• Submissions (English)
  • Contribuciones (Español)
  • Soumissions (Français)
  • Contribuições (Português)
    Support-button

    • Academic Journal
    • Academic Dispatches
    • Magazine
    • Creative
    • Africa
    • Asia
    • Europe
    • Latin America/Caribbean
    • Middle East/North Africa
    • North America

    Mother Tongue (Poetry)

    Contributor: Manash Bhattacharjee

    • September 14, 2015

    "Excitable Speech? Radical Discourse and the Limits of Freedom" (Summer 2015) · Featured · Uncategorized

    • As if it is the same thing
    • As milk from her breasts.
    • As if it is something which flows secretly
    • Between us like a memory
    • Growing deeper as it vanishes.
    • Other people of my terrified childhood
    • Have come and left with momentary hands
    • And receding eyes in my mother tongue.
    • Elders with cavities in the heart
    • Poured their love like saliva.
    • It is difficult to wash away their sticky memory
    • From my mother tongue.
    • Father was a shadow from door to door
    • In my mother tongue.
    • His voice of stern hands and hurried blood
    • Was different from mother’s voice of rice and barley
    • During many illnesses.
    • The language of friends in my mother tongue
    • Is a story where I learnt about my past.
    • The story of stolen guavas of toppled kingdoms
    • Forest fires, puberty and heroic love.
    • I grew up mostly away from my mother tongue.
    • I stepped out of the house to know streets and loves
    • Outside the lullabies of my mother tongue.
    • I fell in love with melodies and eyes from other languages.
    • The smell of strangers swayed in the air
    • Between suspicion and love.
    • My mother allowed me to bring home
    • Other languages with their bottomless snares.
    • I grew many vices from them behind my mother’s back
    • But she could always squeeze out the story
    • From my shadow.
    • I do not know the story of my mother tongue
    • Before I was born. Maybe she fell in love with strangers
    • From other languages like I did. Maybe that is how
    • She brought in new words to her tongue
    • And lost some of her own.
    • Maybe she wanted to run away from home
    • The morning she had gone to pick flowers
    • For treacherous gods.
    • Maybe that morning she wanted to change
    • Into a language of flowers that get stolen from gardens
    • But never reach the altar.
    • The story of my mother tongue
    • Goes as far back as Kunti[1].
    • She alone held the secret of the four men
    • Who gave birth to her sons.
    • Her silence gave birth to a mythology.
    • Her secret is however part of my mother tongue.
    • You speak of the mother tongue as if some tongue
    • Has been fixed into someone’s mouth like a tattoo.
    • What always stuck on my mother’s tongue
    • Would be stains of slaked lime and catechu.
    • You who speak of the mother tongue
    • Like law-makers of the fictional history of lives
    • And the yellow grammar book do not ask me
    • What my mother tongue is but rather ask
    • How is my mother tongue
    • And I would tell you how my mother tongue
    • Is a jar of pickles preserved under a rotten shade.
    • I would tell you how my mother tongue
    • Like the dark side of the moon hides from my daily life
    • Like medicines in the cupboard.
    • I would tell you how her speech and her eyes
    • Have lost each other’s company.
    • I would tell you how she tends to flower trees
    • In the absence of her children
    • And still has tears for old songs of love.
    • I will tell you how her unsteady feet
    • Still manage to hold her heart.
    • I would tell you how her tongue bore lives
    • Of different names as she became daughter wife
    • And mother with no time to decide how
    • She would like to be as a woman.
    • My mother tongue was never allowed
    • To become a woman.
    • To name our tongue in the name of
    • Her motherhood
    • Is a conspiracy to turn her speech into milk
    • And suckle her dry.

     

    Footnotes

    1. The mother of the Pandavas in the Indian epic, The Mahabharata. 

    About the Author

    IMGP8438--Do

    Photo credit: Rajarshi Dasgupta

    Manash Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer, translator and political science scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His poems have appeared in The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The Fortnightly Review, Elohi Gadugi Journal, George Szirtes’ Blog, Warscapes, First Proof: The Penguin Books of New Writing from India (Volume 5), The Missing Slate, The Little Magazine, etc. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by U.K’s oldest literary journal, The London Magazine. He is currently Adjunct Professor in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, New Delhi.

    Filed under: Poetry

    • Previous story Excitable Speech and the Politics of the Womb – Wake Up Grrrl!
    • Next story Represión, persecución y estrategia de lucha del independentismo puertorriqueño

      Related Posts

    • Intersectionnalité et féminismes arabes avec Kimberlé Crenshaw Intersectionnalité et féminismes arabes avec Kimberlé Crenshaw
    • Public-Humanities The Public Humanities and Academe: A Letter from the Editor of The Postcolonialist
    • Copa_do_Mundo_postcolonialist A Weird World Cup in the Land where Soccer is Everything
    • Paulo Friere Afetos, educação ambiental e política: Encontros com Nita e Paulo Freire.
    • Browse our most recent issue, "Excitable Speech? Radical Discourse and the Limits of Freedom"
      (Summer 2015)
  • Social


  • Read Articles

    Language
    • English
    • Español/Spanish
    • Français/French
    • Italiano/Italian
    • Português/Portuguese
  • Trending Topics

    • Postcolonialism
    • Intersectionality
    • Border Studies
    • Gender & Sexuality
    • Indigeneity
    • Puerto Rico
  • Recent Posts

    • Call for Papers: “Postcolonial Apertures: Critical Times and the Horizons of (De)Coloniality”
    • Scarlett Coten, Mectoub: In the Shadow of the Arab Spring
    • Letter from the Editors: “Excitable Speech? Radical Discourse and the Limits of Freedom”
    • Dispatches from Lahore: The Importance of Politicized Ancestral Narratives
    • Os impasses das questões de gênero e sexualidade no Brasil atual
    • Home
    • Releases
    • "Excitable Speech? Radical Discourse and the Limits of Freedom" (Summer 2015)
    • Mother Tongue (Poetry)
    • About The Postcolonialist

      • About
      • Team
      • Contact
      • Submissions
        • Contribuciones
        • Soumissions
        • Contribuições
      • Support The Postcolonialist
    • What Else We Do

      • Events
      • Advisory Practice
    • Stay Connected


      Sign up to stay current on news, developments, and conversations from The Postcolonialist.

    © Copyright 2015 The Postcolonialist. All rights reserved.
    Privacy Policies | Reprint Permissions | Terms of Use
    ISSN 2330-510X