Haibun: Earning My Words

I remember sitting in my college apartment with my friend Meron from Eritrea, Matt was tutoring us. I was still trying to remember what a sentence was made of, Matt reminded me, “a noun and a verb or subject and action.”

This was my second time attempt at college. The first time, I ended up passing remedial English (which everyone passed) but dropping out of Composition I twice because I had no chance of passing it either time.

I knew I was smart enough to make a sentence, so I knew I could figure out how to write. I had to learn it my way because what I was given in high school and college didn’t work for me.

The major I had was going away, I had a B in Comp I and a C in Comp II, and the only major I could take that would absorb all my credits from my last school was a B. A. in English. I said I’d do it and felt like I was going to throw up.

The fall semester of the next year, I was in Advanced Grammar and struggling with a 60 average when our professor had a flat tire, so Dr Cotton, the department chair came in to fill in. He started talking about Noam Chomsky and transformational-generative grammar and how his team listened in on phone calls and found new parts of speech they didn’t know about until this breakthrough. That the old system of grammar from Latin was incomplete, the rules we were given didn’t reflect how we talked. How we talked shaped what grammar was!

At that moment I heard my inner voice. I could hear the rhythm of the words in my head. I could hear the comma, the period, the melodies of an adjective. The very next text I argued my way from a 96 to 104 and have never, ever doubted by relationship with my beautiful words again.

See, the thing about persistence is, it gives you a fire inside no one can ever put out because it is forever fueled by memories of earning it.

all that remains of 

this ocotillo is persistence 

in winter’s sun