In his recent Gandhi Biography “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Joseph Lelyveld includes love letters exchanged between Mahatma Gandhi and a Jewish architect and weight-lifter from Germany named Hermann Kallenbach. The Indian government paid $1.28 million dollars to prevent these letters from being auctioned off, and Lelyveld’s biography was banned in the state of Gujarat. In a letter to Kallenbach, Gandhi promised not to “look lustfully upon any woman,” and pledged “such love as…the world has not yet seen.” This poem was previously published on returnthegayze.tumblr.com.
happy birthday gandhiji to a fag just like me.
dear gandhi:
on sundays my father would drive us
down highway six to that local temple –
that place where we learned about you
and your country.
the men who taught us there wore
buttoned up shirts tucked into slacks
prostrated themselves on the cool marble floor
with an intimacy they
never showed their wives
you see:
we, the dandelion seeds blown
across the ocean find it difficult
to bloom in this climate – this
(white) world that tells us that we are weeds
not the flowers fallen
from the garlands around your neck
so we cling to the memory of the soil,
find solace in the brown of skin
those stories our grandparents tell us about you
and your hunger
you called it asceticism
so we try our best to practice your gospel:
we simply abstain from speaking about it:
when parents stop sleeping in the same bed, daughters
sneak out of houses at night, sons intertwine bodies with
one another and
moan with the hum of darkness (let’s call it prayer)
and we have taken a vow of silence:
the way we do not talk about that one uncle:
the one with the three spoons of sugar in his voice
that one cousin: the one who moved (escaped)
to new york city for studies (sex)
you have taught us how to
speak without our mouths:
the adjustment of a bangle,
the shift of an eye
how to be full without food:
the dinner invitation
not
sent
and
gandhi there are more than a billion people
in your country now and together their silence
deafens us
we, whose bodies unbutton shirts
and slacks and
prostrate
ourselves on one another
call it holy
dear gandhi:
our grandparents, i mean our government, i mean our
culture
forgot to tell us that
you were flawed, were human, were
horny, were weeds like us sometimes
and i wonder if they told me about you and that white man
you practiced civil disobedience with in the bedroom
i wouldn’t have trembled,
wouldn’t have feared that my brown skin
would flake off in those places
that he touched me
and i wonder if they told us that your diet
sometimes made exceptions for
certain kinds of meat
we would not be hungry anymore
and gandhi:
we are wilting in silence
those seeds that refuse to bloom
your salt rubbed on our wounds
by their tongues.
Alok Vaid-Menon is a queer South Asian artist and activist invested in building connections between queer and anti-racist/imperial movements. They wrote this poem while living and working with the queer struggle in Bangalore. You can read more of their work at returnthegayze.tumblr.com and queerlibido.tumblr.com.
