Not My City
This isn't the kind of city,
Once I called my own.
The city belongs to foxy politicians,
Unscrupulous traders, flesh racketeers, pimps, loompens, rapists,
But this cannot be my city.
The city belongs to mute witnesses,
To rape and murder but not to me,
The city belongs to hypocrites,
Feigning nonchalance to the sight of destitute,
At slums and beggars dying on the avenues of the rich.
This is the city of the escapists,
Who at the slightest premonition of a peril,
Make the hastiest retreat.
This is the city of the spooks
They stoically sit on the piles of injustice;
Here they go into rhapsodies,
Over the question of life after death.
This is the city of the soothsayers,
Agents of self-aggrandizement, opportunists.
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poem by Taslima Nasrin
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India
(to Sumit Chakrabarty)
India is not just India, even from before I was born,
India has been my history.
My history, carved into two by daggers of animosity and hatred, running breathlessly towards uncertain possibilities,
with the terrible crack at the core,
History bloodstained, history turned death.
It is this India that has given me language,
Has enriched me with culture
And powerful dreams.
This India can, if it so desires, snatch
My history away from my life,
My homeland from my dream.
But why should I let it drain me dry only because it so desires?
Hasn't India brought forth those noble souls,
Who place their hands today on my tired shoulders,
On the abandoned shoulders of this helpless, orphaned soul?
These hands, longer than the land, stretched beyond space and time,
Gives me warmly cherished security against all worldly cruelties.
Madanjeet Singh, Mahasweta Devi, Muchukund Dube—they are my homeland today,
Their hearts my true country.
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poem by Taslima Nasrin
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What A Country!
For more than an era,
my Country relished the pains I suffer,
watching my banishment in alien lands.
When the vision is blurred by distance,
they spy me through the hole of a binocular,
and roar in peels of laughter;
one forty million of them relish my own holocaust.
Never had my country been like this before,
She had something called Heart,
teeming with humanity.
Now she ceases to be the country I knew.
Now she is all some decrepit rivers only,
some hamlets and towns,
here and there some vegetations;
Some houses, markets and on the grey meadows,
some people who just resemble humans.
Once my country throbbed with life,
My countrymen recited poems.
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poem by Taslima Nasrin
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