A mixed-genre text comprised of memoir, poetry, and visual art, Shailja Patel’s Migritudeis an absolutely incredible book.
In one of the early passages of the text, Patel recounts her experience growing up in Kenya during Idi Amin’s reign in neighboring Uganda:
In olden days, my mother says, they didn’t have banks, so they invested in jewellery. The women. The women would carry the family’s savings in their gold ornaments, their valuable saris. It was safest—and you see, it kept them safe. Women were respected, because they wore and guarded the family’s wealth.
I grew up on tales of the last trains coming out of Uganda. Laden with traumatized Asians who had been stripped of all the possessed. The grown-ups whispered: They took even the wedding rings, the earrings, off the women. They searched their hair.
Image that haunted my childhood: a man on Nairobi’s railway platform who held his toddler child and cried. Cried aloud, through a wide-ope mouth. Soldiers had boarded the train just outside of Kampala, had dragged his wife off while he watched. Too terrified for the child on his lap to resist. The carriage filled with mute, numb people. He cried now because there was nothing left to hold tears back for. Not dignity. Not manhood. Not hope.
Her jewellery did not protect her. (10-11)
Read it.
there have been no words.
i have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna.
not one word.
today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science.
evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality.
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.
fire in the city air and i feared for my sister’s life in a way never
before. and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us.
first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot’s heart failed,
the plane’s engine died.
then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now.
please god, after the second plane, please, don’t let it be anyone
who looks like my brothers.
i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill.
i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger
i have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen.
not really.
even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being.
never this broken.
more than ever, i believe there is no difference.
the most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference
between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus.
more than ever, there is no difference.
watched a poorly bootlegged copy of “Love & Other Drugs” tonight. Movie is fine. There was a scene with a TOTALLY SILENT woman who is identified as being Thai. Scene was so incidental to the plot, but was just another reminder of how unquestioningly we’re expected to digest her dual silence AND sexiness. anyway, reflecting on it made me want to watch the performance above, and Suheir Hammad’s “Not Your Exotic, Not You’re Erotic” over and over.
I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation? It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative. For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity He feels relieved of the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine, which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality. By this device the people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a larger portion of the world with the comfortable feeling of pride of having done its duty; men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust both in their act and in their thought, accompanied by a feeling that they are helping the world in receiving its deserts; men who are honest can blindly go on robbing others of their human rights for self-aggrandizement, all the while abusing the deprived for not deserving better treatment. We have seen in our everyday life even small organizations of business and profession produce callousness of feeling in men who are not naturally bad, and we can well imagine what a moral havoc it is causing in a world where whole peoples are furiously organizing themselves for gaining wealth and power. Nationalism is a great menace.
Water slips down a concrete wall.
In the plaza, she touches a metal table, a chair, a notebook.
Noon already. Each thing swallows its own shadow
murmuring, I cannot flee you.
She loosens her hair, becomes a woman in a silk sari
on a high balcony, the trellis cut in bone.
Rumours clip the air, spread their wings
and swarm through the plaza.
Suddenly she feels hot.
Draws her hair back, a comb glistens in her hand.
She pulls out a pocket mirror puckers her lips.
She tries to make small scale order
(two black eyes, dark skin, two nostrils,
that sort of thing) out of bristling confusion.
“
—
Meena Alexander, “Fifth Avenue Plaza,” which is part of the larger poem “Rumours for an Immigrant.”
The mosque floating like a collection of vases in the drizzle.
The child’s two hands moving along the bookshelf, half deciding on a book before sliding it back in place, as though experimenting with the keys of a piano.
The train passing through three tunnels in the distance like a needle picking up beads to thread a rosary.
Four butterflies in the tree in July, their underwings green. Visible invisible visible invisible – they blink in out of existence as they fly amid the leaves.
The rose shedding five crimson notes onto the grass in the silence of dusk.
Six footprints in snow, a thin sheet of packed ice at the base of each. And through it the flat yellow leaves lying on the ground are visible, as though sealed behind glass.
Three girls up to their waists in the calm lake: the reflection of each making her appear two headed like a queen on a playing card, right side up either way.
A vinyl record with seven songs by Count Basie, his genius so unmistakable the stylus seems to be travelling not through the grooves but the very whorls of his fingerprint.
Condensation on all eight windowpanes freezing into sparkling bird feathers during the night. Into insect wing and leaf skeleton. As though the house contains a magical forest.
THESE ARE THE FORTY-TWO THINGS I DO NOT SEE BECAUSE MY HEAD IS TURNED TOWARDS THE PATH ALONG WHICH YOU MIGHT RETURN.
Aslam wrote this poem as part of “42 Writers for Liberty,” an initiative to protest a proposal by the British government to extend the period for detention-without-charge from 28 to 42 days in 2008. The proposal eventually failed overwhelmingly in the House of Lords, though the civil rights group associated with the 42 Writers program continues to protest current detainment laws.
Dear Mr. Gandhi
It was cold, the day the masjid
was torn down stone by stone,
colder still at the heart of Delhi
Ten years later entering Bengali market
I saw a street filled with bicycles
girls with rushing hair, boys in bright caps
I heard a voice cry
Can you describe this?
It sounded like a voice
from a city crusted with snow
to the far north of the Asian continent.
I saw him then, your grandson
in a rusty three wheeler
wrapped up in what wools he could muster.
Behind him in red letters
a sign: Dr. Gandhi’s Clinic.
So he said, embracing me, you’ve come back.
Then pointing to the clinic —
It’s not that I’m sick
that gentleman gets my mail and I his.
That is why I am perched in this contraption.
I cannot stay long, it is Id ul Fitr.
I must greet friends in Old Delhi, wish them well.
Later he sought me out in dreams.
in a high kitchen in sharp sunlight
dressed in a khadi kurta, baggy jeans.
He touched my throat in greeting —
Listen my sweet, for half of each year,
after the carriage was set on fire
after the Gujarat killings,
I disappear into darkness.
In our country there are two million dead
and more for whom no rites were said.
No land on earth can bear this.
Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.
All day I hear the scissor bird cry
cut cut cut cut cut
It is the bird Kalidasa heard
as he stood singing of buried love
Now our boys and girls
take flight on rusty bicycles.
Will we be cured? I cried
And he: We have no tryst with destiny.
My hands like yours are stained
with the juice of the pomegranate.
Please don’t ask for my address.
I am in and out of Bengali market.
“
—
Meena Alexander, “Bengali Market”
I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with
Nehru. I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,
English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre…
“
—
Kamala Das, An Introduction.
If there is a knower of tongues here, fetch him;
There’s a stranger in the city
And he has many things to say
“
—
Mirza Ghalib, translated from Urdu by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
In the playground, Jagjit says, invisible hands
snatch at his turban, expose
his uncut hair, unseen feet trip him from behind
and when he turns, ghost laughter
all around his bleeding knees.
He bites down on his lip to keep in
the crying. They are
waiting for him to open his mouth,
so they can steal his voice.
“
—
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, stanza from “Yuba City School” from her collection Leaving Yuba City (1997). Though I find a majority of her work to be pretty problematic, I’m amazed at the renewed significance of this poem after September 11th.
Tamil Sangam Poetry
Persian and Urdu love poetry get all the attention, but people forget that there’s a well established tradition of romance from the Tamil Sangam era. This poem, translated by reknowned translator A.K. Ramanujan, comes from the Kurontokai, which was written in the first three centuries A.D. The poem also provides the title for Vikram Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
I'm an aspiring adult and PhD student in English. My research focuses on South Asia and its diaspora. In my spare time, I'm that guy who talks too much about pop culture at social events.
