ESCAPING THE BELLIPHONIC, OR WHAT TO SAY WHEN HE SHRIEKS, CURRY GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY
our grandparents hid under bloodied corpses on steam trains
blood and hair soaking tongues
silencing voice
others jumped into water wells
sewage pits
changed last names
forged lineages
circumscribed cocks
thieved & bribed & blah blah to make the journey under pitch-black skies from Jai Hind! to Pak! Pak! Zindabad!
until of course
until of course
Jinnah’s dream splintered in ’71 and Ama says she cowered like a little girl (correction: as a little girl because indeed she was a little girl) / army crawled / tears and snot streaking down her cheeks / into and under nana’s charpoi each & every time the air raids sounded / the bombs dropped and the walls shook until of course
she grew up & married (well not so entirely grew-up as women married young Over There and Back Then but also they do so now anyway (#tradwives trending) / and esp do so during war All Over
// (but this is a tangent and another poem entirely) //
so when that snot-faced little girl who is my mother grew up and married she immediately & readily coerced and cajoled and agreed and supported another migration
this time onto a rich and unstable
middle eastern petro-state
(in a misguided / miscalculated attempt to grasp at peace and stability)
(& where make no mistake the locals smirked at her and Aba / ‘mistook’ them for the help but this was ok this belittling these daily humiliations scorn and disdain // (and fyi back then we didn’t call it racism / found it acceptable or at least tolerable because there were no air raids and instead there were eid melas henna halwa / the oud / the great blue sky) / all these provided ample or at least adequate bread & circus / / until of course because there’s always an until of course
until of course Howdy Dowdy cowboy george bush junior // (that slow one with all the Cs on his report cards) // bombed Baghdad into bits because … well because axis-of-evil and weapons-of-mass-destruction of course / so our parents upped and left that desert oasis too for it had far too much proximity to the carpet bombing and sanctions and sectarian violence and freedom of speech was not a thing either so you could hundred percent end up dead the next morning for a joke at a dinner party or an uh huh by the water cooler or the wrong book sitting on your bookshelf or maybe your father scribbled the beginnings of a ghazal and it had something to do with democracy or minority rights or women’s right or he spoke up against bacha bazi or and or and or
(and make no mistake ending up dead would be the absolute best-case-scenario-in-this-worst-case-scenario-of-discovery-about-the-hypothetical-beginning-of-a-blasphemous-poem-written-by-your-father-in-a-moment-of-stupidity-or-bravery)
and that’s the how and why of my parents’ migration to this batshit cold white country where ok sure you locals think we came to steal your jobs but ah-ha little do you know we’re here for the minus forty and the frigid women and the potholes and the confusing parking signs in two batshit bullshit oppressor tongues
(& where make no mistake the locals still sneer at us
this time for becoming doctors
and IT execs)
and now there’s tears and tiers of waspish decorum and legalese and double stand-ing and redtape and panama-paper-ing so that ah-ha it’s the same shit Over Here as Over There just hidden better fortified trendier with fancy lighting and lightening whitening filters / under thicker coats of pretense and institutional grandstanding / gaslighting / hypocrisy a stench that by any other name
and if you think that women Over Here are functioning in some sort of utopia of domestic-and-career balance booyah / ho-boy / have you ever had a real conversation with a real woman Over Here in your entire one wild and precious life or do you live under a rock on the planet Uranus / copy and paste if you believe that Lady Liberty over on that island with the torch and perky boobies and her ‘give me ye huddled masses yearning to breathe’ beauty of a poem that applies to all excepting the exceptions // (them from the countries being carpet-bombed) // because let’s be real how else to exploit / obliterate / buy private jets from shady weapons kajillionaires so yeah this here little itty bitty thing about freedom of speech? Go ahead and chant FREE! FREE! PALESTINE! or smash a heart over a tweet with the words GAZA and CEASEFIRE and see exactly how generous freedom of speech works Over Here and how long it takes before you get doxxed cancelled demoted but ok ok ok ok ok sure we can concede that ok fine perhaps the gays are indeed having their moment Over Here on This Side but let’s not hunky-dory pretend that it was all smooth sailing to get here and let’s not pretend that all gays are living New York City fabulous big gay lives. The small town gays continue to live their furtive small town gay lives and the small town bipoc gays? Yeah well they’re still getting fucked and not in no good way // Anyhoo, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just be over here shrugging ‘I no speaka English’ holding my dog-earred Edward Said as you shriek CURRY GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY ‘cuz one – I know it’ll roil and boil you something fierce and two give it a generation or two or three and climate change will have your descendants migrating all over this planet // (again) // too / so then come find my brown ass for a cozy tete-a-tete about my migration options because by then we’ll finally reluctantly gloriously speaka the same language.
