I remember a cavalcade of toothy celebrities on the front of the Corn Flakes box that I poured from each morning. For years, George Clooney as Batman, the Star Trek cast, or the Olympic Dream Team started off my day, their shiny, symmetrical smiles making me self-conscious about the way my own teeth had grown in. Across the dining table, my mom favored a sugar, corn, and milk spiced porridge favored in Haiti that remained unnamed to me because frankly, I was a jerk as a kid (or maybe, just trying to blend in at school) and didn’t care to know.
Whatever it was, it was not the crunchy, bland cereal a naive adolescent such as myself assumed Patrick Ewing or Larry Bird ate the morning they won their gold medals. American breakfast marketing, with its jingoistic aggressiveness, truly spoke to my developing brain every morning, leaving little room for an artsy, emotional, queer, nerdy child of Haitian immigrants by making me not want to show any of those traits to the world.
