Since I knew no English, I was placed a year back into grade two when I came to Canada. During math class, doing basics I had covered back home in kindergarten, a girl showed me how to use an eraser like I was deaf and dumb, explaining this supposed first-world technology to the little foreigner. “Here we write in pencil, then we rub, and looook! Like magic it disappears!” Caught in the purgatory of my mother tongue rendered useless, and this new language of inaccessible foreign meanings, I understood that what was erased here was my expression, my intelligence, myself.
Aga Bijos has a Ph.D. in Hispanic testimonial literature, focusing on trauma studies and a philology of silence. agab.substack.com