this? It’s a rhetorical question,

because I see the white people gathered around the trees, watching.

Why would anyone even consider burning a person alive? What type of society was this that condoned atrocities such as cutting off a man’s penis and stuffing it in his mouth? Yet, these narratives were about real people whose lives ended in horrific and grotesque ways because of their skin color. The revulsion and the disquietude that I experienced after reading the book resonated deep within me.

After reading, We Charge Genocide, something within me snapped. I felt as though I was standing on the bank of an island watching as the rest of the country drifted further off into the distance. I felt disenfranchised, disembodied, and, disconnected from the concept of being American. I no longer wanted to have anything to do with this country or the things that America stood for. This was my first experience of feeling like an outsider in my own country and the point at which I pledged to someday become a native expatriate.

Around this time, I began writing poetry and titled my small collection of poems, Poems of Black Pessimism. I wrote in reaction to sociopolitical events and my poems were deeply introspective. At fourteen, I grappled with the question of what it meant to be a Black person in America. The Detroit Free Press, a local newspaper, ran a poetry contest around the same time and my poems were front and center:

The French are home in France

Spaniards retreat to Spain

I looked in vain for Negro-land, But

The whereabouts of the country escaped me

Perhaps it has been drained for lack of popularity.

Not long thereafter, I was contacted by Dudley Randall, the then-editor of Broadside Press, a Black literary press based in Detroit. He expressed interest in seeing more of my work and I made a slow motion note of his request. I say slow motion because giving him a copy of my poems meant my having to retype each one of them. Computers did not yet exist. Circumstances would prevent me from executing my plan. Some fifty-plus years later, I marvel that my poetry is being published by the same press.

My father disavowed formal membership in organizations that embraced class distinctions within our Black community, although, such groups were popular. I attended public schools, from elementary through high school. My brothers and sister attended private Quaker schools. We were forbidden to participate in Detroit’s elite Jack and Jill social club. We were shipped off to private summer camps but could not attend Cotillion balls—another hallmark of Black high society. My parents frowned upon membership in Black fraternities and sororities. As a result, I didn’t grow up yearning for the social trappings of Black society. That is not to say that I was not comfortable with material trappings. I was. But I harbored a modicum of outrage that racial, class, and economic disparities needed to exist. From my oversimplified perspective, there was enough wealth to go around such that everyone could be provided the basics.

It was the mid-sixties, and the tumult of the Civil Rights struggle was front and center in the news.

On black and white TV, Civil Rights marches chokehold the news.

Aunties are composed, in shirtwaist dresses and tiny-heeled pumps.

Uncles stand proud, in suits, white shirts, and ties. They’re dressed to vote.

They try to be brave as German Shepherds chomp at their ankles.

Fire hoses squelch their will. Dying to vote. They are dying to vote.

Other competing news items included the Vietnam War, Malcolm X’s death, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and the emergence of the Black Panther Party.

I initially joined the Young Socialist Alliance, an organization at my high school. The group was comprised of white teenagers whose political idealism surpassed my own. Then I enlisted in the Black Panther Party at the age of fifteen. The group was not sponsored by my high school. I was attracted to the fact that these were young Black people, knowledgeable of our history and oppressed status, who were taking matters into their hands and pushing back at the system.

they render the revolution

an enticing taboo and brandish big guns–

these black activists–shaking, moving,

molding history with their hands

I wish I could say that my political activities were supported by my parents, particularly, given their own historical political involvement. Quite the opposite. My father’s reaction was so extreme as to haunt me for many years to come. It was one of the reasons I invested in therapy as soon as I began working and could afford it. When I began writing, after many years, it was the one thing I dared not write about. Why? Too triggering.

Of course, when I began my MFA program, my first professor, Kwame Dawes, said, “You should write about that which you are afraid to write.” He inspired me to take the plunge, peel back the time, and enter the era of my teenage participation with the Detroit Black Panther Party. Initially, I was scared to reminisce. I was terrified to touch the wound. But I began writing, little by little. I am still unsure whether I will share the work with the elders in my family who are alive. The jury is still out on that issue. Some of my elders insist that their memories of what transpired in the 1960s are different than mine.

In my very first poem about the Black Panthers, I evoked the image of myself hailing a Black cat like a cab and climbing on.

I hailed that Cat

like a gypsy cab

threw my leg

over its wild part

and clutched its warm recesses

I rode with revolutionary wile

into the city’s bowels

then rose up through its consciousness

flying high like Icarus

It did not then occur to me to employ the myth of Icarus, either in the title or as a recurrent theme throughout the collection. It took my attendance at a lecture on mythology by Mahtem Shiffraw in which she emphasized the importance of creating echoes employing myth to provide cohesion in a body of work.

Initially, I thought of titles such as Running with the Panthers. The manuscript was a coming-of-age narrative, and I envisioned myself hanging out with the Panthers, in the vernacular sense. As the collection grew and I began to weave in the poetic connection with Icarus, it became clear to me that, as much as this was my story, it was really about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party. Fall as in the literal sense. The title declared itself: How the Black Panthers Fell from the Sky. The explicitness of the title allowed me to situate my personal story within the larger framework of the Black Panther Party’s decimation by the federal government. It also gave me room to create speculative narratives as to why the Black Panther Party was destroyed.

Joanne Godley is a thrice-nominated Pushcart and Best of the Net poet and writer, and a recent MFA graduate from Pacific University. Godley’s work has appeared or is forthcomingin Crab Orchard Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. She is an Anaphora Arts Fellow in poetry and fiction. How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky, is a memoir-in-verse and Godley’s first poetry collection. It won the Naomi Long Madgett award for 2025 and will be published in 2026. You can find her at Joannegodley.com, on Instagram at @indigonerd, and on Bluesky at jgodley-doctorpoet.bsky.social

Pushcart Prize Nominations 2025

By Decolonial Passage | December 5, 2025

Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the nominations for next year’s Pushcart Prize Anthology. This list includes writing published during the 2025 calendar year. Congratulations to the nominees!

Poetry

Jesse Gabriel Gonzalez – “Moon Blues”

Yanis Iqbal – “and how shall i walk when the street sings of fire?”

Short Stories

.Chisaraokwu. – “The Visitor”

Essays/Memoirs

Bright Aboagye – “Do They See You?”

Stone Mims – “A Letter to My Grandfather”

Kimberly Nao – “I, too, am California”

Best American Essays Nominations 2025

By Decolonial Passage | November 12, 2025

Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the nominations for next year’s Best American Essays Anthology. This list includes writing published in 2025. Congratulations to the nominees!

“A Letter to My Grandfather” by Stone Mims

“I, too, am California” by Kimberly Nao

“Eid Mubarak, America” by Gemini Wahhaj

Do They See You?

By Decolonial Passage | October 13, 2025

bright aboagye creative nonfiction october 2025

All you ever wanted was to be seen. For someone to read your writing, give remarks, identify you, respond, criticize, and recognize your work. Although it never happens, you share your writing: hoping it will resonate, hoping they will love it, hoping someone will notice your tone, hoping that life will be better after all.

No retweets, no reshares, not even a casual, “This was nice.”

And every time, there’s a distinctive level to the pitch following the uncountable rejections you have received: from the magazines you admire, from people who claim to “support upcoming writers.” And every time you send work to them, there’s a beauty in how they bounce back to you with an “unfortunately”.

The sadness wells up, pushing at the back of your eyes, threatening to tumble and rain down. Your mind floats to everything you’ve tried. Every thought that has rained in your mind. You just want to be heard, to have someone see you, for people to read and cherish the gift/curse you’ve always had.

***

You’d written what you thought was your best. You spent hours reading and rereading, trying to get it just right. And still, they didn’t see you. And when someone finally did, they didn’t listen. They didn’t understand the fight in your words, the way you were writing for more than yourself, for your family, for your future, and for the dreams you thought were simply living in your head.

Every story you wrote was a piece of your life. You’d disguised it in other characters and other settings, but it was always you in there: your struggles, your hopes, your truths, dancing with reality within the lines.

***

That night, as you walk into Valco Hall, the heavens open into you, and you look for a sign to sort your problems. You think about what you’ll say to Fatau, your roommate. You’ll ask him for help for the first time. You don’t want to; nonetheless, you’re running out of options. You don’t want to bother your mother. She’s done too much already, always standing by you, always encouraging you even when things were hard. You know she doesn’t have the money.

Today feels like your last chance. You know Fatau will say yes if you ask. He’s kind, always thoughtful, and has shown you how good he can be. However, you’re not close to him. You’ve never been close to anyone.

Most of the time in the room, it’s just you. Talking to yourself, laughing at your own jokes, planning stories in your head, and speaking out loud to yourself. You’ve read your drafts alone and clapped for yourself because no one else ever did. Fatau never noticed. He probably thought you were mad. Or he never heard you probably.

When you step into the room, his friend is there. The one with the braids, the one from your mother’s home country. You’ve never told him that. He might ask too many questions, and you don’t feel the urge to answer him. You are never fond of sharing too much about yourself.

You greet them, but they don’t even look up. They’re busy, playing on the PS5, their faces lit up by the movements on the screen and their mouths shouting out words to people who only live in such realities. You move around the room, from your bed to the balcony, hoping both will notice you, say something. Recognize your agitation. They don’t.

That’s how it’s always been.

***

You think about the time you tweeted, tagging all those advertising agencies, hoping someone would see it. No one did. You remember scrolling through LinkedIn, sending messages to HR managers, and pouring out your heart into every word. One of them read your message. You saw the “seen” tick, but he never replied.

In your emails, you even said, “If you’re not interested, just send me a rejection. I’ll understand.” They didn’t bother. You followed up, again and again, sending more messages into the same nothingness.

You think back to the time you waited for a response from Ogilvy, your dream company. The delay dragged on until you gave up, deciding to move on and start school again. Then, out of nowhere, they called you for an interview. You sat across from them, explaining that you were now back in school. They nodded politely, and you knew in that second, the job was gone before it even began.

You remember that day. The day you received a call from Insel Communications, the rush of adrenaline as you checked your balance. Twenty-five Ghana cedis. Just enough for an Uber to East Legon. You booked the ride anyway, stomach tight with worry, but excitement overflowing in your soul the way a caged bird sings of freedom. You had been waiting for this.

The boss was accommodating. He was short and made sure his words carried the room, making him taller than his frame. He was in a meeting. You knew it had to be the Gong Gong Awards. You had spent nights combing through industry articles, memorizing jury members’ names like a desperate student before an exam. Your life, at that point, revolved around these professionals, their movements, their triumphs. You followed them the way the tide follows the moon — pulled, fidgety, unable to resist, and determined to play its part.

Then you saw him.

A glance. No! It was a frozen second suspended on the screen, appearing with every wish that you had once made to be near him.

Andrew Ackah. The man whose career you had studied the way Christians study the scripture. His words had guided your dreams, his achievements, a map to places you wanted to go. You had stalked his life online, knew the places he worked, the books he recommended, the speeches he gave, and even where he stayed with his family. And now, here he was, a few feet away, discussing something with the director of Insel online. You needed the job more than anything just so you could… be so close to your industry idol, just so your dreams could sprout from the ground.

While still in the meeting, the director turned to you and asked about your favorite book.

“Gone Girl” you said without thinking. A lie. A reflex. You couldn’t have told him the truth. You couldn’t have said your favorite book was by Akwaeke Emezi, a writer whose words were home to you but whose identity you feared would betray you before you even had a chance.

Then came the test. The page in front of you looked surprising. The creativity you carried as a second skin abandoned you. This is copywriting? You knew, even before handing the horrible handwriting back to them, that you weren’t going to get the job. The Uber fare had been a gamble you lost. So, you walked.

From East Legon to Bawaleshie to Legon. The rain came down in sheets, filling your shoes, soaking into every piece of your trousers and the white boxer shorts you bought before the Kantamanto fires. You prayed. Not for another job, not even for a sign. It should just be for something, anything, to remind you that you were still headed in the right direction.

Four days later, hunger was eating itself around your stomach. You lay on your bed, staring at the ceiling when your phone rang. Regina, an administrator from another company. A meeting on Monday.

This time, you borrowed from MTN Quick Loan.

The journey was long. A crawl through traffic, through neighborhoods that screamed wealth and places you had never been. The estate was lovely, your first time in one. You wanted to work there. To belong there, to smell like them. And you crossed your hands to do your best in the interview.

Thomas, the boss, liked you or so you thought. You could tell from the way his eyes shone when you spoke, the way he nodded, delighted and impressed with your background.

“Great diction,” he said. “You’re eloquent. You have quite a presence.”

And for a moment, just a moment, you believed you had finally found a place where you fit.

Then you walked out, the door clicking shut behind you. But something kept your feet planted just outside, your breath moving in rhythm to your curiosity. You listened to him and the other board members.

Laughter. Its sound had cruelty in its throat. The one that stung more than mosquito bites.

“He’s too effeminate. Probably gay. Sounds too much like a girl.”

The words cut like glass lodged in the gums, impossible to ignore. And your mouth opened in shock to the words. Your breath faster, heartbeat swifter, the promise of belonging disappearing behind the door as you bid bye to the estate.

They never called back.

And despite your follow-ups, your emails, and your polite check-ins, the silence was its own kind of answer.

***

It wasn’t the first time life had teased you with possibilities only to snatch them away. After your bachelor’s degree, you struggled just to start National Service. When you finally got a placement, you worked hard, but no one noticed. You felt invisible. It’s almost as if you didn’t exist in the same world as everyone else. You were a ghost people spoke to when needed and ignored when you desired them to see you.

You dreamed of studying abroad, of leaving everything behind to start fresh. But when you asked for help, no one came through and it was a battle too big for you to even start. After National Service, you sat at home, endlessly applying for jobs. Every email you sent felt more personal than the last, and the rejection came like rain in June.

You thought going back to school would fix everything. Another degree?! Surely that would open doors you reassured yourself. You gathered what little savings you had left to buy the university forms, not even sure where the money to pay the fees would come from.

Your mother, who always stood by you and supported you, scraped together what she could. She used the last of her savings to help pay half the fees after you got admission. That left you to figure out how to survive.

Feeding yourself? You didn’t know how you’d manage, so you left it in God’s hands and hoped for the best.

***

The first day you walked into Legon Interdenominational Church, you hoped to find something more than sermons and praises. Perhaps someone there would see you, connect with you, and perhaps help you. Instead, you got leftover food and free meals from the events you attended. You were grateful and ashamed, feeling smaller with every bite that you took.

And then there was love. Or at least, what you thought was love. It arrived like a promise and left you the way a bad memory is never forgotten. Your honesty became a joke; your confession was something to laugh about, and the betrayal following it stung so painfully in your heart that it left you questioning if anything in your life was real.

***

You think about the day you wanted to end it all. You were tired. Too tired of fighting, exhausted from trying, bushed out of feeling as though nothing you did would ever be enough. That was the day someone finally noticed you. He reached out to help, but even then, he didn’t listen. He didn’t hear the way you were saying you couldn’t take it anymore. He should have just let you be without interfering with your journey to the next life.

And you’re still here. Somehow, you kept going on.

It’s hope that keeps you moving, stubborn, and persistent in the way a weed grows out through a crack in the pavement. Or maybe it’s just the voice inside you that refuses to give up.

Now, you stand on the balcony with the cool metal rail under your fingers as you stare out at the night. You feel invisible; you always do. A part of you wants to scream, to force the world to turn and look at you. The words fail you. Your mouth is buried inside.

Sometimes, you wonder if it’s because you’re a man — the reason no one sees you and makes your struggles easy to ignore. You think about the female celebrities whose beauty seems to do all the talking, opening doors and winning attention in ways you can’t.

You blame something bigger. It’s not you at all. Possibly, it’s the country: the way it feels like it’s designed to work against you and the way your soles crack from running around. You keep trying, putting in the effort. Trying, and yielding to a lack of results. It’s as if the system is broken. As if no matter how hard you try, the soil just won’t give back your results.

It feels like God has forgotten you. He doesn’t see you. You’ve prayed so many times, poured out your heart, fasted, and still nothing changes. No answer, no sign, no rain. Just nothing. The faith you once held onto so tightly now feels shaky, and it could slip away at any point in time.

You climb into bed, your roommate and his friend still glued to their video game, still not paying you any attention. You pull the sheet over your head, trying to block out the world and let everything disappear. The sadness feels enormous. It’s pulling you under, and you let it. You let your thoughts carry you away, far from the noise, far from everything. Far into somewhere else.

Bright Aboagye counts Aja Monet and Akwaeke Emezi amongst his influences. He dreams of becoming a surrealist blues poet, writer, and restaurant entrepreneur. Bright hopes that his work inspires and gives hope to all who engage with it. He can be found on Medium, Blogspot, and Linkedin.

Best of the Net Nominations 2025

By Decolonial Passage | October 8, 2025

Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the 2025 nominations for the Best of the Net Anthology. This list includes writing published between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. Congratulations to the nominees!

Poetry

“His Tousled Hair, His Toothly Grin” by Eric Braude

“color you dark” by Ashley Collins

“The Ancestor’s Song” by Leslie Dianne

“Sonics” by Joanne Godley

Fiction

“Michael, Deportee” by Stephenjohn Holgate

“From Glasgow Without Love” by Albrin Junior

Creative Nonfiction

“I, too, am California” by Kimberly Nao

“Note From Nonpeople” by Serhat Tutkal

Ocean Antidote

By Decolonial Passage | September 19, 2025

lauren mcneil creative nonfiction september 2025

The first time I saw her, she stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. I’ve never seen God, but I imagine it’s like taking in the ocean for the first time. The ocean was my home — the only home I ever knew. The ocean kept me alive and gave me hope for the future.

A future where I could be with her for all eternity.

At eight years old, I came home to an empty house, overwhelmed, scared, and exhausted. I could only call my mom in case of emergencies. Unfortunately, fear was not an emergency. I pulled my blue beach bucket out from the closet and meticulously laid all my shells on the floor. I carefully placed each one on paper towels and sorted them according to how they made me feel. Now, I realize why the bucket was so special to me. It represented freedom. The freedom to cry, the freedom to be heard, the freedom to be seen, and the freedom to live judgment-free. My life seemed full of struggle, even my early years reeked of trauma.

My childhood wasn’t the worst, nor was it a cakewalk. It was marked by abuse, emotional neglect, and abandonment. I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood and attended a private Catholic school where I was one of six Black children. I endured years of being made fun of for having “nappy” hair, being “ashy,” “too loud,” “too ghetto,” and “too fat.” When I went home, the neighborhood kids called me “White girl,” said I “talked White,” told me I tried to sound “too smart,” and teased me for wearing a uniform.

I look back on those times, and I’m grateful my mother didn’t keep a gun in the house. Kids can be cruel. I lived in a constant state of anxiety, fear, anger, and self-loathing. I remember longing for death in elementary school. Why am I here? What’s the point of living? No one wants me here. In those moments of desperation, I imagined the ocean’s waves crashing on the shore and beckoning me to reunite with her. The second my feet hit the sand, none of that mattered. The warm sand on the soles of my feet and the grainy beads between my toes instantly cheered me up.

I always bring books to read at the beach, but I never read them. You would think that after decades of going to the beach, I would have learned to leave my books at home. I haven’t. The beach awakened my inner child — the child who didn’t get to exist outside of the beach, the latch-key kid, the kid who had too much responsibility, the child whose dad left and whose mom emotionally departed around the same time, the kid who was misunderstood and bullied.

She came alive at the beach.

My favorite beach gift was sand dollars. I kept them on top because they were fragile, and I loved them the most. The bumpy, slightly porous texture of the outside and the beautiful pentagon star-shaped holes in the middle made them priceless to me. I held each one. I relished feeling the cold, hard shells in my hand, tracing each groove with my fingers. I rubbed the textured ones against my cheek, closed my eyes, and imagined myself lying in the sand. I felt the waves pulling and pushing my body. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was these small moments of visualization that rescued me from darkness.

No beach trip was complete without seashells. I came home with my bucket full and happily relived the day. The beach is one of the only places on Earth that bestows gifts freely. As a kid, I remember the shore being filled with shells of all sizes. Perfectly shaped, no cracks, no holes, for as far as the eye could see.

Now, the beach gifts have changed. There are no more sand dollars. I would have better luck finding an intact kidney than an unbroken conch shell. All the years of being polluted and pillaged have finally taken their toll on her. Despite this, she still provides food, life, and shelter for countless species, including us. I decided to stop taking shells and enjoy her beauty while I still can.

The cool air reignites my childlike innocence. The saltwater, dripping down my face, cleanses me of all emotions. The once-cold water now feels like the most heavenly bath. I never want to leave. I long to be a mermaid who can swim away from this life on land and be amongst those who accept me in the sea. The ones who love me no matter the color of my skin, regardless of my pants size, and despite my shoes. They embrace me. Submerged in the blue-green water, I feel the comfort of being in the cosmic womb and the unconditional love and scorn of a parent who disciplines me whenever the limits are pushed.

Looking out into the distance, I feel humbled by the vast open ocean. Water to my left, water to my right. The powerful waves knock me down and lure me back for more. Now and then, I feel something brushing past me, a colorful fish or a sprig of seaweed. I’m delighted and fascinated, watching schools of fish swim so close. Bright blues and pale yellows dance in the water around my feet. The water is so clear, I can see through to the bottom. No lifeguard forces me to take a 15-minute break. I happily float for what feels like hours on my back. The heat from the bright white sun beams down on my skin. I feel like the happiest Thanksgiving turkey.

The ocean saved my life on numerous occasions…I wonder if she knows.

Does she know that other than my daughter, she was the only one who stopped me from hurling myself off a cliff in 2023? When I lost everything within a couple of months. When I discovered the love of my life lied about our entire relationship. Resented my daughter and me. Lured me to Durham under false pretenses. Strung me along with talk of marriage. Lied about me like a dog, painted me out to be a narcissist, posted my intimate photos and videos on websites for all to see, and created fake profiles using my information to spite me. Does she know that the grief almost broke me? That the embarrassment destroyed me? I lost all trust in people.

Can she sense that it was only memories of being with her that comforted me? The solace of feeling her warm embrace enveloping my body. I closed my eyes and imagined I was there, with her…in her, and for a moment, thoughts of her gave me respite from the torment. Focusing on her relieved me from intrusive thoughts. The times when doors were broken, laundry baskets thrown, and threats made. When I ignored red flags and inflated green ones.

It was only the smell of salt and seaweed carried by the breeze on a humid day that eased my pain.

Lauren McNeil is thrilled to make her literary debut on Decolonial Passage and grateful for the opportunity to share her voice. Before this publication, you could find her writing in random notebooks, on scraps of paper, or on the Notes app on her phone. A former nurse turned budding creative, she eagerly seeks out opportunities to share her unique perspective. She is a beacon of light in dark places and hopes to inspire future generations. You can find her on Substack and on YouTube.

Eid Mubarak, America

By Decolonial Passage | August 27, 2025

gemini wahhaj creative nonfiction august 2025

When my daughter was in daycare, I wanted to let everyone know about Eid. I bought dates, teamed up with another mom, asked to go to a class and share what Eid was with the class. I read a Bengali folk tale for children from a children’s book. Then, we lit candles, and the smoke alarm went off. It was her third year in daycare — a time when my daughter was falling off the end of the world. In her first year, she was happy. At first, she didn’t know the language, so she would wait the whole day until she saw me, then run towards me and burst into tears.

But the third year, it was the bullying. She wanted to be white. She drew herself white with blonde, straight hair and blue eyes. When a friend bleached his hair white, she kept asking him questions. Another friend and I locked eyes. We both knew what was going on in her mind. At that time, I asked many friends what to do. I asked my classmates who then referred me to other moms who also spoke to me about what children of color face in school at a young age and how to deal with it. So much figuring out, how to fit in, how to make things better for my daughter — a child growing up in America.

“I sacrifice so much for her. Why doesn’t she understand how loved she is?” I said to my husband. “I don’t even brush my hair!”

“Why don’t you brush your hair? Why do you look like that? Maybe if you dressed nicely, she would look up to you.”

In the end, this was the strategy I chose, which seems strange to me now. I’m not the same person. I dressed up in shalwar kamiz with the gold earrings my mother had given me. I also wore a teep on my forehead.

I went to pick up my daughter.

“What’s that on your head?” a child asked, pointing.

“Hush,” the teacher said, as if what I had on my head was something shameful.

I brought teeps for all the girls as gifts. I went to Bangladesh in the summer, and I brought back bangles and little cloth dolls to give away. We watched Hindi movies on a VCR, and I dressed my daughter in gaudy dresses, jewelry, teep, so she would have her own standard of beauty, her own role models, her own cheap, cheesy way of being feminine.

The atmosphere among girls at that age in America is toxic. Girls watch Disney movies and dress and think of themselves as Disney princesses. She didn’t watch TV. She didn’t know anything the other girls were talking about, so they excluded her. But also, the clownish racist exclusion of someone with dark skin and curly hair, and adoration of another girl with white skin seems outlandish to even write about. The teacher said, “There is no racism here.” Of course. So, we watched these movies so my daughter would be able to join in the conversation and fit in. My professor explained that at this age, girls are arranged in hierarchies according to the status of the moms — like a hive around the queen bee. I scheduled playdates, threw parties, positioned us as a family in the hive.

Another dad with a daughter in an older class suggested bending the princess trope, introducing her to other versions of fairy tales, so we read The Paper Bag Princess and watched Kiki’s Delivery Service at his recommendation. (I really admired a lot of these fractured, fairy tale picture books and still love them.)

I surrounded myself with allies and we survived.

I don’t do that anymore. I don’t want to share, to be known, accepted. I write fiction rather than essays because what I have to say is not welcome. Even in my stories, I want to establish a faraway voice at a remove. It seems so long ago, the earnestness, the frenzy of wanting to be known, to explain. I would be embarrassed by the me of that time.

I don’t enjoy being in these spaces or the ways in which I have to compromise, grovel, demean myself to be in the room. In 2014, Obama had iftar in the White House. Many Muslims attended, gleeful, while Gaza was being bombed, with full support from Obama and the Senate. I asked one of them online why they would go to such an event, and they mumbled something about making space for Muslims. During the Ramadan one year while I was a student at Princeton, Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq. All the years that I have lived in the US — first as an international student, then as a mom, and an employee — have left me wandering the halls alone during Ramadan and Eid. I associate Ramadan and Eid now with silence, a complete erasure in our schools and places of work, with the added bonus of a bombing campaign somewhere.

Now it is Eid again. My daughter is in college. Sick, I asked for leave from work. I asked to teach online. While negotiating, I realized it’s Eid. Every year, I either have to take the day off as a personal day, have my children miss school, or come to work, and just go about quietly pretending nothing is going on.

I am an atheist.

I thought I would send an email out to everyone at work, wish them Eid Mubarak. Just to let them know. Then I asked myself, “Why? What does it matter when countries are being bombed?”

Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025) and the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13
Books, Fall 2023). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third
Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other magazines. You can find her at GeminiWahhaj.com.

I, too, am California

By Decolonial Passage | June 18, 2025

kimberly nao personal essay june 2025

I never had a crush on David Lee Roth, but he had a crush on me. And, he sang a song about it. You remember the video. David dressed as a tour guide leading tourists through sunny California, dancing around bikini clad girls singing, “I wish they all could be California girls…” On the beach, at a movie studio, so many girls in bikinis and with big Aqua Net stiff hair teased up much higher than David’s golden locks. He just loves these California girls. And well, that’s me. But wait…

There are no brown-skinned girls in this video. Tan, yes. Brown? No. And my hair? My hair is actually too big to be teased up to look big. My hair is long almost down my back, but it’s thick and frizzy and more like Diana-Ross-Central-Park-in-the-rain concert hair than bikini-clad-blonde-on-Venice-Beach hair. So, am I a California girl?

In fact, it wasn’t David Lee Roth’s song anyway. It was the Beach Boys’ song. They’re the original ones who loved California girls. As long as they had blonde-bobs-on-the-beach hair. Yes, bikinis and tanned bods. Not the 80s, but women in the 60s doing the jerk while the band defines the quintessentially endless summer sound and California lifestyle. And there are no brown skinned girls.

There’s cute, perky surfer girl Gidget. Not Sally Field Gidget. But Sandra Dee Gidget. The one that personified the California vibe in the 60s. The one that made everyone who wasn’t a Californian want to move to California and buy a surfboard and live on a Malibu beach for the summer. And it was always summer. Blonde Gidget. Is it her? Is Gidget the culprit? Is she the one that made every media image of a California girl thereafter blonde, tan, and bikini clad?

Seriously there are so many California blondes. Not just any blondes but the ones that defined the “California girl.” The Bionic Woman. I did not have a crush on David Lee Roth, but I did have a crush on the Bionic Woman. She was blonde and beautiful and could rip the yellow pages in half. And she had a bionic ear that could hear across long distances. I mean miles. She would push a blonde lock behind her ear and listen. Apparently bionic ears can hear for miles, but they cannot hear through hair. I couldn’t push a lock of hair behind my ear. Well, I could but it wouldn’t stay there. My hair was not tame. It was wild and did what it wanted to do. The Bionic Woman was indeed a California girl. She lived in Ojai. You can’t get more California than that. Unless, of course, you lived in Malibu.

The Bionic Woman’s boyfriend was the Six Million Dollar Man. The Ken to Jamie Somers’s Barbie. The Six Million Dollar Man was played by Lee Majors who was married to the very blonde Farrah Fawcett. Another quintessentially California girl (even though she was from Texas). Fawcett was Jill Monroe — the blonde on Charlie’s Angels with feathered hair bouncing in the wind as she chased down criminals. She ran the way boys run when their peers say, “You run like a girl.” Farrah was the breakout star of that show. And yes, you can find pics of the ultra-feminine Fawcett trying to look like a tomboy skateboarding Dogtown style down the street. But more importantly, there is the poster — Farrah, sitting in front of a striped Mexican blanket wearing a red bikini, one knee up, one leg down, head cocked back in a smile that shows all of her white, perfectly straight teeth. It is very California, and it is said to be the best-selling poster ever. I did not look like Farrah Fawcett. I tried to cut and feather my own bangs and ended up with an afro on my forehead.

Maybe that’s when I stopped trying to be the California girl. Yeah, I was born and raised in L.A. and went to school so close to the beach that the boys would surf every morning before making their way to class. I said “grody” and “gag me with a spoon” and “groovy.” But I wasn’t Gidget, or Farrah Fawcett or Lindsay Wagner. I wasn’t Pamela Anderson in another red bathing suit saving lives on a Malibu Beach. I wasn’t Angelyne or Malibu Barbie. I wasn’t even Bo Derek, hair adorned in cornrows, running in slow motion on a misty seashore.

I was the brown-skinned, frizzy-haired girl. Born of a Japanese American mother and Black father. My Japanese grandmother was Nissei, first generation born in San Francisco, California in 1913. My paternal grandparents came to California from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My parents met in the Bay Area, and I was born and raised by my single mom in L.A. We did not live near the beach. We did not live in a sprawling, ranch-style home like all those blonde Brady girls. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood both affectionately and derisively called the Jungle. With its grassy lawns and abundant foliage, it was the perfect playground for bike riding, hula hooping, sock ball, and tree climbing. But the crack-laden 80s and 90s made it resemble more the urban hellscape of Boyz in the Hood than the dreamy paradise of The Endless Summer.

But this, too, is a California story. Better than the glossy, glamorized image projected on television, this California is real. It’s brown-skinned and frizzy-haired, and mixed-race, and multicultural, and queer, and it’s me. I’m it. California is after all named after me. Not as if David Lee Roth had a crush on me but instead, where the name comes from. According to the book, California Place Names, “[t]he term originally referred to a mythical land of Amazons, ruled by the beautiful black queen Calafia, as described in the Spanish novel, Las Sergas de Esplandian.” It’s me!

The city of my birth, Los Angeles, was inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and was founded by a band of 44 pobladores who settled the area in the 1700s. These pobladores were of Spanish, Indigenous, and African origin. Brown-skinned. Pio Pico, the first governor of California under Mexican rule, designated Los Angeles the state’s capital. Yes, the Pico that the boulevard is named for, and he was mestizo, mixed with African, Indigenous, and Spanish ancestry. Brown-skinned.

The bouncy, blonde surfer girl version of California leaves out the Chinese immigrants who worked in the Gold Rush, the Japanese farmers who were later interned in concentration camps, the Mexicans and Native Americans who were here before the state was annexed to the U.S. The African Americans who brought jazz and soul and hip hop to waft along the Santa Ana winds with the Beach Boys and Van Halen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It left out the non-blondes who made the state what it was and is today. And by the way, surfing was invented by brown-skinned Polynesians, and Malibu is a Chumash word meaning “it’s loud over there” in reference to the waves of the unruly sea. Wild like my untamed hair.

I want to take a black crayon to plain white paper and draw a thickly bordered square. Above it, I want to draw a triangle and give the square a roof to make a house I never lived in. I want to take a brick red crayon and draw a rectangle for a chimney. And a gray crayon to draw a curlicue of smoke coming from the chimney I never had. I want to take a yellow crayon and draw a circle for the sun and a sky-blue crayon to outline perfectly fluffy clouds. It will be the home I never had but for some reason the one I always drew at school when my teachers asked me to draw a house. I imagine it on a perfectly manicured California street. Under it, I want to pick up a black marker like a French teacher and write “Ceci n’est pas une maison.” This is not a house. Like that painting of a very realistic, very idealized pipe under which Magritte wrote “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Because it wasn’t a pipe, it was a painting of a pipe. And this drawing wasn’t my house. And that California was not California at all.

Kimberly Nao was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she works as a professor of education at Mount Saint Mary’s University. She is the founder of Nao & Associates, a DEI and antiracism consulting agency. Her current projects include integrating contemplative practices in education, helping organizations engage in antiracist practices, and researching the historical landscape of Black Los Angeles. As a certified yoga and mindfulness facilitator, Kimberly believes that self-awareness and compassion for others leads to social transformation.

Best of the Net Nominations 2024

By Decolonial Passage | September 27, 2024

Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the 2024 nominations for the Best of the Net Anthology. This list includes writing published between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. Congratulations to the nominees!

Poetry

“reflection” by Matthew E. Henry

“Embargo” by Fabienne Josaphat

“towncrier.” by Dana Francisco Miranda

“Reclamation” by Emma Ofosua Donkor

“Bones Beneath the Plow” by Joel Savishinsky

“O!” by Salimah Valiani

Short Stories

“Number Ninety-Four” by Mehreen Ahmed

“Home Affairs” by Otsile Sebele Seakeco

Creative Nonfiction

“Fading Away” by Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

“Everything Disappears” by Eraldo Souza Dos Santos

France Isn’t a Racist Country

By Decolonial Passage | June 23, 2024

zoe mahfouz flash nonfiction june 2024

Written by a person deemed ethnically ambiguous.

I know France isn’t a racist country, and I am not Arabic, so to speak. I’d like to believe that my resume, my showreel, my social media, or even my face speak for themselves, but apparently, they don’t. My mom has been fully integrated in France since she moved there as a child; yet she’s experienced systemic racism her whole life. She thought that giving me a French first name would be sufficient since I was born in Paris, white and atheist. Apparently not. In primary school, a kitchen server refused to serve me pork, said I should ask my mom if I could have some. That was just the beginning.