~After Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill”
~a thank you, to those who made the journey, before
They built the train tracks
for memory, brakes to stop some,
others of sea and salt and jelly anemone.
The sting the train lay down:
the stitch marks across the back of you,
scars of a sometimes-broken sub-continent
and all the books in the world cannot tell it:
No Oxford degree, even the perfect pedigree
goes nothing but dog, doggedly on you,
against the sienna spectrums
of your gorgeous skins, eclipsing the other’s vision
of your golden mind, but Africa
would promise a reprieve:
Another kind of servitude, yes,
but not for you. Board the boat,
maybe a passel of children and a guarded wife carried
in your wild mind, a yellow paper of learning,
clutched in your hand, that they will try to tear from you—
and your mind—it sets sail in the wind.
The ocean opens herself to you,
and you feel the years of a homeland on its back,
your own bruised back’s healing:
It’s behind you now, as the water lays down the trail
you will travel, before quitting your India
carrying the chapati and love of mango
to the impossibly sticky okra fields of Tanzania.
You will find a movie theatre in Dar Es Salaam
for dreaming. A limestone quarry in Chunya
for laying down new foundations. A new life,
though you knew, you knew—
it would not really be for you—
but for another generation, possibly two
***
Willem van de Velde II (Dutch)
