I am not Indian.
Be sure, I will resist the forcing of your disguise,
the one on your face,
your ethnic or religious claims,
an obvious mask for the old gross concept of race.
I am not Indian.
My skin may be brown, my hair is black.
I have never been to the country you speak of.
My great-great-grandparents knew their way around,
but I am not them—a people I never met, I no longer desire to mimic their lost love.
I am not Indian,
not Bangladeshi, Pakistani,
nor Sri Lankan or Nepali,
I get that colours across states can seem the same,
but I refute this obsession with ancestral origin, pretending I am a jolly Bolly.
I am not Indian,
racially, religiously,
physically, by tax payments or sound,
I hold no greater claim to a country,
when my centuries of strangeness to the land is well-found.
And so, this word diaspora only counts,
if I called India mom.
My humid mother ate magwinyas for lunch,
so where is this diaspora theory coming from?
In what way is diaspora being used,
to rank human beings into deserving and less so.
Must I pour my grief onto Muslim or Christian Indians,
suggesting Hindu roots,
makes me more human, more acceptable.
Must I allow nebulous race,
peeking through ethnic, religious, colour claims,
propping up policies and processes that exclude,
or undermine some, while guaranteeing me an easier race.
Listen, I am not Indian,
I don’t cling to racial loyalties that hide behind ethnicity, religion or colour.
Every life matters.
Every power abuse, structural or incidental, requires I dig deep into knowledge.
I am not Indian,
yet, I reserve the freedom to criticise Indian policy as much as I please,
the policies and practices of any country.
I am done with this ethnic race colour fixation, amongst the springboks I paid my fees.
Do you get it? I am not Indian,
my husband is not European or politically white,
our son sure ain’t Anglo-Indian, coloured or mulatto,
this weird constant snacking on man-made race bites.
Hyper-generalising culture,
racialising religion and look-and-sound-a-likes,
in Tunisia, India, across Africa, Europe and Arab slave households,
please, keep my family out of this long dark night.
I am not Indian.
Yes, I celebrate Diwali, eating food with my hand like a pro.
My husband, who you seek to separate from me,
can eat hot food too and knows more Durban slang than any Indian would,
I won’t have these lines drawn between us, for me this is a no-go.
I am not Indian.
If you’re afraid of skin or accents,
worried about difference, an overpowering threat.
Please, first engage with how and why race matters to you,
We can’t be—shouldn’t be—responsible for your international, national inner discontent.
I am not Indian,
My son is not Asian,
he is not criminal or corrupt.
Loneliness, boisterousness, temper flares are human,
let’s keep that in mind before we assume or interrupt.
I am not Indian,
I was born an African woman,
let’s stop pretending racist, sexist ideas are rare and stay at home,
when last year’s economic minister suggested abortions for African women, his Suomi voters surely saw this as a win.
This man with his peers,
holding the quill, determining my likened fate,
only when he was publicly caught,
ignoring what racist idea means, he said he made an immature mistake.
But it wasn’t a mistake, was it?
He is not intellectually disabled or fresh out of a time machine,
the policies of the 1930s, 1960s,
like danmark’s sterilisations in green lands is what he says should be real.
And if your only formula for economic success,
is exploitation and cruelty in suits,
the old favourite remixed when innovation and neoliberalism should be reviewed,
then the world is in big trouble, severe indifference will turn into philosophical brutes.
When stateless migrants are funnelled,
through ’23’s E-and-U agreements,
costing hundreds of millions, money flushed down like poo-poo,
to struggling or opportunistic African states,
good people are selling human bodies, while complaining about population age in their citizen review.
Focussed on white women’s birth and fertility rates,
how frightening,
when the people in charge say they’re managing incoming threats,
while ignoring the mass grave of migrants in the same countries they call enlightening.
What they do to others, they can do to you,
if the time comes and the seething masses point to your bus.
Will it matter whether you paid your taxes, said please and thank you,
forcing you to find shelter with nothing but your clothes, you too will stand nonplussed.
And the people who voted for this,
will pretend that they didn’t see the ugliness coming,
that migration, crime and economic suffering,
was why toward suited swastikas they went running.
But the truth is and was,
they knew, just like they did in the 1930s,
they knew enough but chose indifference,
hoping to benefit from whatever was done to claw back prosperous streets.
I am not Indian,
but I understand more than most the tram ride between fear and race,
I grew up breathing in toxic fumes,
born to a normal that was a neo-Nazi capitalist state.
If I can offer any advice, let me say this,
fear is human, there’s no shame in anger or worry,
but ideas birth emotions, it’s important you interrogate, your biggest threat isn’t curry.
Let’s talk about financial markets, dependence on economies,
tell me how you hold business accountable, prevent geopolitical wars.
What success could your climate change migration plans have,
if you’re excluding, undermining, bringing weapons and death to other countries’ shores.
I am not Indian, friend,
Like you, I am human, nothing less or more.
Sleeping soundly is harder these days, this could happen to me,
if we were the many desperate, destitute or just plain poor.