Before I did not know I was the other in my country, before I did not know it was not safe to be the other in this, before I did not know my existence was a series of ellipses, owing to mispronunciations and a smothering absence of words, before I did not know that the past will, unfailingly, be subsumed by its past and fantasies of a future will become present torments, before I did not know all of that, I did not know I was to be a woman. … Thirty-odd years in, having married a man and birthed children, I was made to look at myself and pronounce the most foreign of words. The sound was deafening. The sound left me speechless. These writings are an attempt at puncturing the silence enveloping the most dangerous of (my) words.