Effigy – A Coupling and 2 other poems

We cannot now try to edit or censor our past.
You cannot hide famines you forced on our bodies.

We cannot pretend to have a different history.
Your hands reek of our blood. You cannot conceal.

The statues in our cities and towns
made from our wealth looted on boats

were put up by previous generations
overseers of colonies, plantations.

They had different perspectives,
but you still see us the same –

different understandings of right and wrong,
like your different treatment of white and not.

But those statues teach us
stone can crumble with time;

about our past,
about your self,

with all its faults,
without amends.

To tear them down would be
to rip the soul of empire,

to lie about our history
is to lie in cowardice,

and impoverish the education
and suffocate the revolution

of generations to come,
of generations who came.

(Note: In this coupling poem, the first line of each couplet has been taken from an X thread written by then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June 2020, during the George Floyd protests where protestors defaced the statue of Winston Churchill in London.)

at the immigration desk your tongue becomes your passport
the more angrez you sound the more you become native
so you speak proper english with proper pronunciation
endlessly reciting she sells sea shells on the sea shore
until your mouth settles in its new firangi mould

that garland of letters remains dormant in your mouth
characters that hang off bars as if terrified of the fall
or when they reveal a noose like the letter व
that sounds weak and violent at the same time

language is showbusiness and you carry its burden
an entertainer switching in and out of your अजनबी skin
testifying your life’s purpose to the border officer
while he casually mispronounces your name
is it worth it when he says yourenglishissogood?

your mother tongue is at war with your other tongue
the aftermath ends up in looted words
you now become اجنبی in your own home

a boat moored to shore
but you’re always in water

it has become     a reconciliation  

this return to the jaws of the river

       waters         that held                   my adolescent anger

    draw me   back in   with their tidal wave 

    on the opposite bank   the old colonial fort    remains

    captor of my ancestors      is now my witness

I stretch my eyes out         to the horizon

 searching             for the point where

river   

        pours   

     into sea

     away from the interior

I turn my back

to the concrete walls closing in 

but I cannot escape

     the white teeth   gnawing our hills

         if we drain this body   of all its    fluids   will we find

        the carcass of our grief at the river bed 

or does the sea swallow us 

           whole