words that bleed and fly
by Brinda Bose
I
for abhijit roy in dhaka, february, 2015: requiem
what now, this living hour in the dead of night. what is it about you that raises the hair on our arms tonight as you die for the words you wrote, felt, slept, spoke. a dhaka pavement bleeds and weeps but is there insurrection on all the pavements of the world, are they all rising and shrieking in this seething messy unruly grief that is going nowhere
because sharp brave words have lost their way in the grey frantic flapping middle where death and surveillance and vigilantism snicker and stride and where you can start squirting blood in so many directions that you can learn, or forget, to count. all your life you piled words on words bearing aloft the freedom of thought and the land of the free and the brave gave you bright promising skies to trail your letters of fire across to a homeland that was to celebrate your thoughts on freedom in a carnival of books. should we not howl at the horror of this massacre of the word that came flying over mountains and lakes searching for roots in the land of rain and rising rivers. and if we have stomach for more than horror there is irony too, to be hacked good and proper you need to be felled with fair books, you must be knived carrying the burden of the printed word, the spoken word, the heard word and the read word on your breathing walking talking person and it must be etched on your body with the dull pleasurable ache that brands your arms when you limp out of the fair of books that you travelled so far home to sell and buy: words. your words and their words and everybody’s words but then suddenly in a bizarre coldblooded calm your words turn deathly pale and ghastly red and begin to spread and leak
until every book on every pavement from dhaka to all the cities of the known world is doused with the blood of the words they bear and the flesh that carries them, limping and triumphant, incarnadine
II
for taslima nasreen in america, june 2015: aubade
and what now, when words rise like yeast and carry you over hoary oceans to a land that is yours and everybody else’s or so they like to sing, but is not really yours in blood and tongue and glistening silverscaled fish and monsoon floods except in hyphenation. that land is warm with welcome, yes, with the laughter of sisterhood camaraderie solidarity support and the deep grinding sorrow of a brother’s passing but it is not your land.
so you may land there but you shall not forget the words you left behind in the lands you call your own, many cities that you had to leave one by one dhaka calcutta delhi trailing garlands of poems and prose and loves and conversations and writing, always writing. where can you go, where must you go, light and heavy on wings of words sharing stories and wine and the nostalgia of white. white summer sarees left behind at home… but wait, was that home? that adopted city of a tongue once-removed while you hungered and fought for a place in the grimy bangla sun on either side of two-nation borders. but then who cares about borders when lands on both sides grow hostile slouching into a dull sepia with memory searching for bold angry markings on the ground beneath lowering skies. there are now only shadows casting grim tales of émigré despair and hope and lives old and new are rolled up and hurled at the barbed wire fencing to pierce holes and squeeze dreams that are dead and dying through them like camels through eyes of needles
and some stories surf up on the other turf and plant words in a soil unknown yet intimate for the words are shared if the tongue rolls them differently and spits them out in shapes and sounds at once alien and one’s own but just as you begin to believe that the roots are taking hold you must pack up your sarees and your stories in a weary suitcase and fly away again. into hiding they say but where will you hide how can you hide why should and would you hide when the words find you again and again and tear into you and out of you and speed away to slam into other faces and names and tongues. to beat and flay and form fresh flags
of words, just like all your white summer sarees waiting to be worn and crushed and soiled with passion and poetry, splendidly done and undone in beauty, sadness and rage