What Year Barak? Euh?
So old Barak gets up there
and starts talking about that old great America
and all that kinda stuff
you know, it reminds me of Reagan
talking about he's gonna bring back America
to the way it used to be
-
now what year in america
do you want to go back to?
~Chokwe Lumumba
British CCP ...incurable.
Ammu said that Papachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader's Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said: Person well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up dispose.
It said:
(1) Place suitably in particular order.
(2) Bring mind into certain state.
(3) Do what one will with, get off one's hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell.
Chacko said that in Pappachi's case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi's mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English.
~Arundahti Roy, The God of Small Things
Island - Amilcar Cabral
ISLAND
Mother, in your perennial sleep,
You live naked and forgotten
and barren,
thrashed by the winds,
at the sound of songs without music
sung by the waters that confine us...
Island:
Your hills and valleys
haven’t felt the passage of time.
They remain in your dreams
- your children’s dreams –
crying out your woes
to the passing winds
and to the carefree birds flying by.
Island :
Red earth shaped like a hill that never ends
- rocky earth –
ragged cliffs blocking all horizons
while tying all our troubles to the winds!
Mother, in your perennial sleep,
You live naked and forgotten
and barren,
thrashed by the winds,
at the sound of songs without music
sung by the waters that confine us...
Island:
Your hills and valleys
haven’t felt the passage of time.
They remain in your dreams
- your children’s dreams –
crying out your woes
to the passing winds
and to the carefree birds flying by.
Island :
Red earth shaped like a hill that never ends
- rocky earth –
ragged cliffs blocking all horizons
while tying all our troubles to the winds!
~AmÃlcar Cabral, Praia, Cabo Verde, 1945
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Poetess Lucille Clifton (RIPP)
memoryask me to tell how it feels
remembering your mother's face
turned to water under the white words
of the man at the shoe store.
remembering your mother's face
turned to water under the white words
of the man at the shoe store.
ask me,
though she tells it better than i do,
not because of her charm
but because it never happened
she says,
no bully salesman swaggering,
no rage, no shame, none of it
ever happened.
i only remember buying you
your first grown up shoes
though she tells it better than i do,
not because of her charm
but because it never happened
she says,
no bully salesman swaggering,
no rage, no shame, none of it
ever happened.
i only remember buying you
your first grown up shoes
she smiles.
ask me
how it feels.
~Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010)
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