The Civic Expression Award, sponsored by the Maurice R. Robinson Fund, recognizes six teenagers whose artistic and literary works explore political and social issues. Through drawings, short stories, journalism, and paintings, the students who received the 2022 Civic Expression Award show an awareness of the issues affecting their communities. Their exploration of these issues and the history surrounding them, as well as their recognition of their civic responsibility to find solutions in respectful and innovative ways, earned them this prestigious award, which includes a $1,000 scholarship for each student.

The 2022 Civic Expression Award winners are:

Emily Bennett, Cortland, OH
Maya Dabney, Huntersville, NC
Sara Homma, San Antonio, TX
Ava Paulsen, Castaic, CA
Samantha Podnar, Wexford, PA
Kadi Sacko, West Fargo, ND

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners! You can read one of the award-winning works below.

The Rushes in Silence

SHORT STORY

Kadi Sacko, Grade 10, West Fargo High School, West Fargo, ND. Civic Expression Award, American Voices Medal

How do we begin with one another again?

Dearest Maman, allow me to start over. I am writing to you from the cold, so that I may feel your warmth. I am writing to feel the rushes again- to rewind time to Oakland Drive. You once told me that time is like memory, if you give it patience- it will circle back. And if that is true, then I will meet you between the lines of the words on these pages. In the silence after you struggle to read the first few vowels on this very page. Maman, if you ever learn to read—I hope this finds its way to you—back to Philadelphia, where the street cats roam free and the air sits heavy in our lungs. Let us turn back time, shall we? Oakland Drive North Philly—we’re younger, and by that, I mean that I am three and you’re happier. Our third year in the U.S. together, and we had spent the year stressing over immigration paperwork and couch hopping from distant relatives’ living rooms. Your head sway back and forth before you finally laid to rest on the living room floor, as the television roared in the background. As I sat beside you, I attentively watched the animations on the television move rapidly across the screen.

Dora the Explora

Slowly I began to lay flat on the floor with you as we spread our limbs across the hard surface and grew into each other. I hated sleeping on the floor, but you made it seem so easy. To me, sleeping on the floor made it supposedly easier to hear the Earth’s heartbeat, as you once said. To you, sleeping on your step aunt’s couch meant another morning of words being sharpened and polished—just to be aimed at each other the next day. So, I lay there with you quietly, occasionally complaining about my inability to hear Mother Earth’s heartbeat. When you’d finally had enough with my chattering, you propped your head up and aimed a glare at me. I quickly responded in distress,

“I can’t hear it, Maman. Are you lying to me?”

It was with that question that you cocked your head back and chuckled. But it was more like an eruption than a laugh—and as your gums slowly began to hide under your lips—you replied,

“Darling, silence is also speech. Come, press your ears to the ground with me.”

You leaned flat on your belly and turned your head to the side. I did the same—and I heard it, the Earth’s heartbeat. Perhaps now that I’m older and know it was merely my heartbeat being reflected at me—that makes this past moment less miraculous. But it meant everything to me then. And so, it began as we restarted the tradition that you once shared with your own mother, who must’ve done the same with hers. The speech of silence.

Ma let me refresh your memory

It is a bitter December now in Fargo, North Dakota. The weather is so dry that it feels like the air itself is piercing the insides of my nose every time I take a sharp inhale. It is twelve years later, yet I still remember all of it. It comes circling back every now and then when I’m on the edge, just like you had always said it would. Sometimes it feels like a rush and other times I am drowning in the place where the past and present meet. And now I am screaming for you to hold me as if you are not drowning in the same body of nostalgia that I am.

Can you hear me?

The time in early summer when you finally came back from your in-home nursing job two states away. We’d never spent so much time apart—and you’d left me with a distant relative named Auntie Lala. It seemed like we were always finding distant relatives hiding under rocks, the thin air, or in Auntie Lala’s case—a weathered-down tan house. It was built out of cement, with brick steps and iron railings. She was old and cruel and sent me up and down stairs constantly to bring heavy gallons of water to wherever she was. I was only four, but I still remember. I could speak all three languages you taught me; English, Bambara, and silence. But this could not save me from the whiplashes of cable wires, plugs, and spoons. There were times when I ate in silence, as the lump in my throat grew, sitting next to her. Sometimes as the lump grew bigger—I’d imagine little men and women heaving big stones up my throat—to stop my body from hollowing itself out through tears or partially digested food.

Maybe this is where my eating habits came from, the slight disinterest in overflowing—just in case the stones in my throat couldn’t stop me. I spent my days eating stale bread soaked in sweetened milk. When you finally came back, after the news had gotten to you from your friends, you seemed defeated. I was not the same anymore. The day you came back, you took me to the bathroom to bathe me—but found that I sat in silence to all your questions. I knew you’d understand our language—because silence was just coded speech.

Remember Ma?

The time where you first struck me. I was now five, and you’d been teaching me math through loose change on our very own dining room table. A step up from the past five years of homeless shelters after a fire destroyed our first home on Oakwood Drive. Ever since then I’d become enamored in the ways of fire. Though I had healed from the burns and smoke inhalation, I hadn’t from the memories. The idea that something that gave warmth to life and civilization could so quickly destroy physical manifestations that held memories and echoes within them threw me aback. I needed to get up close with fire. I was always turning on the stove when you weren’t looking—playing with matches and light bulbs. I’d burnt the skin off my fingers multiple times, and you’d had enough. I didn’t realize then that the trauma was still within you. You had spent most of your life hiding from fire, in Africa during the Liberian war—and now it had followed you all the way to America. Your hand flew across my face so hard it left my cheek ablaze. Maman, I was merely trying to tame the very thing that almost destroyed us. I am sorry, I was too young to understand.

The second time your hand struck me, was a few months later. I was on the track to being an advanced reader at my age and you had entertained it with interactive books, shows, and more. One night, I caught you under a living room lamp, trying to read one of my ‘early reader’ books yourself. After the embarrassment of stumbling repeatedly, you sat the thin book down beside you on the couch. I found my way to you, and opened it, trying to point out the words to you when I felt it again. So quick I almost didn’t realize. The idea of your own child teaching you something as simple as reading had crossed the sort of boundaries that blurred into the very culture we were trying to escape from.

“I don’t need to learn how to read-I taught you to write, and count, and everything else. I don’t need to anymore. You are not better than me because you know how to—” You stopped mid-sentence as your voice cracked and I was sorry. But not as sorry as you were when you saw my face. The gap in your education arose when you were forced into marriage at the age of thirteen by your family, years prior. You accepted your fate, though you protested—and married a man in his late-40s who died a decade later. It was not your fault. In silence, we reached a mutual agreement, that I would be your reader from then on. So, I read for you, and I filled out our immigration paperwork at the age of five upwards. And you pushed me to be the best in school—so I could achieve everything you could not.

Years later, as we moved back and forth through crappy government housing, I encountered conflicts at my schools. Bullies, causing me to miss months of school due to concussions, and more. The days I sat in front of a therapist, they knew I was wiser beyond my years—as they’d constantly perform IQ tests on me and diagnose me with new issues every now and then. It never sat right with you though. The day that a therapist told you that I was depressed- I wonder if they knew what that would do to you. To you, Maman, being depressed meant that we’d have to be living. But we were merely surviving. We’d been running from the oppressive culture of FGM, war, fire, abuse, gang violence, and now depression. We both quickly dismissed it—and never scheduled another therapy appointment again.

Years after those years, when I’d encounter men who would try to take my livelihood, when I would try to do so over the edge, or when we would argue back and forth over religion, and a woman’s role in the world—silence was always the follow-up. Our trauma had changed us. We no longer laid flat on the floor without limbs spread to listen to the Earth’s heartbeat, we no longer grew into each other. We were drowning in silence. Time and time again you’d break down in your room, or rant about feeling like you were smaller compared to others—but that was about it. Ma, how did it get to be this way? You took up religion as your coping mechanism, forcing your prayers onto me as the echoes of the Quran filled the house—and when it wasn’t that you were mixing our spirituality with religion. But I took to hiding from you and myself. I couldn’t tell you that I liked women too, or that I was more-so spiritual and wanted nothing to do with organized religion. I knew you wouldn’t hear it. Our silence became a double-edged sword—that was followed by yelling, and words we wished we never said

Ma, we’ve made it to the present—

Can you feel the rushes, as we sit across from each other now? Without the covers, it feels as if we’ve been stripped. There is no more hiding. I often think of the days in which I was so consumed with my imagination, fairies, and invisible dinosaurs, that these things had not yet reached my mind. I wonder how it could be that I could love someone so much that I hate them. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about first-generational curses. The feeling of invisible borders separating you and me. Invisible jokes, languages, and touches. You’re swaying your head back and forth in silence as you used to do, and the smell of pounded yams and strong La Vie Est Belle perfume is filling the room. It’s the first time in forever we’ve been this close, and I do not know what to say. I look at you and whisper quietly,

“I feel like I’m drowning.”

And you begin to tell the story of a younger you. You were back in grandmother’s home village at the age of nine and were playing by the river when you slipped in. You tried to shout but the strong currents of the body of water dragged you under. You were drowning. As the fresh water entered your lungs, you tried to swim faster—but you didn’t know how to swim. A few hours later, you awoke to the chirping of birds and a warmth.

I looked at you curiously as I questioned, “How did you get out?”

You looked at me with a genuine smile that somehow made the room a bit warmer.

“Allah and the river spirits. They pulled me out—you know?”

I scuffed at you and looked ahead in silence. But I was too curious to end my questions there—so I asked,

“So, what is that supposed to mean? I mean, is there a meaning in that story?”

Your smile brightened further as you looked down studying your feet.

“My little star, if you truly feel like you’re drowning—learn to swim.”

I looked toward you and then back down before chuckling, and you joined in. The laughter soon erupted—sending a rush down our backs as we sat under the warmth of the lights.

Featured image: Sara Homma, The Things Between Us, Drawing & Illustration. Grade 12, Texas Military Institute, San Antonio, TX. Civic Expression Award