Malaya: Essays on Freedom by Cinelle Barnes (Little a)
“We had everything, then we had nothing. But I always had books and dance.” When Cinelle Barnes is asked about her childhood in Manila, this is how she sums it up, “like the summary of a fairy tale.” But within the space that ought to have been the fairy tale’s happy ending, Barnes comes perilously close to losing everything—books, dance, and her strength. She leaves the Philippines when an aunt on Long Island decides to adopt her and gives her everything she wants, including a Communion-white dress as a gift on her seventeenth birthday, which she will wear to INS offices as soon as her adoption is finalized. There an immigration officer tells her she’s two years too late, to become naturalized by adoption she should have been there before her sixteenth birthday.
Paralyzed by depression, Barnes lies in bed at her sister’s house, unable to brush her hair or her teeth. “My spirit or gumption or essence departed from my body.” Barnes’s sister knew of only one way to cure her, by forcing her to move and took her to work at the cleaning company their brother has launched. Slowly Barnes returns to life, graduating from high school and working her way through college as a cleaner, a waitress, a nanny—jobs that don’t require proof of legal residency. She doesn’t choose U.S. citizenship until she has a degree and is married, with a child. A year after that her first book, Monsoon Mansion, is published and Barnes decides her epitaph will include the words “telling stories that dragged them out of their fiction.”
Her stories are mosaic—a tile here, another in the opposite corner. Their jagged honesty drags readers out of their fiction and the fluid beauty of her writing keeps attentions riveted until her entire story comes into focus. Barnes’s success happens in spite of this country, not because of it. She shows that even for a smart, ambitious, determined immigrant who arrives from a former U.S. territory with English as a primary language, brown skin ensures a long series of barriers and micro-aggressions. She makes it plain that sad stories kill as efficiently as cigarettes, if they aren’t brought to the surface to be heard. She flinches when her child tells her “I want to be a writer” and hopes the little girl will choose to be a physicist instead.
Soon after her daughter is born, living in a southern state where her husband’s family has roots going back for over 200 years. Barnes longs for some facet of life that belongs to her alone and takes up surfing lessons. She finds a teacher who gives lessons for free, tough, blonde, looking like a character from Blue Crush, and a mother. Happy to have met another woman with “a proclivity for dangerous sports, Barnes invites her new friend to come over for tea. When she asks the woman what she did before taking up surfing, she’s told she’s talking to a former drug delivery girl who never got caught. “Nobody will stop a young blonde girl, that’s the truth. We just get away with things, you know?”
Barnes, who never had the luxury of breaking the smallest law for fear of deportation, who couldn’t get on a plane or even order a cocktail, who lived “in perpetual hiding” forces a grin in response and hides her anger. “I’m Brown, an immigrant. I’m forever clean.” And in one story of one encounter, she nails white privilege to the wall, leaving none of us white women exempt.
Cinelle Barnes has laid claim to the personal essay and has made that form her own. Her stories etch themselves upon the minds of their readers, with their fierce tenderness and unwavering truth. I hope with all of my white-privileged heart that her next book finds a home with a publisher that is not owned by Amazon.~Janet Brown