Original Poetry by Alok Vaid-Menon

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.

 

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