Ear to the Ground

The Nobodies

The Nobodies ( Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latina America, 1971) Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even…

When I was

When i was untethered the dappling blue and cold Canadian sky shimmered with the light of return I hitched the catheter tighter in my green and blue dressing robe, my hospital gowns parading as patient, while inside i flew like a swan to that far shore no trust but instinct, this must be how a…

I Wanted to Write a Dyke

KAUSHALYA BANNERJI I wanted to write a dyke poem in your face rhetorical a poem unbound angry as my curves aching as the words you never see me throw I wanted to write a dyke poem struttingjeans ungirdled fists that caress like fingers a poem as inspiring as Bonnie as Thelma and Louise as defiant as Lila…

Re-Humanizing the Caribbean : The Micro-Histories of Documentalist Gloria Rolando

Kaushalya Bannerji (Excerpt from presentation, Berkshires Women’s History Conference) copyright 2014 This is a piece whose purpose is to reflect on and pay tribute to the work of Gloria Rolando, whose commitment to Afro-Cuban history and to the notion of culture as resistance to forces of oppression and hegemonic amnesia, make her films both contextually…

This Black Man is Lost! An Essay on Afro-History, Law and the Failure of Liberalism in Cuba 1880-1912 Copyright 2013-2019 Kaushalya Bannerji

“Este negro se ha perdido. Nadie sabe de donde es!” Afro-Peruvian folk song I used this quotation to open this essay, because it signals to the centrality of racism as a material lived practice and set of social relations that totally transforms ways of being and seeing— or ontology and epistemology. In our Eurocentric conceptual…

Ourselves or Nothing

ourselves or nothing seeking my eyes on your face i long for our complicity bankers with guns patrol the streets and our sister’s children go growing hunger like a poisonous fungus. ourselves or nothing the woman we did not choose whose breasts sagged over her belly the colour of her skin, our skin the colour…

Song for a City

(The poet is you who reads) Song for a City/Fieldwork I walk Sun at my back. Sun in my face. The pavement licks my flip-flops. There are surreal and abstract buildings Where you can see dream and sky through the windows that do not exist. There are plants and flowers that salute the cocktail of…

Pies, para que los quiero, si tengo alas para volar?

Homage to Frida Kahlo, myself, and so many others immobilised by a disabling world

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me! Ear to the Ground #1, Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019