Diaspora and migration

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

~~

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)

 

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