The slow vanishing. A disappearance masked as survival. The bending of one world into another, a soft erosion at first, like waves licking at the shore, then a rush, a flood, a swallowing whole.
It happens in the mouth first. A mother stops speaking the old words to her child. A grandmother hesitates before telling a story in the language her own mother spoke, knowing the child will answer back in another tongue. And then the names change—Jean-Baptiste becomes John, Kwame becomes Kenneth, Ezili becomes Mary.
Haiti knows this well. They outlawed Vodou, said it was devil worship, so the people folded their gods into saints, gave Ogou a sword and called him St. James, put a blue robe on Ezili and called her the Virgin. They prayed in secret, because to worship in the open was to invite punishment.
In Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, Spanish names replaced the ones the Taíno once carried. In Trinidad, in Guyana, indentured Indians took on English names, were taught to see their own gods as backward, their own foods as lesser.
Assimilation is always costly. It is the forced forgetting of what once was, the trimming away of everything too foreign, too unpalatable for the colonizer’s taste. To be assimilated is to survive, yes. But it is also to disappear. To make oneself small enough to fit into a world that was never built for you. And once you have been made small, once you have shed the name, the tongue, the gods—what remains is not you, but a version of you they can stomach.
