#identify - Hello Poetry

Identify French people abroad are never immigrants We say expatriates as if the word were silk, as if it could soften the weight of leaving, as if it could rinse history clean. But my story does not wash so easily. There is Africa in my blood— not in memory, not in footsteps, but in silence. In the hands of my grandfather, who carried a rifle through Algerian dust on the wrong side of a broken century. His ghosts do not speak, but they stain. My father was born under a Moroccan sky, French by decree, by flag, by empire. My grandmother, further south, in the deep heart of Africa, also French, because history decided so. Colonialism is not a chapter I can close. I carry its shame. It hums beneath my name, threads through my veins, an inheritance I never chose and cannot refuse. And then—my mother. She crossed an ocean not for conquest, but for breath. She fled violence and found language. In English, she found air. In English, she rebuilt herself. And she placed that language in my hands like something fragile, like something sacred. So I learned to live between tongues. My past speaks in French— rigid, inherited, unavoidable. But my inner voice softens in English. It bends, it opens, it becomes mine. I built a life here, on foreign soil that no longer feels foreign. Still— my family remains across the ocean, like a second heartbeat I cannot silence. I am married in French, but I love in English. Two languages share my mouth. Two histories pull at my spine. Two homes claim me, and neither fully keeps me. I do not belong in halves— I exist in the fracture. My heart does not choose. It stretches. It trembles. It translates itself endlessly. I am not one self. I am the space between.

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May 13

May 13, 2026 at 1:17 AM UTC

Callixiope

Origins

Identify French people abroad are never immigrants We say expatriates as if the word were silk, as if it could soften the weight of leaving, as if it could rinse history clean. But my story does not wash so easily. There is Africa in my blood— not in memory, not in footsteps, but in silence. In the hands of my grandfather, who carried a rifle through Algerian dust on the wrong side of a broken century. His ghosts do not speak, but they stain. My father was born under a Moroccan sky, French by decree, by flag, by empire. My grandmother, further south, in the deep heart of Africa, also French, because history decided so. Colonialism is not a chapter I can close. I carry its shame. It hums beneath my name, threads through my veins, an inheritance I never chose and cannot refuse. And then—my mother. She crossed an ocean not for conquest, but for breath. She fled violence and found language. In English, she found air. In English, she rebuilt herself. And she placed that language in my hands like something fragile, like something sacred. So I learned to live between tongues. My past speaks in French— rigid, inherited, unavoidable. But my inner voice softens in English. It bends, it opens, it becomes mine. I built a life here, on foreign soil that no longer feels foreign. Still— my family remains across the ocean, like a second heartbeat I cannot silence. I am married in French, but I love in English. Two languages share my mouth. Two histories pull at my spine. Two homes claim me, and neither fully keeps me. I do not belong in halves— I exist in the fracture. My heart does not choose. It stretches. It trembles. It translates itself endlessly. I am not one self. I am the space between.