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“You belong anywhere you can flee to and return from in one piece” ― K. Eltinaé
Today we travel to Sudan with poetry and music from artists, k.eltinaé and Basma Osman.
As well as being a human rights activist, lawyer and poet, Basma Osman is the host of Khartoum Arrivals on NTS Radio and the co-host of radio show and record label Hear, Sense and Feel. She plays music inspired by the long road, drawing from the wedding anthems and eclectic folk of Sudan, the Sahel, the Horn and beyond.
Tune into her show from her last trip visiting family in Sudan “with bops from the bus,” before delving into the poetry we have for you this week.
k.eltinaé is a diaspora poet of Sudanese-Nubian and Mediterranean descent, whose work is centred around otherness, cultural/geographic displacement, generational trauma, and exile. His debut collection the moral judgement of butterflies won the Beverly Prize for international literature 2019 (BSPG Press). He is a world literature lecturer and a soul /funk/ afrobeat disc jockey residing in Granada, Spain.
We are still dreaming of a vacation
from being chased out of cities.
For the empathy every child dangles
in their mother’s eyes as hope.
For a future where the ‘other’ challenges every fear
we unlearn and accept to grow from.
One day you too will face that same floor
you pressed a man’s face against before you handcuffed him.
You too, will cry futile tears to keep living.
The difference is your dignity
will never know cages
and days without showering
will never know the shame
of running from a place
you are forced to return to
because you weren’t born disposable.
If you feel threatened about living in a country
full of sleek, dark and beautiful bodies
arriving on boats smiling and glowing
though nobody has welcomed them,
stop watching the news.
This poem is for you,
for your parents
and their parents too.
For children
who should learn from the different
looking, speaking, believing ‘other’
whose kindness exists despite
being quarantined on planes before arriving to your lands,
despite being interrogated and segregated in queues at the airport
for your precious safety.
Stay safe, with truths that bloom from kindness.
------------
Illustration by Miriam Sugranyes
More from the artists
- To find out more about k.eltinaé’s work and to follow him on your respective platforms, visit: https://www.flowcode.com/page/c1ntr-1666035995942. Read more here: https://kalaelae.wordpress.com/.
- Watch our poetry evening, in collaboration with Sawti, featuring k.eltinaé and others, including Ngollo Mlengeya, Suhayl Omar and Manal Younus, during the Rights Studio festival: https://vimeo.com/545926938.
- You can read Basma’s poem ‘Fuck borders, or things I wish I’d said to immigration before they deported me,’ which was published in the CRIN/Rights Studio Magazine What Lies Beneath: Power, here.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” — Arundhati Roy
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, … but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 86, so that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at 130, 140, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.”— Katsushika Hokusai, also known as Gakyō Rōjin Manji (The Old Man Mad About Art)
“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” ― Carl Sagan
