HAJICHI: FOR THE OKINAWAN OBAS
They took your hands and gave you ceremony
a permanent marker of all the life you’ve lived;
first past childhood, bird-bone hand decorated with dark ink
simple lines and dots that grow as you grow.
Did you know, then, what shame you would feel for them?
When you crossed oceans in hopes of finding a new home to be welcomed into
but they turned you away when they saw your tattooed hands;
Savages they whispered over your head and you
kept your palms up, almost a prayer,
waiting for the boat to return you to
the shores you ran from.
First it was your tongue as the Japanese forced your language from you.
Then your song and dance was hidden away, deemed too strange for modern society.
And your clothes, your soft clothes you wore when running on the soft beach,
that, too, they ripped from you. They had not seen your simply joy,
only the ways in which you were not Japanese.
Now you sit in an ever changing world that has no place for your traditions
on hard plastic chairs, ceiling fans spinning weakly over your upturned palms;
Uchinaanchu is a thing of the past, but still you are here. A living relic
sent back to the islands that birthed you.
When you look to your hands, decorated in hajichi, you are ashamed.
It is only you who carries this ink, each milestone of your life etched into your skin.
Remember not the pain of the needle or the judgment of the Naicha mainland.
Lift your hands to the sun and be that young girl again,
dancing through the streets with your hands in the air
overjoyed with the beauty of your first hajichi
palms raised not to hide but to embrace.
The generations after you will live past the shame;
when they look back, all they will see is the way your hands held the sky
hajichi proudly displayed and they too shall share in your joy.
Aika is a half-Okinawan poet and recent university graduate with a degree in Classics and Linguistics. She enjoys writing a variety of genres, baking, and not being normal about DC comics. You can find her on tumblr @aikatxt or Twitter @OkinawanAika.