Poetry Pique

You know how there’s always this one person or event, or this one incident that once you’ve encountered, you are never able to liberate yourself from? This thing, person, or exploit haunts you in your sleep and looks over your shoulder when you’re trying to accomplish something great. It clouds all your successive achievements and makes them look like insignificant feats because compared to her, nothing will ever be brilliant or remarkable.

My apologies to all those romantics out there who might presume that I’m referring to an ex-boyfriend (it is, after all, two days before Valentine’s Day), but in fact, the object of my pique is a girl named Rosita. How I detest you, Rosita. You have shadowed all my triumphs with that abundant hair of yours, taking with you my pride and satisfaction. You have forced me to doubt my capabilities and deem myself unworthy. And yet—oh, irony of ironies—you are the creation of my own amateur pen!

I was fourteen years old and fresh off the raft (okay, plane) from Venezuela when I composed “Rosita with Hair like a Bush and a Big Nose.” Rosita was the product of a last-minute attempt to complete an assignment on the meaning of community for my eighth grade English class.

Not surprisingly, the protagonist of the poem is a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl who moves to the U.S. (sound familiar?) and is both impressed and overwhelmed with the luxuries of her new country of residence. Much like Rosita, the newly immigrated me had trouble identifying with the American boys and girls at my school, but luckily for Rosita, she soon found Sally, a nice blond girl who helped her adapt to the environment. Unlike Rosita, I had to resort to pretending to watch the news on the cafeteria TV because the girls that sat at my lunch table conversed faster than the Gilmore Girls.

So yes, Rosita provided me with a cathartic effect by allowing me to imagine the nice American friend that with luck I would have in the future, and that would hopefully speak intelligibly. But this psychological release lasted only until a week later when, at a middle-school assembly, I was called to the podium to read my “exemplary interpretation of the meaning of community.”

“Rrroseeta,” I mumbled over the microphone, “with hair like a boosh,” chuckles echoed across the auditorium, “and a beeg nose.” The situation would have been slightly more tolerable had it not been for the thick Spanish accent that insists on flaring up whenever I am under pressure, and more significantly, for the title of my poem. Middle-schoolers can be quite cruel with their dirty minds, especially when provided with the ideal opportunity to mock the new foreign girl. Or so I thought.

The remainder of my heavily accented recital is quite a blur in my memory, but the social consequences of this traumatizing experience were actually not that bad. Before Rosita, I was the tall, quiet girl who dressed differently. After Rosita, I was that “Spanish” girl with the cool accent. People recognized me and waved as I walked down the hall, and for three years after that day, even my friends (yes, I did eventually make some) would call me “Roseeta.”

Why do I detest Rosita? You might ask. After all, she seems to have been beneficial to my life, excluding those five humiliating minutes during which I was forced to recite the poem. Nevertheless, after I told my parents of the performance at school, they asked to read “Rosita,” and were impressed with its inventiveness, its perceptiveness, and its imagery. Whenever a family member came to visit from Venezuela, my parents would show them the poem, and they in turn would be astounded by it. Rosita followed me wherever I went, and although I have to admit I was proud of its popular acclaim, I always still felt a tinge of embarrassment for being the creator of “Rosita with Hair like a Bush and a Big Nose.”

Moreover, I didn’t think Rosita deserved that much recognition; I had written the poem in one night and had not even given it much consideration. When I showed my father the college application essays I had been preparing for weeks, he told me to try to write something inspiring like I had with Rosita.

The subject of this post actually proves my argument by itself—Rosita continues to torment me even in my college years. Nevertheless, I have to admit that although the initial intent of this post was to bash Rosita, it has actually led me to a realization. Instead of being an antagonist, this little Mexican girl with frizzy hair is actually a blessing.

Ever since that second week of eighth grade when all I wanted was to be pulverized in that podium, Rosita has been my incentive to better myself. For some unexpected reason, she set the bar high for my successive literary feats, and I have been attempting to surpass her standards ever since. Who knows? Maybe I already have, or perhaps my glory days are somewhere in my future. Whichever the case, I owe many of my literary achievements to Rosita and to that fourteen-year-old girl who just wanted to fit in.