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Tag: #Language

We Cannot Fail to Write Love Poems

-after Miguel James

If I write a poem against the CAA and the NRC,
that poem will be a love poem.
And if I write a poem about Chandra Shekhar Azad
leading a march in Daryaganj in support
of the constitution and in violation of Section 144,
or a poem about hundreds of women sitting
day and night on the hard pavement of a main road
during the coldest months of the year,
or a poem that says what everyone knows—
that the police does not serve the people or our laws,
but only the Home Minister and his boss—
those, too, will be love poems.
If I write a poem against the very idea
of exploitation, property or borders,
or a poem about a ragged line of teenage boys,
trembling as they face a wall of police dressed
in riot gear and wielding lathis and guns,
and if one of those boys turns and runs,


while his friend reaches down and picks up
an egg-sized stone and weighs it in his hand
as he lets fly a word that means ‘freedom’
but may later be translated as ‘sedition’
in the court record if he is lucky enough
to live to appear in a court—
those, too, will be love poems.
All the poems that I and you and we
write and sing as we try to hold and show
the courage of people sitting
and standing and fighting
to be treated and seen as human—
all of these may or may not fail
as poems, but not one of them
will fail to be a love poem.

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Desh ke Gaddaron Ko

Go fix your gaze on the setting sun,
or even a welder’s torch:

the damage you suffer may result
in blurred vision or blind spots.

Your eyes will heal, but for a while,
when you study a budding tree

you may mistake a parakeet
for a piece of smoky sky.

Some slogans work like that, my friends:
if we train our ears to their blare,

we may perceive only barks and growls,
when we hear our neighbors’ prayers.

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We Must Insist on Saying
Unspeakable Things


When right wing thugs
attack members of a religious
minority in broad daylight
in a nation’s capital
while the police look on
or join in the attacks,
that is not a ‘riot’,
that is a pogrom.

And when armed men in uniform
force their way into homes,
break furniture and take
jewelry and cash,
that is not ‘quelling a riot’,
that is loot and pillage.

And when students of a madrasa
in UP, or any other place,
emerge from jail with bruises
and rectal bleeding,
that is not ‘detention’,
that is torture and rape.

And when officers of the law
take young men accused
of a crime to an empty field
(on a hillside or under a flyover),
and then turn them loose
and shoot them dead as they run,
that is not an ‘encounter’,
that is murder.

And when any government
anywhere in the world,
at any time in history,
accepts, justifies or orders
these and many other crimes,
that is not a ‘democracy’,
that is tyranny.

And when any of us agree
to use words that mask
the truth of these
unspeakable things,
we are not using
‘measured language’
we are telling lies.

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Republic Day Bad Translation Blues

Friends, these are confusing times and everywhere
I go I hear people using words in confusing ways—
it’s like we’re living in some kind of twisted fever dream
or a second rate postmodern language poem. In Kashmir,
torture has long been known as ‘interrogation’,
but now martial law is called ‘development’,
and if you chant or write azaadi in bold letters,
in many states, it’ll be translated as ‘sedition’.
Almost everyone refers to police lynchings
as ‘encounters’ or ‘rough justice’, but at JNU,
the police and their masters now say ‘accused’
when referring to victims of a crime,
and at Jamia they seem to understand library
to mean a ‘place to lob tear gas’,
not a place to read and discuss books—
and speaking of reading, if you’re a Dalit leader,
the police now says reading aloud the constitution
on the steps of a mosque is ‘instigating violence’,
and that, my friends, can land you in Tihar Jail!
(In a related matter, to celebrate the approach
of Republic Day, the Lieutenant Governor
has decreed that if you do land in a Delhi jail,
you can be held without lawyers or charges,
at least until April. But don’t worry; our leaders
have assured us that this is a ‘routine matter’.)

Yes, friends, these are confusing times—
but between us at least,
let’s try to be honest and clear:
when used together,
inquilab and solidarity mean
‘a meeting of power and love’,
and as long as we remember that,
they won’t divide us,
we’ll win.

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