Uma Parameswaram is writer and poet and works as a professor at the University of Winnipeg. Her latest collection of stories Riding High with Krishna and a Baseball Bat & Other Stories can be found on Amazon.
I
(1975)
Let us pledge to stand together
As the Inuit igloo
of packed snow
tight smooth edgeless
Withstands the Arctic’s wintry wind.
Come, let us build our temple
Where the Assiniboine flows into the Red.
II
(June 23, 2000)
Long a celebrant
of this lovely land of endless skies,
whose earth I've walked into horizons,
whose skies I've flown from sea to sea,
in whose rivers I've seen my own -
the singing waters of my native Narmada,
Kaveri, whose rapids feed ancestral fields -
I come, beaing votive incense and a pledge.
I, who have brought Ganga to our Assinibone,
and built my temples where it flows into the Red,
and seen the fluteplayer dancing
on the waters of La Salle,
now stand on the oceans' shore
and know
I must walk farther,
fly higher, dive deeper
to find the fire
that is now but ember
in empty pyres
that smoulder ever
waiting for the hopes,
the bodies, that lie strewn
on ocean floor.
Earth, air, fire, water,
Progenitors of all life,
Inspire, exhort, goad, needle us,
I pray,
That all who live
in this lonely land of endless skies,
Remember now and forever
the dates etched in caves of memory
where there and here come together
to make us who we be.
Dive deeper.
July 23rd, 1914, dark day of ignominy,
When Komagatamaru was driven into the open sea,
while people and newspapers screamed:
Keep Canada white, true north strong and free.
(As though the first nations of this land
never were, had never been.)
Fly higher.
June 23, 1985, dark day of ignominy
when Mulroney sent condolences to Rajiv Gandhi
for “your great loss”
after Flight 182 hurtled through the sky
into the Irish sea,
stopping three hundred Canadian hearts
and breaking three thousand more.
Cry rivers.
June 23, 2000, dark day of ignominy,
when the criminals who sent limbs and hearts
hurtling through the sky into the Irish sea,
have still not been brought to book
because of an Inquiry that drags its feet.
She said, Dark, dark your memories.
Surely there are sunnier ones that shine
Through the spruce green of your prairie mind:
November 2nd, 1949, when Jawaharlal in personStood on the Pacific shore and thanked
the Ghadars for their part in freedom’s cause.
February 21st 2000, when Ujjal took oath of office
to the sound of India’s drums and dance.
Yes, yes, and I have sung psalms to those.
But I come today to light camphor marker,
stupa, gnomon, pyramid, obelisk,
and to sing dirges to the dead, who,
denied funeral pyres,
shall glow forever
in history books and hearts
of all who live from sea to sea.
III
(2005)
I am come to a place past a fading collage
of nostalgia for another land where mangoes yellow and red
peeped with wonder at the purposeful spruce spare and tall
against blinding snow;
of protests proclaiming alienation, marginalization,
discrimination, racialization
of women , races, classes, ages, shapes and colours,
in language deemed meet
for poetry
and for the corporate ladder we call academe ;
of thankless service to various causes
social, political, altruistic, educational;
of secret trysts with the muses moving to music
beyond measurable decibels,
dancing with their shadows as they teased me
with poems and stories to magical dells
that have ever been and never reached.
I am come to a place where the land I stand on
Calls me
To know it as I had never known before.
I had searched and sieved through history texts
for resonating names to suit my prairie rhymes –
Johann Cabot, Jean Baptiste La Verendrye,
de Champlain, Vilhjalmer Stefansson,
oh how the syllables echoed like an honour roll of drums,
and names that are etched in the honour rolls of war –
Allan Edy, 25; James Johnston, 26; Harry Edwards, 24;
James Smith, 27; Normand Edmond, 21; Frederick Watson, 26;
Mark Brown, 30; all pilots in the Battle of Britain.
And met too that nameless woman who from Orkney Islands
came across the seas in search of the man who had sired
the child within her, first white woman to stand on the patch
I call my own, this prairie gold once bush,
through which in travel and travail she sought for help.
Nameless she remains, woman-mother-pioneer.
I did not know then
when the mangoes red and yellow
peeped with wonder at the purposeful spruce,
that history texts had redefined, obliterated or consigned
to nothingness the unwritten, deeply etched memories
of peoples who had walked this land longer than anyone
can rightly ascertain.
Now I walk the land whereon I stand
to meet the past beyond my past
that has been forever, never known.
Aditi, goddess of the seven dimensions of the cosmos,
celestial light that flows through the universe,
permeates the consciousness of sentient beings,
mother of humankind,
I see you here,
Aataensic, who, seeking for healing herbs,
tripped and fell through a hole in the sky,
and was caught in the wing-arms of the Great Geese,
who set her up on the back of Turtle,
which became the earth we know,
where she gave birth to humankind.
Aditi, mother of us all,
Did the birds walk kiiqturtut around you
as you lay birthing?
And when the babies came,
Did they swaddle them in qulittaq,
spear fish with their kakivak to feed you,
and dance the qilaujaniq?
Aditi, mother of us all,
Did you send one of your sons,
a sage with knowledge drawn
from the fount of Vedas,
to our Arctic snows?
and did he teach the Harvaqturmiut
about reincarnation? that the souls of the good
return to earth again as human beings
and that the souls of the evil as beasts?
and to give the name of the noble dead
to the next newborn so he will be here again?
Nowhere else do we find this thought,
not even among those nearest them,
the Quernermiut, Haunektormiut, Hailignayokmiut,
Inuits with other sagas than ours.
Aataensic, mother of us all,
I stand enthralled in the presence of your children,
with their stories and myths so like our own,
with names more liquid gold than any I’ve known:
Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nootka,
Dakota, Mikmaq, Salish, Haida,
sounds that danced to caribou drums
ere the Kabloona came
and stilted their steps,
and changed their names,
and penned them in the rez.
And fed them booze,
and no, let me not go there,
for we dance to the future,
red, white, black, yellow and brown
we dance together around the totem
Maple Leaf white and red
and the purposeful spruce
straight and tall
against blue-tinged snow.
Aditi Aataensic, mother of us all,
Bless us now.
Notes to II above
Air India Flight 182, bound from Toronto to New Delhi via Heathrow Airport in England, was blown out of the sky off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985. There are several annotations as it were that are needed for my poems.
The name of the airliner was Emperor Kanishka.
Though it was common knowledge soon after the crash that Khalistani terrorists were responsible for placing the bomb that caused the crash, even fifteen years later, in the spring of 2000 when I wrote the poem, the Inquiry had not led to any arrest.
Secondly, 329 people died, of whom 278 were Canadian citizens or landed immigrants of Indian descent. The first official Canadian response to the tragedy was that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent a message of condolence to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on “your great loss,” thus clearly articulating the general Canadian perception that Indo-Canadians are non-Canadians and belong to India, not to Canada. This is an attitude that the Indian diaspora in different countries should be aware of, the perception that we don’t belong here as equal citizens of Canada or the United States or wherever we are.
Another reference is to the Komagatamaru, a ship carrying about 350 prospective immigrants from India to Canada that was denied entry into Vancouver port early in 1914, because British Columbia and perhaps all of Canada, was in a state of racist paranoia about the presence of Chinese labourers who had been brought to help build the railroad, and the 2000 Indian labourers who were in the lumber industry. Like the internment of the Japanese-Canadians during the second world war, this is one of the dark chapters of racism in Canada.
Another reference is to Ujjal Dosanjh, the first Indo-Canadian to be premier of any Canadian province, who took office just about the time I wrote these poems.
Notes to III above
kiiqturtut: walking in a circle around a woman in travail
qulittaq: caribou-skin parka
kakivak : spear fish
qilaujaniq: drum dance
kabloona: Inuit name for non-Inuit i.e. white people