We Are Kin
Remembrance.
On the 14th of August, 1947
Pakistan was born.
On the 15th of August, 1947
India was “independent.”
The British called it transfer of power.
The Indians called it Independence Day.
It was Partition Day.
One and a half million lives were erased.
Among them, my elders.
Seeds of dissent were sown.
Trauma took root.
Punjab’s bloody border
is bleeding anew.
Partition.
We speak not of it.
We harbor unforgiveness
While we nurse forgetfulness.
None of us have roots.
We carry and pass on the traumas
of uprooting as soul wounds.
Partition.
Passed down generation to generation.
We bear the soul scars of severance
Punjabi to Punjabi.
Rootless and borderful.
We make war with our truth.
We do not recall that we are the same people.
Partition.
We do not remember
Who rooted this loathing of ourselves in us.
We forget that the border was by design
But not destiny.
We make war with ourselves.
But, we do not decolonize.
Remembrance.
We are kin.
We the Pakistani, we the Hindustani, we the Bangladeshi.
We are kin.
We were partitioned.
Could we reconcile?
***
Gayatri Sethi is an educator, mother and aspiring poet. She is of Indian descent and was born in Tanzania and raised in Botswana. She currently resides in the Atlanta area and is raising (biracial) Black children who respect their African-American, Indian and African heritages and cultures.
