I.

I was never comfortable of what you’ve given us:

Grand narratives

Great figures

And analysis from the view up

Not from where I am standing

The gutter

So let me start from the very beginning

And beware of my nostalgic imaginings

These are my private passions

Personal agonies

I will defend the romantic and heroic

There will be revelation in narratives of resistance

But I will not stop there

Collaborators will be hunted 

And tried for complicity

There is no forgetting

No redemption

I will chase you in your own land

And drag you back to here

So we can dig corpses

And have their stench stay

In the interior of your nose

Even when you dream

II.

I was told

We’ve been people of the sea

Since there was memory

We reached these islands

Thousands of years ago 

When the world was still young

And greed had a different name

When men felt the presence of gods 

But never felt so alone

And when everything was yet to be claimed

This land was there for us to own

It was our destiny to be it’s keepers

We shaped the land

Tilted the soil

And domesticated local animals

When there was no more question of survival

We learned to sing

To recite poetry 

And to create new stories  

We gave spirits that reside

In trees

Rivers

And light

Shape

Allowed them to possess our bodies

Through dance

We had the abundance of sun and rain

Everything was enough

This became our home

III.

Then they came

They saw us in these boats with our chief

Seated under an awning of mats

These men 

Who held crosses on one hand 

And swords to slither on the other 

But this poem is not about them

I refuse

We might have loss our poetry of living

With their arrival

But we had our daily dreaming 

Our gift of resistance and resilience

We might have been haunted by grief 

Fear

And images of terror 

And disillusions

But we claimed what to remember

They can command us

To everything 

Except to forgetting

This poem is about my great forefathers

Not about them

IV.

Then usurpers came

They bought us 

Like objects

They dreamt 

It’s their duty

To make us like them

Benevolent assimilation

And when we resisted 

10 years into their rule

Their general ordered

“I want no prisoners

I wish you to kill and burn

the more you kill and burn 

the better it will please me

This place must be made 

A howling wilderness”

But this poem is not about them

It’s about those children 

Under ten years old

Who were spared not to be shot

And the children of their children

Who reclaimed their church’s bells

One hundred seventeen years later

They are back to where they used to be

Every morning they are rang

To remind everyone 

There is reckoning

V.

God then left us for three years

When they came

We sent our

Fathers

Husbands

And Sons

To flatten cities

To thick forests

To guerrilla fighting,

Leaving our women out in the open

But this is not about them tossing babies 

And sticking them with bayonets 

This is about our women

Some under the age of 18

Imprisoned in those red houses

Enduring forty men every single day 

After forty seven years of trauma 

They opened their mouth

To release a shout with no sound

With no tears

Because they had none left

They did not stop

Until it was heard

Until it reverberated across

Lands where there were other women

Who suffered the same

Until it reached perpetrators

And punctured their eardrums

So they could hear better

VI.

“We passed through four different governments,

Inaugurated two republics, 

And underwent a total war, 

Two invasions, 

And a great peasant uprising..."

All we wanted was a simple but necessary life

After many attempts of locating and dislocating

We stopped asking

“Where is our soul?”

“What can it be? “

We left open the ruins of our bodies 

 And memories

Their disrupted geographies

We’ve become evidence in each other

As a map of an ideal world

Our shaman was correct

You can take us to cities you built

But we will have the same thirst 

And we’ll look for the same spring

That stays where it is

You can lead us to what you call progress

But the world will demand to return

Itself to the beginning