Dear Professor,
Today is twenty third of October.
How are you sharing the time? the time of the most brutal violence in history? Your classes used to bleed to the core. The passion that you poured in colonial history/herstory ouched our lips, welled our eyes and leaned our head to hands. Long after the class, Culture and Imperialism vibrated through our souls.
How are you, Prof?
The sun rises today as it does. Its warm ray falls on the tomato leaves. The baby spinach looks yellowish green. The puny Mexican chilies blush brightly. In an unadulterated light.
What is this unadulterated thingi, Prof?
You used to say you can be an authentic researcher when you will not savour tasty colonial cookies, fried crispy with lies. Yes, you can be a true researcher when you can stand under the sunlight and see your hands clearly and shout, this is my hand, this is my mouth, these are my eyes…
Truth never contaminates in crisis!
Can you please help me to unlearn all these when a vengeance lashes out on “an open-air prison,” when a God-like “wrath” (not anger as in Look Back in Anger, but Homeric one in Iliad) reinforces caricatured justice, hey, not for an eye for an eye, but seventy five years of ongoing mass murder (statistics on going, sir!), when the binary of good/evil and angel/Satan are melted from the colonial freezer and “human animals” are slaughtered in a chilling darkness…
How can I unheard all these, Sir?
Can I deter me from lining up East Bengalis, Rohingyas, Palestinians, and Aborigines in the same row and listen to their stories of stolen lands? Can I seal my ears like Odysseus not to listen to Siren’s dangerously sweet songs? Can I cure my postcolonial sickness, dry clean Eagan’s “weevils” that suffers us with the sufferers?
Remembering to sing reconciliation long after
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land, past, present and emerging…A reverence clicked through the room, a silence shrouded you and me, roaring in the cool ac’d hollow like a wounded lion.
I can’t catch the hollow, I can’t fill it up
I only feel, land is the mythic Hasnahenah, attracting the snakes to bite the “not quite” to death. I only feel, not showing a bedouin‘s shifting, a musafir‘s transient temporality, land invites “cleansing” through “collateral damage.”
Let’s flee the land and float on the Moon!
My poems, Umme Salma, 1/11/2023
Salma Seclusion 