Love Letter to Home — Nina Munoz
You are on the most insignificant speck of land on the globe, the smallest island of Honduras, perhaps the smallest island in the world, and though you haven’t done your research, it surely feels that way. Against the concrete of the only paved road, that same old man from last time rests his cheek on the ground and waits to be burned. It is still sweltering like how it was in your childhood, the air humid and uncomfortable, the sweat sticking to your skin in a way that it doesn’t to anybody else, and you think these might be the only things that haven't changed besides yourself and the face of that same old man.
Arriving in Utila is always the same, always unforgettable. After boarding the yacht and taking an irresponsible amount of Dramamine, after spending hours cramped next to your sister against the window and staring at the waves despite her warnings of seasickness, after hours of listening to the tourists at the front of the boat scream after being hit by a wave, you are now in somebody else’s home. You’ll hug all of the vaguely familiar relatives who have waited for you at the dock, ready to load up all of your luggage on their golf carts and drive across Main Street as the smell of raw fish hits the air.
People you could’ve loved had you lived closer have now passed away, cousins you’ve only met once but bathed in the same bucket with are now running off to get married, your aunts and uncles are still waiting on visa approvals while their hair grays and falls out. That same vagrant whose name you somehow don’t know is still wearing that tattered red-shirt, lined with sweat stains, sleeping on the street, in front of the only pharmacy. You think of what his home would look like, if he ever had one, perhaps a green cottage on top of Pumpkin Hill, before the White tourists came and bought up all the beaches.
You’re reminded of the first time you came to visit and were old enough to remember. You were eight years old and arriving for a great-grandmother’s eightieth birthday party, where everyone wore white and rejoiced in the celebration of her life. Everyone, except for you, who managed to escape the party and sit on her front porch, feeling utterly miserable in the midst of your childhood angst. The only view in front of you was of a stocky brick house belonging to one of your grandaunts. It felt awful to imagine your great-grandmother, with her fat sagging off her arms, sun-spotted skin, and eye-smiles spending her days gazing at such an ugly thing.. Days later, your mother would drag you inside of it to meet the house’s other inhabitant; a one hundred and three year old woman who greeted you with tea and a kiss from wrinkled lips. As a little girl consciously visiting “Home” for the first time, you wondered if there was some hidden fountain of youth, if people from here possessed the ability to live forever.
Even now, you find yourself wondering the same thing when for the hundredth time after her grandmother’s passing, your mother mentions to near strangers how terrible she feels that her own children would be growing up without the older generations present. Much like other Hondurans, the grief is rarely visible on her face, but weaves itself into her tight curls and permanently furrowed brow. You can still recall the time you witnessed a funeral parade whilst visiting. A baby had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The people lined the streets and stared with blank expressions as the miniature casket passed by. Life and death act as synonyms in this place. There is not one without the other, there is never a time where another Utilian is being born without another one dying, the most permanent of cycles still finding itself cramped into this little place.
When she is not grieving, your mother can best be described as angry, closely followed by loving. Your mother is a woman who only knows how to communicate through yelling. She screams to awaken the entire house in the morning, she playfully yells at your kid brother when she tucks him in at night, but her loudest screams stem from the frustration at her life as a whole. She sometimes jokes that she’ll dump you and your siblings off elsewhere and go back to Utila all on her own. Sometimes you believe both of you would be happier that way. You had always wondered what exactly provoked her to feel that way. What made your mother so angry? Why must she always raise her voice no matter the occasion? Every visit to Utila reminds you that this is simply the way people there talk. Though they are funny, garrulous, and welcoming, beneath it all is an all-consuming vexation, one nestled in their bones and blood, passed down from offspring to offspring, so much so that the entire island had become infected with it.
And why?
The history of your people is a difficult one. Due to the island’s small size and obscurity, their history is not well documented. Many of the people who knew its history or had lived through it have now died. Even when conducting research for this piece, you will find that the author of one of the only papers on the island’s history passed just three years ago. If you search up “Utila” now, you’ll be met with travel blogs and tourist reviews of its inexpensive diving programs. If you’re lucky enough to speak with an elder, or if you search deep enough for a well-written article, you’ll find out that the indigenous people, the Paya, were enslaved for unknown amounts of time. First by the Spanish, then the British, who would go on to force their language onto the people, and back and forth between those two groups for many years, as if it were a rubber plaything.
Your people are brought up to be hardworking. What else can you be when you’re exploited? This trait is passed onto your mother, alongside the anger, and you are made to be another member of an enraged population.
You are fourteen and back in Utila. The first day is fun and miserable. You’re forced to talk much more than you’re accustomed to, and your stomach is aching with a hunger that will not subside, no matter how many pieces of rambutan you swallow. You are almost immediately agitated by the oppressive sunlight, the catcalling of fathers with their little girls next to them, and the sensation of a mosquito’s mouth digging into your leg, but it's hard to stay that way when the rest of your surroundings are beautiful. The schoolgirls are running after the mango man, their mary jane’s thumping against the ground, toddlers are wrestling each other on the sandy shores of Chepes beach, a man covered in Indigenous face tattoos is selling his wife’s handmade jewelry. As you age, you realize that this sort of beauty isn’t visible to everyone you encounter, that whatever silver-spooned circumstances mainlanders have grown up under have twisted their brains into thinking that a place like this can only be described by its poverty. That this place is only notable because of its lack of money, of the essence of desperation and disadvantage over everything, a place that is only good as somewhere for tourists to come and party during Carnival. You begin to feel grateful. Grateful that while this place is shunned by the rest of the world, you know its beauty, and you’ve realized what a privilege it is to bask in it.
Your newfound optimistic outlook won’t last long. This place is, obviously, very different from your home in America. For this you are thankful. However, that also means that the people here are different too. That you’re less sure of. In run-down seafood restaurants loudly playing reggaeton to attract customers, in the afternoon traffic jam that occurs daily near the kindergarten as parents rush to pick up their children, in the auto-shop where the Indigenous employee with a silver earring and rat-tail pauses his work to stare as you walk by, amongst the Spaniards and the Garifunas, you feel like what a Utilian would best refer to as a “Yankee.”
You feel most like one when you’re directly spoken to. Due to the island’s previous colonization by the British, English was the language that was widely adopted. For this, you are relieved. You have it much easier than other Americans visiting their ancestral homes. In the rare event that someone approaches you speaking Spanish, you are overcome with anxiety. You read, you write, you understand, but you don’t speak because there is no one in America to be spoken to. Even your own family has adopted English. You want to respond to them and you technically can, but without the same ease as you would in your primary language. Your throat closes up and your face flushes. You feel strangely akin to a mime, someone bound to never use words, and communicate solely through their hands. You do just that. In most cases, you offer a small smile and corresponding gesture. You can feel the words bubbling up, traveling through your intestines and throat, but there is some invisible border that you cannot cross. It is at this moment you realize that you have simply become too American.
But were you always this American girl who didn’t know how to speak?
There’s countless videos of you as a toddler. Taking some of your first steps in an oversized monkey costume, blowing out birthday candles with so much force that spit comes out, having your first sip of Cafe de Oro with your mother and cringing at its bitterness. There’s one of you in a car with her, counting a wad of cash with an unmistakable accent. The drawl of your kid voice can be heard, “Tweneh-five, tweneh-si, tweneh-sehvuhn” amongst your mothers giggles. You don’t know what she’s giggling about, but you join her. You are simply too young, too innocent, to even comprehend what embarrassment is, and why she thought you might feel it.
A few years later, you were no more than six years old and found yourself bickering with your mother from the backseat of that same car about something trivial. You and your mother are both “hard-headed” as she would say, self-assured and always arguing, even when you were only six and she was thirty-three. One of her professors or classmates had upset her in some way. The exact details are hard to conjure up. Her complaints were a daily occurrence. She drives crazily along the road leading to your childhood home, your head bopping up and down with each bump she runs over, your tiny hands tightly gripping the sides of your toddler car seat. Feeling her frustration, you blurt out, “Well you shoudda toll her no aneweh!” She pauses her rant and looks directly at you.
“What?” she says with a giggle.
You flush instantly. Your hand flies over your mouth. You were born in America, raised in America, surrounded by Americans. There is no reason why you, an American child, should have any trace of a Utilian accent. For the rest of the ride home, she continues laughing, and you stay silent. Now, you’ll still refuse to speak with an accent in public, afraid that her cackles will still be ringing in your ear.
Even as a teenager, your silence remains and travels with you back to Utila. You are perpetually embarrassed. Embarrassed that if you open your mouth to speak, the wrong accent will come out from your foreign mouth. Embarrassed that you’ve sworn off pork and that’s what every dish here includes. Embarrassed that your body is too skinny and invites itself to poking and questioning by women in your family. Embarrassed that you’ve succumbed to the feeling of alienation and sometimes wish to go back to America sooner, though you know your isolation would be no different there. You are sensitive, pale, miserable, and full of hatred for the world you’re surrounded by. You are everything a Honduran isn’t supposed to be.
One night spent crying, your heart aching and aching for no particular reason, you comforted yourself by looking through old photographs at your grandmother’s house on the hill. Most of the pictures are of her father, whom you also lovingly referred to as “Dad.” Admittedly, you were a little scared of Dad. He spoke very little and you were told he didn’t like children very much, despite having around six of his own. Each time you had visited him, you sat by him on the porch, watching as he stared off at the brick house and said nothing. You were unsure of how to break the silence between the two of you, but wanted more than anything to do so.
In each picture, Dad is handsome in a way that Utilian men usually aren’t. His appearance is very masculine, but not offputting. He looked very different in his youth. He had the same forehead wrinkles, but his brows were black and sharp, his jaw strong and pointed, yet his solemn expression remained. You are told he was always soft-spoken and never once raised his voice at anyone, much less a woman or child. There’s a black and white photo of him in some American city, wearing a fashionable bomber jacket that looks weirdly modern. A polaroid of him building something on a boat, where he’d go after leaving his children for ten months at a time in order to provide for them. A portrait of him on his wedding day with a pink pocket square in his suit, his salt and pepper curls somehow combed at least four inches above his head, likely due to his wife’s help. A candid of him wearing a t-shirt from a tourist gift shop in front of a mirror, his eyes blue and distant, his reflection lingering in the background. The sadness in your heart subsides, almost evaporating completely when looking at pictures of Dad. He is beautiful, intelligent, hard-working and above all else, gentle. He is your own blood, and for the first time in ages, you are overcome with a sense of pride.
In the early hours of the following morning, Dad is found dead. He passes buried under the sheets of his wife's bed, sickness finally overcoming his body. Just a week before, your other relatives came to visit, kissed him on the forehead, and whispered into ears that could hear very little, “I love you Dad.” The funeral is held later that afternoon. It’s the first one you’ve ever been to. You step foot into a church for the first time in years, slip into a pew near the front, and cry and cry. Though you’ve read numerous books about death, you’ve never experienced one before and you don’t understand. This isn’t how a funeral is supposed to be. Nobody is wearing black, a White missionary that never knew your great-grandfather is leading the service, and you can’t even focus with the screeches of the choir behind you. You have never grieved before and now you will be until you’re dead too. This is the last time you have been to Utila.
Months later, in the middle of your intro to fiction class back in America, stumped with no ideas of what you could possibly write about, the funeral miraculously makes itself onto your page. Your grief is shrouded in false details and made up names, but generally follows the same events you went through. You’ll feel that same sense of pride that came over you when you were looking at those old photographs of Dad. You hate fiction, but you wrote it. It won some awards and was published in some places. You are a writer now. You have always wanted to be one and now it’s your reality.
Your reality eventually turns you to shame. You are ashamed that you have taken something tragic and morphed it into something entirely about yourself, a death only visible through your lens. You don’t know how to feel, how to write, or in what way you should be within your grief. You won’t write about Utila again, until now.
More time has passed and has taken more people with it. Your great-grandfather’s dog and then his wife. Someone told you once that people always come and go in threes. You are grateful that they died in Honduras, amongst the hills and beaches, and not in the clammy, fluorescent rooms of an American hospital. You haven’t been back since their passing and you’re not sure when or if you will return. Death has left you permanently homesick for a place where your strange accent, sickly looking body, perpetual embarrassment, and rage could still be embraced by the sun-spotted, saggy arms of your elders.
You hope to return to this some day, no matter how impossible it seems for now. You hope to return to the fish and to the sea, to the brujas and borrachos, to sweat and desperation, to the giggles and stretches of newborns, to mangoes and lobsters, to the church and school bells ringing, to the calling of Utila, the only place you may ever know as “Home.”
In an imagined future, that’s exactly what it becomes. Home. You don’t question it; it just is. You have no husband, but a beautiful daughter that has somehow materialized. Your mother has grown to be one of those one-hundred and three year old women, and your kid brother and older sister live just a hill over. Your daughter is delicate and smart, and reads a novel with her head in your lap. You rub her curls between your index and thumb and let out a long-awaited sigh of relief.
Nina Munoz is a sixteen year old author whose work revolves around subjects of womanhood and ethnic identity. Her work has been published in UMBRA Literary Magazine and The Weight Journal. She has been shortlisted for the William Faulkner writing competition and honorably mentioned by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She currently studies creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.