Tuesday, December 14
VOCATIVE English is my native anguish. I was born here, read here, teased and torn here. Vocative, ablative, locative, alive: English was a dislocation navigating oceans. Wherever it arrived, it broke and brokered words, in little bits of Britain pilfered, bartered, written, looted, hoarded, heard. Papa swapped a world for shiny colored beads, for dandelion seeds. We are subject verbs. The root word of my name hooks a foreign land, long-since-shifted sand books cannot reclaim. Graft of tongue, gift of dust, mother and stranger, sing the kedgeree, the everything at once you've made of us. (Amit Majmudar)