Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And on this episode, two stories of unexpected gifts, because “Tis the season,” as they say. They still say it that way, “’Tis the season.” These stories are not about traditional gifts. In fact, our first story is more about a hard-won lesson.
Zanele Chisholm crafted the story you're about to hear in one of The Moth's high school workshops. This one was done at Beacon High School here in New York City. Here's Zanele live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Zanele: [00:00:40] I was living in northern Canada in this small suburban town called Oshawa. I remember sitting in my first-grade classroom next to my best friend Brooklyn. She had these huge goldilocks curls, and she had the most amazing smile. I just remember hugging her so tight, and it was like were transferring the memories from summer into each other, so that it was like we had never missed a beat. I had never felt so happy. It was like the way that the sun feels on your skin, and it was like my whole world existed right in that moment, right in that room with these people, with Brooklyn in Oshawa. This is where I belonged.
And so, my first-grade teacher, she comes in and she introduces herself. It's the first day of first grade. And she's like, “Hi, my name is Mrs. Neals.” And we're all like, “Hi, Mrs. Neals.” She picks up the roll call sheet, and she begins to go through our names. So, she starts with Aliyah who is the only other black girl in my class, goes past Brooklyn and gets all the way down to me, Zanele. She hesitates for a little bit, takes her time. That's something I'm used to, because my name is spelled Z-A-N-E- L-E, and so there's always complications.
So, I wait a bit. And then, Mrs. Neal, she begins to sound out the names like syllables as she's speaking it. So, she's like, “Zannnnelllll?.” I look at Brooklyn, and I'm like, “This girl just got my name wrong. [audience laughter] But Brooklyn doesn't really have a reaction. So, I'm like, “Okay.” So, I look back at Mrs. Neals and I'm like, “Oh, actually, it's pronounced Zanele. You pronounce my name Zanele.” And then, in that moment, all of the students fall over each other laughing.
Everybody's hysterically laughing, giggling to each other, and I'm looking at Brooklyn like, “What's going on?” And then, they start to chant one by one and then all together, “No, her name is Zanele. Zanele. Her name is Zanele.” I'm looking at them like, “What are you talking about?” And so, I look back at Mrs. Neals, and I'm like, “No, my name is Zanele. Zanele. That's how you pronounce my name.” They're calling me a liar, and they're saying, “No, it's Zanele. Zanele.”
[chuckles] And so, I look at Brooklyn for some validation or some reassurance, but she looks at me like, “What are you doing?” And Mrs. Neals looks at me like, “Oh, I found the problem child this year.” So, I look back at her and I tell her, “I'm not lying. My name is Zanele.” But she leaves the room, and she goes and finds my kindergarten teacher from the previous year. She brings her back into the room, she points at me, and she says, “What's that little girl's name?” I'm looking at my teacher like, “You're my last chance. You know who I am. Tell her my name is Zanele. I've lived here for a year which feels like forever when you're six years old. You guys are my home, you know me. My name is Zanele.” And she looks at me and she says, “No, her name is Zanele.”
And so, I'm looking around, and I'm feeling like I've just been abandoned by the entire life that I've known, my whole life. This idea of belonging has quickly disappeared, and I'm just left completely isolated. I realized that these people had never even said my name. All of kindergarten, I thought that we were so close, that we were beyond titles, that it was just like, you just know me that well that you don't even have to say my name, but they didn't know me at all. And so, I went on for the rest of first grade being Zanele, and the rest of second grade being Zanele, until I moved out of Oshawa, and out of Canada into America.
I realized that that moment in Oshawa was not just a moment. It became the next 10 years of my life. Zanele always being seen before Zanele, always being heard, always being noticed. And Zanele just seemed to kind of disappear. And so, a couple weeks ago, I was feeling like I couldn't do it anymore. Like, this girl, Zanele who's supposed to mean so much, who was given to me by my grandparents. And Zanele means to be sufficient, to be enough. It comes from the language Xhosa, which is also my native tribe in South Africa. And this person who's supposed to be enough, I don't fulfill that, because look what I've done to her. She doesn't even exist anymore.
And so, I go to my mother and I tell her that I don't feel deserving of my definition, that Zanele doesn't belong to me. I'm crying, and I'm hoping that she can say something to reconcile this lostness, because it feels like I'm just sinking, floating away. She looks at me. And my mother, she's also a nomad in her own existence. And she tells me that “Your name isn't something that you have to live up to. It's not something you earn or something that you have to try to be a part of. You are constantly manifesting your name simply by existing, and your name will always belong to you, no matter what.”
I look at my mother, and look within myself, and I agree with her. Zanele, she is who I am. I am Zanele. I may not always know what that means to me, but I do know that it means home, that it means belonging, that it means Xhosa, and that that's enough. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Moderator: [07:04] Zanele Chisholm, everyone.
[cheers and applause]
Moderator: [00:07:10] On three, I want you to all say her name is Zanele, and she's an amazing storyteller. Can we do that? Yes. [audience chuckles] I want those first graders to hear us. All right, so, it's one, two, three.
Unison: [00:07:23] Her name is Zanele, and she's an amazing storyteller.
Moderator: [00:07:28] Yes. Give it up for Zanele Chisholm, everyone.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:07:33] Zanele Chisholm just finished her first semester as an English major at Ryerson University in Toronto. She writes for Her Campus, an online global community for college women, and recently had her poetry published in New Wave. She says, every encounter with someone new provides her with the opportunity to introduce herself, and she's been pushing herself to always begin with Zanele before allowing any nickname to be introduced. She says, it's a form of respect to her name, not to allow it to be replaced by ease or comfortability.
Our next story comes to us from a college StorySLAM we produced with the students at Brown University.
[cheers and applause]
The theme was Transformation. Here's Isabel DeBre, live at The Moth.
Isabel: [00:08:18] If I had to describe my family in one word, I think it would be petless. We not only didn't own pets, but we were actively vocal about not owning pets, and that was our collective identity. That's how we identified and made sense of everything. We had family friends that had pets, and we would go over to their houses, and they would have their dogs as pictures on their mantelpieces, and they would scroll through their phone and show us pictures of their dogs, and we would just look at each other and be like, “I would rather hear about your dream for an hour and a half.” [audience laughter] Like, “I don't want your dog's pooping patterns.” Like, “We just did not understand.” But we tried.
When I was in fifth grade, I had a hamster named Jessie. And one day, I came back from school and it just like had disappeared. [audience laughter] I, still to this day, don't know where it went. I wake up in the middle of the night and think I feel it in my sheets and it's like very traumatic. [audience laughter] So, that happened. But after that, a few petless years, my sister came home one day and was just like, “Guys, there's this gaping hole in my life.” She was in third grade. [audience laughter] And she was like, “I need a pet. All my friends are talking about their pets. We lack something.” My parents are like, “Are you kidding me? We've been over this.” And my sister's like, “No.”
She was really persistent. She went on these sad shelter websites, and she found dogs and cats that were really cute but also emaciated. [audience laughter] She would email them to my parents and would make an email subject of like, “Urgent.” [audience laughter] And my dad would open it in the middle of a board meeting, [audience laughter] and he would see Urgent be like, “What?” It would just like this hungry cat would pop up. [audience laughter] And he was just like, “Okay, you're right. We have to give you a pet. We have to do something.”
So, we sat down and we were like, “Okay. After Jesse, no furry animals, obviously no cats or dogs.” That really narrowed down our options. And so, we decided on a reptile. My sister did some research. She was deciding what reptile to get and she discovered a bearded dragon. And bearded dragons start out like small and green, but then after a year, they're supposed to get like a beautiful, and orange and grow beards, whatever that means, I don't know. [audience laughter] But get super thorny and cool and neon. So, we're really psyched about that. So, we were like, “Okay, we're going to get the spirit dragons. Be really cool.”
So, we got it. We got this huge cage for it. And then, we realized, okay, it's actually alive. We have to feed it. [audience laughter] And so, that literally required feeding it which was crickets and worms which is not something my family does. My dad would come home from Petco with bags of crickets. One time, they exploded all over our house and we had to chase them and collect them. For some reason, we stored them next to my bed. I don't know why that was a thing, [audience laughter] but I could never go to sleep. I had perpetual insomnia, because crickets would be chirping in my ear.
The crickets also ate this cricket jam. This is a little tangent that has doesn’t have to do with anything. But it looked like real jam, so we kept thinking it was jam. Okay. [audience laughter] Anyway, so, this was the thing that occupied the majority of our thoughts and lives. We would start to talk about our lizard at the dinner table, and we would talk to our lizard with our friends. It was named Opal and it was really cute.
Literally, I would come home from school. My sister would drop her backpack, and run upstairs, and just stroke it for the rest of the afternoon. [audience laughter] This was like 2007. I didn't have an iPhone, I didn't have anything to stare at, so I just stared at my lizard. [audience laughter] It actually wasn't a lizard, it was a bearded dragon. If anyone called it a lizard, we'd be very offended. We’re like, “No, it's a bearded dragon.” [audience chuckles]
So, my dad was like, “Okay, we need to get it exercise. We need to make sure he's healthy.” So, we bought him a leash. [audience laughter] Every Sunday, we would walk it around the neighborhood [audience chuckles] on a leash as a family [audience chuckles] and we became known as that family that had a bearded dragon that walked it, not a lizard, [audience chuckles] with a leash every Sunday. So, our neighborhood knew us. They knew Opal. It was really cute. We were obsessed with him, loved him.
Then one day, we noticed, like, “Okay, wait a second. He's a bearded dragon, but he's still green. It's been literally three and a half years.” Like, “Where is this orange? That's literally the whole point that we got him, because he was going to be orange. [audience laughter] So, Opal, what's going on?” [audience laughter] We noticed every day it would just get slower and slower, and we were like, “Oh, no. Something wrong. Opal.” And then, one day, its eyes didn't open. [audience chuckles] My sister was crying. Like, I've never seen my sister cry this much.
My dad literally did not cry through all Schindler's List was sobbing. [audience laughter] I was crying. And we were like, “Okay, literally, we need to do something. We need to get a funeral together. We need to invite the neighborhood.” [audience chuckles] So, we invited the whole neighborhood to the funeral. We made it a little coffin. It was made out of tissue paper. We went to our backyard. Everyone was like, “Opal, we saw you in the leash. You're so cute.” [audience laughter] And so, they all gather around.
My dad said a speech. My sister wrote a speech, but was too choked up to say it. [audience laughter] We're lowering it into the dirt. I'm literally putting dirt on its head and it's going into the ground. We're all crying. And then, all of a sudden, it jumps up [audience laughter] and starts running around our backyard. We're all screaming. We're all like, “Oh, no, you're alive. What is happening?” And my sister's like, “Oh, my God. We were about to bury you alive. I'm so sorry.” [audience laughter] We're just dying. We don't know what to do. And then, two days later, it died. [audience laughter] We have yet to get another pet. Okay, thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:14:17] That was Isabel DeBre. Isabel graduated from Brown University earlier this year, and she's now a reporter for Associated Press, based in Jerusalem. The events in this story happened almost a decade ago, and Isabel says that a few years after Opal, she bought a vacuum-packed frog for her high school science experiment, but she thinks that probably doesn't count as a pet. Isabel, I would like to say that I think you're free as a pet owner to decide what constitutes a pet. Although it'd be pretty weird if you were walking a vacuum-packed frog around town. So, hopefully, you'll try being a pet owner again in 2019 Isabel, because pets are so important.
That is it for this week on The Moth Podcast. We hope you'll join us next time. And we hope you have a story-worthy week.
Catherine: [00:15:09] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First. Rock on, and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth.
Dan: [00:15:18] Podcast production by Emily Couch, Ivan Kuraev, Viki Merrick, and Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.