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My people once fought a war over language.
Who are my people?
I now fight a war with myself over language.
Who am I?
My people, my country. I, a citizen unwilling to identify. It is not shame I feel as I write: I am Bangladeshi. But it is in the way the word sounds so laden with tradition, so thick with its South Asian flare, so dated and dusty like a Mayan rune unearthed.
Pondering thought: how could I think to scrape off the honey melted into my tongue and remove it like crackling hard wax chiseled off an envelope lip? How can I create magical wordscapes with a language my culture was once pressed down upon with colonialism like a cold-pressed stamp? How do I continue to address my words to all people but my own? How do I discard the blood off my hands of the men and women who lie in overlapping bones of unmarked graves?
Vicious scrub, foaming red drips in unending pour.
I am Bangali. Let your tongue brush your teeth as a sensational pour of sweetness drizzles out through your lips. How do I stop the mourning bloom of stained water lilies in my peccant chest as I write you poetry in a language that is not my own? My tongue feels burdened by the anchor hanging by it, down my throat and into my gut, and yet, this is the only way I know to speak my mind. Disgrace and shame have pooled inside of me in spiraling ruby galaxies. And still, when they spill through my fingertips in streams of pent-up red emotion, they come out in filtered letters my ancestors were shunned with.
Where am I to go with my head hung low, when there are names hardly known that disappeared in '52 and '71?
Rafiq, Shafiq, Salam.
It feels odd when I write of my Bangali roots, when my pages scream in carmine with the names of martyrs, not pristine and clean with the names of foreign strangers.
Blink twice, flutter, the grass is green.
I am the laureate of lingual distress, a bearer of the torch the passes through my generation in flaming despair. I am the bilingual beast my people watch in awe as I unapologetically march.
Left. Right. Left. Right
words don't come to me in rudimentary waves of appreciation for my culture, so I can but only describe the agony that runs through my veins as I crumble before the precipice: am I a worthy bearer of the flag? It claps against the air, moving. I moved out of my country and into one not my own. I am but a bloody stain in an evergreen lingual yore.
I walk away from my mother tongue, like I walk away from my mother. For one I feel shame, for the other I feel ashamed for seeking peace.
Some bloodstains do not wash off, some are meant to go.
I am jealous of the poets who can wield my first language as a steady weapon, while I put on an armor of English alphabets. Where are my ক, খ, গ (ko, kho, go)? The letters that Tagore used to write prized poems, the ones Nazrul penned in a protestant jailcell? I, I don words like a cloak in the dead of night; cowardice. Escaping lingual arrows drenched in poison-pen under a twisted night of swirling dark aggression. As if my struggle is hardly comparable to a Zainul painting.
I once dreaded the possibility of myself becoming an artist like the artists who build their art upon the base of their nationality, their religion, race, and social identity.
Why must I begin with who I am, when I can paint myself a beginning with poetry?
Yet, here I am, writing of my complex roots, unable to trace them to the first lush leaves, as the worthy artists do.
image: Nadezda Razvodovska, Single Red Water Lily Flower in Sunny Day, via shutterstock.
