“Who remembers the music,” was taken from Hala Alyan’s incredible poem last week.
The words struck me so deep, a calling back to a lost sound within myself. I think so much of what I personally grieve is this feeling of loss, knowing what my ancestors, and therefore me, have lost in the last 100 years or so of mass colonization, genocide and migration. The line “Who remembers the music,” evokes that sense of lost beauty, lost memory, that even a moment of solace, like music, can be forgotten… it’s haunting. It’s hard not to obsess over the pain.
Many of us, children of the colonized, are therefore being faced with the retraumatization of witnessing what is going on in Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo because the eerie violence of imperial force uses the same techniques of terror. Witnessing that has been ugly, pungent, blood boiling. Yet, who better to think of the future than survivors of genocide, rape and war? It’s hard to think of what’s to come through times of mass death, but it is an important task to imagine an honest future.
I have recently been talking about ~utopia~ amongst my friends a lot. I acknowledge that I see a lot of despair in my friends and the larger community as I look around me. I don’t know what the salve is but I think the power lies within us and I’d like to share some of my optimism. So I wrote a poem…
Shout out to the book “Our Dead Behind Us” by Audre Lorde which inspired what I wrote.
Who remembers the music?
for Hala, for Audre Lorde
There’s a distant pining
that I hear like a linger.
It’s been dormant,
in haste,
in delirium,
for a millennia.
This world was not always
like this, it would do us some
good not to forget.
I am utterances,
scripture,
hungry for the moon,
deliberate,
like Miriam.
I pray holy
I pray devout,
I want to
understand you better
than myself, Lord.
I was scooped out
& incorrigible in your
eyes, yet with divine
grace I see myself
exalted,
my moon in Cancer,
pirouetting like Satyajit Ray’s
ET. Who could we have been
without thievery?
The colonizer finds
reason for every
oppression.
I am blood-soaked
& hazy, lurched
out & enraged
the children of
Gaza sings in my
veins.
Your rot
is a metaphor
for what you’ve lost.
Summertime, blissful
it begins, the slippery
slope of denial
the loss, as children
pale skinned,
mouths bloody rimmed
babies with purple-laden
eyes blacked out & blue
neglected in NICU wards
across hospitals
in Gaza.
History is not rallied
against us, I deny whiteness
its grasp.
Beyond anything we have
survived, amidst it all,
Our ancestral
lucidity shines through us,
we did it once
we can do it again.
All it takes
is laboring the current
back to ourselves.
As Audre writes,
“girl brave enough
to be crazy.” In a world
like this, take haste.
I scrimmage through
all dark corners to
perfect myself, to
become illustrious like
the stars, the full
cleansing moon,
undulant.
There’s a bright future
twilling on the horizon
there, we remember the music
the hyacinth songs, & the vibrato
grand, the dialects pulsating of
sibilant sounds. I’ll remember the
way when Umm Kulthum sings
you can hear the Qu’ran,
radiant and true, mingled
as she serenades you
back to Allah, back to
divine tongue.
The stinging nettle
soothes my nerves as I remember
it all, nothing will ever
be lost or forgotten, the totem
of memory lines, ancestry,
from Sudan to Congo,
lineages of mulukhiyya and
dates will be remembered,
the ground so fertile,
aching with our stories,
our bones revising to folds.
We are my favorite
constellation, we the
wretched of the earth,
all the unseen gems of our
future orientation.
Only the dead are
swallowed by the sea
but the rest of us
are seeds, each a memory
topiary, written into
the mud, the ground,
the top heavy &
healed soil.
The pungent ash rises
so does the smoke clear
the jasmine blooms
on the crest of the hilltop,
I can see clearly here.
Everything is an arrival
nothing has to be the
category of sin, I am
hungry for a new
beginning. The
oracle is here,
a whirling
sphere. I take heed,
I humble, I listen.
There's a whole lot of songs but we missing THE MUSIC!
Okay you went awwwf
Stanzas sticking to my ribs at the moment:
“This world was not always
like this, it would do us some
good not to forget.
I am utterances,
scripture,
hungry for the moon,”
“Only the dead are
swallowed by the sea
but the rest of us
are seeds, each a memory”
I love when your pen is werking like this. Thank you for giving us something new to hold.