Shailja Patel is a Kenyan-Indian poet, based in Oakland, California. She has appeared at venues across North America, and the UK, including New York's Lincoln Center. She is currently at work on a one-woman spoken word theater show, Migritude. Read more at www.shailja.com
Will The Sky Change Color?
Blood is red. The land is red. The sky was red the day they found me – and did what they did. The skin of the child I bore was red. Then it turned pale yellow, like a sick plant. Like urine. How can there be a god who allows these things to happen?
* * *
“Amnesty International is gravely concerned about serious allegations that members of the UK army, posted to Kenya for training, raped hundreds of Kenyan women. To date, about 650 rape allegations have been made. The alleged rapes took place near the villages of Dol Dol, north of the town of Nanyuki, Rift Valley Province; Archers Post, near the town of Isiolo, Eastern Province; and Wamba, Coast Province; all situated in Central Kenya. More than half of the cases involve gang rape. Some of those sexually assaulted were children at the time. The allegations cover 35 years, approximately from 1965 to 2001, but most incidents reported occurred in the last 20 years.” [Amnesty Report]
* * * *
There is a woman at the well. Three white soldiers approach her. They stink as they grab her. Years afterwards, she remembers the rankness of them as they lie on top of her. The ugliness of their red sweating pockmarked skin, the deadness of their eyes.
* * *
“ Chiefs….and other local officials complained to UK Army officials about the rapes. Such reports did not lead to any investigations by the UK authorities. Amnesty International is concerned that such systemic failure over two decades may amount to institutional acquiescence, and contributed to more rapes and a pattern of grave human rights violations by the UK Army. These failures generated a climate of impunity that caused entire communities to live in fear.”
“International tribunals have confirmed that rape is a form of torture. “ [Amnesty Report]
* * * *
They are the noble savages, staring out from the coffee table books – Africa Adorned, The Last Nomads. Backdrops and extras for Vogue fashion shoots, stock ingredient of greeting cards, tourist safari brochures. The sun sets behind them, glints through the huge holes in their earlobes. They are the myth of tribal splendour. Everything about them is foreign, exotic – shaved heads, gigantic beaded necklaces, bare breasts, red loin coverings. They roam the savannah. Hunt lions with spears. Do tribal dances where men leap several feet in the air. Ululate. Drink brews of milk and cow’s blood. Believe that god made 3 races – the blacks, the whites, and the Maasai. That all the cattle in the world belong to them. Their ‘timeless culture’ is the stuff of children’s books, African American fantasies, everyone’s dream of a people untouched by modernity.
* * * *
Survivor One
Elizabeth Rikanna, attacked in 1984, when she was 22. She’d walked 6 miles from her cousin’s home to find a functioning well, and was filling her water cans, when 3 soldiers approached. She greeted them in English – she had just finished high school and was about to become a law student. Two soldiers raped her, while the third held their guns. After the attack, she walked the 6 miles back to her cousin’s house. Without the cans.
Her family reacted with harshness and outrage – they’d never said they loved her, but they had invested everything in her education. Her labour was agonizing – she was taken to hospital where she had a c-section. She gave birth to twins, but one, a boy, died in the course of labor.
She is now a school teacher. Never married. Feels grief and rage over her shattered ambitions. Deep pain and ambivalence towards her daughter, whom other children call ‘mzungu.’ She still wonders if they attacked her because she spoke to them in English – the language that was meant to be her doorway to the world.
Survivor 35
Tition Pere was attacked by 4 soldiers while herding her goats. When she saw them approach, she began to run, as it was widely known that they raped women. She was heavily pregnant with her first child. They chased her for almost 2 miles, and finally caught her. They argued about who would rape her first. She went into labor the next day, and gave birth to a stillborn child. She only told her husband about the ordeal.
Survivor 412
Benjamin Lechakwet was in his early teens in 1995. While tending his father’s cattle, four soldiers approached him. One offered him a packet of biscuits, and as he reached for them, grabbed him and held him. He remembers being raped by 3 soldiers before he lost consciousness for 4 hours.
He knows of other boys who were also raped, but are too ashamed to speak of it.
* * * *
The British army sends 3000 soldiers a year to Kenya for target practice at 5 military ranges. In July 2002, a group of Maasai and Samburu pastoralists won 7million pounds in a legal case against the British Ministry of Defence for injuries from unexploded bombs and ammunition left by the army on training grounds.
* * * *
May the redness overtake them. May red ants feast in their groins, scorpions nestle in their beds, blood vessels explode in their brains, organs rupture in their bellies. Wherever they go may the land rise up in redness against them, poison their waking and sleeping, their walking and breathing, their eating and drinking and shitting. May they never escape the redness on their hands, on their dicks, the bitter nausea of it on their tongues, the haze of it before their eyes, the drum of it in their ears.
* * * *
From foxnews.com: Adrian Blomfield in Nanyuki reports “Human rights activists have encouraged Kenyan prostitutes to submit fake rape claims against British soldiers”.
* * * *
Blood is red. Grief is red. Rage is red. There is a crimson rising from the soil, spreading through my limbs, burning in my belly. The sky was red the day they found me and did – what they did. It has not yet changed color.
How Umbi Became Paisley
It began as a teardrop in Babylon. Where the sunlight came from Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine. The boteh. Stylized rendition of the date palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled the wrath of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as Empire rose.
Some historians claim it travelled to Mughal courts from Victorian England, as the foliaged shape of the herbal. Evolved in the 18 th century into a cone, then a tadpole. But a legend in Kashmir calls it the footprint of the goddess Parvati, as she ran through the Himalayas at the dawn of time.
Umbi. Form of a mango – fruit that ripens and rots the dreams of all South-to-North immigrants. A shape like a peacock feather. Half a heart, sliced on a smooth s-shaped curve. Something that would feel good in the hand, round to the palm like a solid breast, narrow to a sharp point to test the pad of the finger. Image a child could draw in a single stroke, free form, and still produce something elegant.
Have you ever sliced a heart on a curve? Which piece would you keep?
There was a craft of weavers. Makers of mosuleen, named after its city of origin, Mosul, in Iraq.A fabric so fine, you could fit a 30 yard length of it into a matchbox. Egyptian pharaohs used it to wrap mummies. Imperial Rome imported it for women of nobility to drape seductively around their bodies. Two Indian cities rose to glory and fame on the waves of mosuleen: Masulipatnam in South India. Dhaka, in Bengal.
There was a force named capitalism. Armed with a switchblade, designed to slice the heart out of craft. Separate - makers from fruits of labor. Spirit - mangoes out of their hands into the realm of dream. In 1813, Dhaka mosuleen sold in London at 75% profit, yet was still cheaper than the local British fabric. The British weighed it down with 80% duty. But that wasn’t enough. They needed to force India to buy British ‘muslin’. So down the alleyways of Dhaka stamped the legionaries – British, this time, not Roman. Hunted out the terrified weavers, chopped off their index fingers and thumbs.
How many ways can you clone an empire? Dice a people, digit by digit?
In 1846, Britain annexed the vale of Kashmir, fabled paradise of beauty, and sold it to Maharaj Gulab Singh of Jammu for 1 million pounds. How do you price a country? How do you value its mountains and lakes, the scent of its trees, the colors of its sunrise? What’s the markup on the shapes of fruit in the dreams of its people?
Article 10 from the Treaty of Amritsar, 1846: Maharaj Gulab Singh acknowledges the supremacy of the British Govt and will in token of such supremacy present annually to the British Govt one horse, 12 shawl goats of approved breed (6 male and six female) and three pairs of Cashmere shawls.
Kashmiri shawls. Woven on handlooms, patterned with umbi, rich and soft and intricate as the mist over Kashmir’s palace gardens. First taken to Britain by bandits, aka ‘merchants’ of the British East India Company, they wove themselves through the dreams of Victorian wives, like the footprint of a goddess no one dared imagine.
Has your skin ever craved a texture you could not name? Have you ever held strange cloth to your cheek, and felt your heart – thud?
There was a village Scotland. Paisley. Tiny town of weavers who became known as radical labor agitators. Weaving offers too much time for dangerous talk. Weavers of Paisley learned how to turn out imitation umbi, on imitation Kashmiri shawls, and got to keep their index fingers and thumbs. Until Kashmiri became cashmere, mosuleen became muslin, ambi became paisley, and even later in history, chai became a beverage invented in California.
How many ways can you splice a history? Price a country? Dice a people? Slice a heart? Entice – what’s been erased - back into story? My-gritude (whisper)
Have you ever taken a word in your hand, dared to shape your palm to the hollow, where the fullness falls away? Have you ever pointed it back to its beginning, felt it leap and shudder in your fingers like a dowsing rod, jerk like a severed thumb, flare with the forbidden name of a goddess returning? My-gritude.
Have you ever set out to search for missing half? The piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple. Won’t drop neatly onto a logo, slot into a market niche, make the perfect exotic motif to Chanel’s Spring Collection? The half that’s misshapen. Ugly, itchy, heavy, abrasive. Awkward to the hand, gritty on the tongue, platypus of history – stage of evolution we’d all prefer to ignore. But it’s there. Living, breathing creature that bewilders and irritates: it’s not what it should be. It births its young in a shell – then suckles them. It’s a mammal – but lives deep underwater. It lay hidden for centuries. Have you ever feared what the missing half would reveal? Migritude
Copyright Shailja Patel, 2005. All rights reserved.
My thanks to Lisa Martinovic for the concept of migritude as a ‘linguistic platypus’
My thanks to John Chung for turning migritude into a living platypus and giving me its characteristics