[poem] My Name is a Spell

MY NAME IS A SPELL

My name is a spell
It can’t be held
In the mouths of oppressors
Reminiscent of territories
Of bodies, invaded
The database collects my name
But cannot understand it
Yet the database decides
Where I will go in this life

Life, is a series of borders
Built and policed by those
Without access to themselves
But if we can be sorted, ordered, owned
By walls, by data
Then so can they
Eventually, borders creep
But our inner worlds
Cannot be stolen, like land

Land is a source
Of our innate, ancestral power
The soil and water
That nourished my infant body
Lives on in me
Even here at the borderlands
Where my Tamil is broken
And our people
Indefinitely imprisoned

To be imprisoned for seeking safety
For fleeing a genocide
For escaping the erasure of language, culture
For leaving a broken country
For resisting the regime that broke this country
For being born in a country broken by Empire
For being ripped from our homelands
For sacrificing ever being home again, whole again
Is to be imprisoned for existing

Existing is not possible
Without building worlds
Made up of music
Sound and stillness
In frequencies their ears can’t hear
Our ‘selves’ are fluid
Complex, interwoven with ‘other’
And at the same time non existent
Not to be contained in 1’s and 0’s
The seeds of liberatory systems

Systems we live in
Could bend and break under
The pressure of presence
Of a stillness so deep
It feels close to death
Perhaps even colonisers could access
Their own stillness, could speak our names
If only they stayed quiet
Long enough to hear it

Notes:

• Dhakshayini read this poem at the 64th meeting of Orinam’s Quilt in Chennai on Jan 2, 2023.
• Image from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Blogtrepreneur

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