A poem on the repatriation of Naga ancestral human remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
Across these crooked mountains where the land curtsies to the riversAnd the raw timbres of tattered history meanders into the songsOf my forefather and my foremother –Songs I now sing with broken syllables and mismatched tones,I am comforted by the ghosts that live in themGhosts that wake upon such an invocationWhose lives have previously leaked out of the crevices of these songsAnd have become transmuted into objectionable topics of study one holdsBetween their fingers as they discuss anthropological indiscretionsOverproduced in seminar halls and monetised by museums.They say they wish to return to their land where myths are containedNot in twisted tongues or caged in glass boxes stained with the interdiction –“Please do not touch”,Or on labels where a child’s game lie paralysed in description,Where people come and gawk and say, this is spectacular!But to return home where people walk and move with the earth,where the water of the forest nurses the wounds of the heartwhere touch has no mediatorand the truth has no dialect.
My friend, tell me, how can you and I tell them that thisis just another dream that one keeps to oneself?
-To Dolly