The Rohingya – A People Brutalised

The Rohingya – A People Brutalised.

The deadened eyes scream, lashing out at our mute consciences,
the numbed faces cry out, tearing at our complicit deafness,
the streaming tears slice deep, slitting our accursed inaction,
the haunting faces of human suffering, tearing at our indifference,
the wailing children remind us, of a real evil that stalks this world.

The peacemakers, the nobel laureates, the impotent powers that be,
turn the other way, sewing their eyes shut, feigning not to see,

the misery that stalks the Rohingya, each brutal night, and every horrific day.

Where are the howls of protest,
Where are the voices of indignation?
Where are all of us, staring at this festering wound, septic and dripping with pus?

We live in a world of wretched hypocrisy, where pain and suffering abominably leers,
as we turn our heads, neglecting genocide,
unless it happens to ‘our’ people, and not to ‘theirs’.

The Rohingya stare deep into each and every soul, their eyes tunnelling into our inert shame,
while we argue passionately about the results of last night’s football game.

We are complicit, all of us to a person, having failed to be human once more,
stuttering words like these that I write, while into flesh unspeakable horrors tear and tore.

We are nothing, all of us, we are no longer human, as we drink and eat merrily, basking in our own closeted cells,
while tears of mothers, of fathers, of sons and of daughters, overflows reeking wells.

Where are the good people of this world, where are the voices so loud to proclaim, where are the obscenely wealthy countries,
cowardly silent,
as an entire people are brutalised, and savaged till they sink to their blistered knees.

The poet Erich Fried, who endured the savagery of the Nazis, wrote this …

” it happened, it happens, and it will go on happening, unless something is done to stop it from happening “.

It is happening now.
It will continue to happen, unless something is done to stop it from happening.

Now. Today.

 

The Women

The Women

(for the countless women, names unknown, who bore the brunt of Apartheid, and who fought the racist system at great cost to themselves and their families, and for my mother, Zubeida Moolla)

Pregnant, your husband on the run,
your daughter, a child, a few years old,

they hauled you in, these brutish men,
into the bowels of Apartheid’s racist hell.

They wanted information, you gave them nothing,
these savage men, who skin happened to be lighter,

and white was right in South Africa back then,

but, you did not cower, you stood resolute,

you, my mother, faced them down, their power,
their ‘racial superiority’, their taunts, their threats.

You, my mother, would not, could not break,

You stood firm, you stood tall.

You, like the countless mothers did not break, did not fall.

You told me many things, of the pains, the struggles,

the scraping for scraps, the desolation of separation
from your beloved Tasneem and your beloved Azad,

my elder sister and brother, whom I could not grow
up with, your beloved children separated by time, by place,

by monstrous Apartheid, by brutish men,
whose skin just happened to be lighter.

You told me many things, as I grew older,
of the years in exile, of the winters that grew ever colder.

You were a fighter, for a just cause,
like countless other South African women,

you sacrificed much, you suffered the pangs,
of memories that cut into your bone, your marrow,

you resisted a system, an ideology, brutal and callous and narrow.

Yes, you lived to see freedom arrive, yet you suffered still,
a family torn apart, and struggling to rebuild a life,

all the while, nursing a void, that nothing could ever fill.

I salute you, mother, as I salute the nameless mothers,

the countless sisters, daughters, women of this land,
who fought, sacrificing it all for taking a moral stand.

I salute you, my mother, and though you have passed,
your body interred in your beloved South African soil,

you shall remain, within me, an ever-present reminder,

of the cost of freedom, the struggles, the hunger, the toil.

I salute you!

(for the brave women of South Africa, of all colours,
who fought against racial discrimination and Apartheid)