Two of Rupam Baoni’s poems featured in the volume of essays and poetry
DIASPORA and MIGRATION : Interrogating Homeland and Identity in a World of Precarity
Edited by Pradipta Mukherjee
Published: Pencraft International August 2024
This is a volume of essays by significant contemporary voices, a thought-provoking interview with poet and academician Debashish Lahiri, some incisive poetry by Rupam Baoni that juxtaposes human displacement with the process of surgical transplants of organs, as well as her foray into phantom pains experienced by the two countries Pakistan and India, post-partition. The book explores the pertinent subject of migration, diaspora and its effect in today’s socio-political climate.
step-by-step study of human displacement: a surgical evaluation
tell your arm to wrench free from
the socket holding it together and
take another body now – there’s a science
to your tissues taking to theirs, there’s
rejection at first, there’s always rejection
of one foreign body entering another, of
your fears colliding with
your recipient’s fears, the weeping and
wailing of the new and old bits of you, the
infighting, the moderating of yourself so
just parts of yourself reject parts of them, so
there’s hope of growing into their
parts as their parts; and you work your
nuts-and-bolts into their armhole, their
hollows, to sit snug like you’re back
home with family or the likes of it, working
yourself to the bone, working your motors
to their tempo, tempering the colour of
your eyes and skin and blood in keeping
with the colour of their needs and
requirements so you’re the malady you
learn to live with – allograft transplant
it’s called surgically (as opposed to
autograft where you take parts of you to
another part of you); and you must hereon
ingest the linctus of your survival
day after day after day
to allow the daily living
to allow the rhythms of you to grow into the
rhythms of them and the other way
around, and you must know you won’t take
to each other easy, you never do, never
completely, and the french call this
depaysment or exile, the feeling of not being
home, of non-being, of being in a distant land, of
being far, far away from where your
mother patted flatbreads at the kiln, where
your son buries himself in the rubble with
your uncle’s son, where the sun never
shines again, where the days are like
night, where the nights are a blanket of
what was and isn’t anymore
~~
audio
your body was my home
(we meet here every evening to dance before the sun goes down again)
and I’m learning to navigate the fractures of your body and mine,
and I’m learning to worm around clefts and curvatures as though
the splints, gridlocks, routes, reroutes intersecting each other
at angles aren’t catches enough holding me up from making any
headway anymore; the shoulder-blades whittled to sand dunes in
fours, in fives of our rivers, our riverfronts have splintered to caverns
where westerlies wail and raid all day long, routing hopes of full
recovery yet persistent like death traps lain upon our thighs, our breasts,
belly-buttons where we were lovers once; it’s true that hairline fractures
are tackiest to tackle: they’ve passed through similar pains of rupture
and breakage as other fractures but are unseen like grief and there’s no
telling of damage or destruction, there’s fear of treading upon or around
pits of pain, and there’s fear of un-treading, of faltering, of falling
headlong into those no-man’s lands, into landmarks where I refuge but
cannot be refugee because some words have outlived their use
or usefulness now, some have altered, some others comminuted or
compounded to newer bits; sometimes I vault across spaces blundering
and flightless like a runner-bird, sometimes I tread gingerly between gashes
that have paused their weeping but rankle still, reek in their festering of
loss, love, the likes of it all; this manoeuvring forward of my body and my
body mass about your contours is a craft I acquire with time and practice
before I learn to master the art of failing and of flying; have you watched
a raptor coax her fledglings, then thrust them headlong over crags to school
them of the fundamentals of flight and of fall and how best to avoid the
head or when to tuck in the limbs when crash landing? have you seen
how the preceding months of their feeding and fending are part of her
modus operandi: of knowing love and all it entails, then un-knowing it all
to give way, to let go, to stop the weeping within – or hope it will? her
maternal instructiveness is after all her longing to expel the ache she’s
carried in her belly for centuries, for nothing aborts the absence of presence
that’s mute but tumorous; I think often about how the breaks and bindings in
your body begin inside me and how they wiggle through spaces I’ve never
touched with my fingertips because touching you is never an option or
can be because touching you is sacrosanct and like touching a rainbow, like
watching the colours crumble to black and ash; yes, we meet here every
evening to dance before the sun goes down, never touching or knowing
touch in the way we must know touch or how touching is another word for
healing but has never made the lexicon we carry about our persons now; and
every time I reach the gateway to your body and mine in its emerald downs,
its pearlescent points, I un-touch your throat and I unkiss your spaces
where I’m told that breath and death are one and the same, and I negotiate,
then re-negotiate your fissures, your fractures, the lines and lineaments of
control that hold us hostage in love or love’s namesake
~~
(every day just before sunset indian & pakistani soldiers meet at the
attari-wagah ‘border’ and perform a dance-off ceremony)
audio
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