black child goes out into the day mother’s afraid for him today he brings the only skin he’s got while a white cop fires the final shot to take it all away i can’t breathe brown woman goes to work white boss tries to force her with just one phone call to someone who he’s…
The Dollar Store Poem
1. AnthroApocology Safari suit clad fascist with microscope and coolies enters the Temple of Doom At his shoulder, Harrison, in those Fordlike soundbytes Urging urging him on Amen Father Son and Holy Cow 2. General Motors stares back at me From every shop-window his silver dollar and medals swinging to a marching oompah pah oompah…
The Soloist
I’ve been having a hard time with this solo-self-isolation. All members of my family are thousands of miles away, experiencing their own lockdowns. Music, books, cleaning, and cooking are losing their charms after the 2 weeks I’ve been doing this! And I fear there will be weeks more. As a person with disabilities that make…
The Weight/ Solo Quarantine
Waiting for the one who never comes or might come forever. The ground shattered beneath our feet, the sky splintered above us. Mitigating their barbarism or choosing our love? That is the weight of this wait . All the roads are empty, and do not only lead to Rome. Grief and fear sweep through China,…
COVID19 Kills Postmodernism!
The other day, a friend asked me if I had been writing. The truth of the matter is, being solitary sometimes makes me unable to concentrate. I think it’s ironic, that I have not watched Netflix once, since the start of official self isolation for elders and those with pre-existing conditions. Part of this has…
Patiently Brown 2: A Journal of the Plague Year
For those of us with disabilities and compromised immunity, the coronavirus contagion is loaded with particular fear. Like the elderly, our bodies are already dealing with underlying issues, some of which are already being treated for, and some for which there is no reliable big pharma treatment but sometimes symptomatic help. Over the last six…
Xanaxocene
A poem about the coronavirus and our changing world
Stardust
in a distant eon, you and i were stars. tumble and spark, ether and eterntity, dust and light, while the world was being born. we were young. fierce and shining like a child’s eyes. in a distant eon, you and i were stars. rock and fire distance and delight. while the world flourished we joined…
They Don’t Come Easily!
i don’t find these days that poems come easily. they’re no longer at my beck and call. these days, if i want one, it’s as though, like my arthritic hands, battling the last squeeze of toothpaste, my mind squeezes out a little word or two, some syntax. the world is full of silences those beats…
Trigger Warning/Not One Less
After the world celebrated and commemorated International Women’s Day on March 8th with so many marches, rallies, gatherings for women’s rights, and so forth, the fact of the matter is that women are being continually violated and killed with impunity. Earlier last summer on the blog in a piece called The Weight of All Our…
March Mermaids
A visual series celebrating International Women’s Day!
Of Pipelines and Pogroms
This short piece discusses the term “rule of law” in the context of Canada and India.
An Animal ABC! by Kaushalya Bannerji
This is an illustrated ABC for kids and the young at heart! Colourful and fun!
World Social Justice Day
The United Nations has declared February 20th as World Social Justice day. In this era, social justice is like a carrot dangling before humanity while the vast majority of us are being beaten with sticks. So, social justice is an aspirational desire, a desire to remediate the wrongs of past times and current ways of…
Hey, Bobby Marley!
If Bob Marley were alive today, it is likely that he would be assassinated again, by the U.S. government and its agents. His 75th birthday would be tomorrow, February 6th, although he perished at the age of 36, a man in the prime of his music, lyrics, and creativity. It is fitting he was born…
My Dida’s House
Reading the stories of so many Indian women, I am reminded of this, my only heirloom. I want to tell too, of my hidden memories. My Dida’s house, the noise, the open sewers, the eternal mangy cat with her multi-hued descendants. The ceaseless summer war between cat and human, mosquito and human. The long afternoons…
The Heart of Winter
We’re in the heart of winter, with dark days, blizzardy conditions occasionally, and slushy, slippery streets. It’s hard to muster up excitement to go for a walk and there’s very little to do if you don’t have loads of money. It’s even hard to think about my blog or plan what to write about next,…
I am the truth… as well as you…
This article is a brief and introductory summary of recent political developments in BJP India and some examples of resistance to the Hindu fascist agenda.
A Murder of Crows
On my recent visit to Kolkata, India, I was struck by many things, but one that stands out for me in the wave of pollution that blankets the city, is the harsh cawing of the crows, who proclaim their resilience much like people. Their ubiquitous presence was a big part of my urban childhood summers…
A Rapist in Your Way
Today’s piece pays homage– and it must– to the brave women of Chile and around the world who are standing up for their right to be free from sexual and gender-based violence. Currently, Mexico leads the world in murder of women and other forms of sexual violence. The United Nations, whose research wing may be…
Return to My Native Land (with apologies to Aime Cesaire)
I have been travelling and experiencing the world through the eyes of my childhood and the “now”. The city I return to is not the city of my childhood and teens, nor the city of my twenties and thirties, where the excitement of women’s liberation, the furious exchange of ideas, politics, and philosophies at the…
Chile: Forbidden to Forget…
I was first introduced to the world of Chileans in exile, in the late 1970s, as adults and children fleeing political repression, torture, kidnapping, political rape and murder, arrived in Canada. In fact, Chile had not been know for mass migration until the political banishment of left and progressive sectors under the Generals. Chile’s self-image, shaped…
A fall gallery
A series of drawings celebrating autumn in all her glory!
Pachacutec
This is a seven part poem I have been working on since my work, studies, and travels have taken me to South America and Cuba. I have long been fascinated and moved by the strength of peoples who manage to hold on to their cosmologies in the face of terrible odds such as kidnapping, enslavement,…
We Lived Happily during the War
One tries to hang on to hope, in spite of the onslaught. Poetry, art, music, dance, theatre, and even sometimes film, can offer us someting in that direction, give us a glimpse of that blue star. This year has been filled with changes in our political landscapes, fear and trauma among many who have been…
Journey
nothing but the need for friendship reduced, quest now stripped of myth how difficult not to remember the colour of eyes how we ran to and from such passions there was a time i thought i must not know you but outside the rain howled your name could not forget, would not, how could i?…
2 O’Clock
a yellow butterfly flew past brushing bougainvillias with dreams of rain now the grass is solemn does not dance a shadow grows longer upon the limewashed wall somwhere near by, children ae singing to capture even half this beauty in the palm of the heart from A New Remembrance, 1993, Copyright Kaushalya Bannerji
Indigenous Uprising on Columbus Day
I am a strong supporter of the movement throughout the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean to stop celebrating Columbus Day. Critics of the pro-Colombus status quo signal to the cruelty and harshness of Spanish empire-building and by extension, European and British colonization efforts in the Americas. Genocide of indigenous persons, the wholesale buying…
A Walk in the Park
We went to the park the other day. Storing up the sunshine of these beautiful days while we can, like squirrels with their nuts. The ups and downs of the meadows and trees, the glint of the sun on the tiny river and all around, little inhabitants of our world, scurrying to save stores for…
Denial is Not a Policy! Climate Strike 2019
Today I marched in the climate strike with millions of people around the world. I marched because I breathe, eat, need water, have increasing love and appreciation for the natural world, and hold the lives of the world’s citizens in the highest regard. I have been appalled and sickened by the astronomical levels of pollution…
Patiently Brown: Misadventures in the medical system # 1
I am always being told what to do. Like many people with poorly understood disabilities and conditions, I have heard every possible advice that people’s grandmothers, parents, aunts, doctors, naturopaths, second cousins, and their neighbours might possibly have to offer. Headache. Oh, just do this, and it will go away. My aunt/doctor/grandmother used to have…
Autumn
Today’s piece is sharing some poems which have been part of our English poetry canon for centuries and decades. Some I had to study in school, and thus happily rediscovered in adulthood. My mother suggested me a beautiful poem by John Keats, Ode to Autumn. I share it below. A beautiful cadence of the English…
Snowscape
SNOWSCAPE The landscape is still-born Birth of winter brings blood to the snow someone is not walking but standing awkward space the corner of December Breaths are frozen leaving the pale orifices of mouths as though they were not inanimate Moving away fleeing the refuge of bodies And someone wanting the comfort of another thinks…
They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds
Ever since I saw the phrase, “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds”, I have been so moved. I am a part of so many communities that have survived burial, in the manner of the phoenix. We are resilient and resourceful like seeds that are nourished by hope instead of fear,…
The Harvest Moon
Last night, I glimpsed the harvest moon, red and full. This is the time of the year when the days grow shorter, the wheat and vegetables, apples, and stone fruit are harvested. Soon the nights of pumpkins and souls will be upon us. Autumn also brings the delight of jumping on crinkly fallen leaves, and…
Of Gods and Goddesses
For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about myth-making, religions, and various deities. I saw a Cannabis strain called Blue God. It made me think of Krishna, the Hindu blue god and flute player, and lover. Before the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda, this image of the blue god was one I always found to…
Ringing the Bell on Facial Palsy
An essay on the long-term effects of permanent facial palsy.
The Haiku Way
Is that your face I see? Or an old map of travels we took, each alone? Bussing the Sierra Madre, two travellers homeless, dreaming of return. River beside us sand beneath our flip-flopped feet men we did not know All haiku and artwork, Copyright Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019
Traveller’s Lament
I used to love the roads as well as blood loves vein fleeing from running to the geographies of other maps where my race charted like a cartographer’s fantasy finds itself obscured by the deviance of our desire in all my darkness i have never lost the way nor forgotten the words of this lamentation…
Signs of Disorder
the new season eats us with raw uncertainty even this weather has us guessing night’s frost a riddle chancing upon a newspaper a little bit of history intrigues between the fullstops lives collapse and transform nations turn upon themselves jobs are lost wars won and all our dreams made homeless everywhere there are signs of…
Blood in the Fire: A Cry from the Amazon
I’ve been aghast but not surprised to hear about the devastation of the Amazon due to uncontrolled fires set throughout mainly Brazilian territory. I don’t think fire will respect borders either. I’ve been remembering my own experience visiting the Amazon, a place that had always seemed magical and exotic due to the vast amount of…
Skintalker!
These haiku are inspired by music from the 1940s onward. I used to love listening to “latin jazz” and afro-cuban jazz. Years ago, when I had a radio spot, finding music to share was a delight, especially since it was long before the Internet! Chano Pozo revolutionized American jazz at a time when it was…
I like mine neat! More Haiku!
Rulers they want us to hate ourselves easy to dismember flesh bone memory Ether/real Chamber the internet is not yet full with dead minds the haul must be greater Politricks in the age of Electronic Voting Machines/DREs Press that button quick hackers must work wonders all hail the motherboard of lies Elites they have a…
Rainbow/Arco Iris
The colour Red is a bird with wings that shine. Yellow, turns into a sunflower. Grey, the colour of rainy afternoons when bodies love. Green, hope yet unreachable. Blue, the clear melody that cleanses everything in its wake. Pink, the tongue of a black cat. And Black, the open arms of night, although no-one, but…
Be Like Water
(Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019) flow, like water wave, like water cry, like water rage, like water rain, like water dry, like water still, like water one drop, like water becomes many.
The cat went here and there and the moon spun round like a top (W.B Yeats)
Cats are amazingly complex creatures. Beautiful, predatory, cuddly, inquisitive and also experts at being lazy. Our cat often enjoys the evenings outside and the moon with me. What her shining eyes see only she knows…
Deportee
The day brings so much more news about ICE, the U.S.Border Patrol, family separation, the dependency of multi-billion dollar corporations on undocumented labour and racism. The buying of citizenship (U.S.A) and the ban on migrants who receive social assistance from becoming citizens (Germany). And in the midst of these conditions, people still love and live,…
The Weight of All Our Rage/Red Dress
I recall this poem I wrote during the Oka Crisis of 1990. Thirty-one years ago. Things have only gotten more dire. Oka Nada It was true what the foremothers told us. Words are unrepentant birds which fly off and leave us silent. (Once more we watch the silenced movie. Clear Quebec Sky, still summer days)….
World Refugee Day June 20
Refugee production continues to be caused by war, ethnic cleansing, class warfare, narco states, apartheid, climate change and collapsing economic conditions. In 2015, the world was horrified by the searing image of Aylan Kurdi (3 years old), drowned on a Mediterranean beach, but the commitment to stopping the creation of refugees has not been matched…
Pies, para que los quiero, si tengo alas para volar?
Homage to Frida Kahlo, myself, and so many others immobilised by a disabling world
