Voice from Future Past
p. 419-420
Texte intégral
‘Bwana, you are moving from your fixist theories with a centre and multiple peripheries. In your colonies there is also food for imaginaries.
You made us sugar cotton rubber and coffee thinking you would not question those identities that have been mixed in the field or on the seas.
In migration, all of us experiment another humanity. Some clung to the past, to the present, some to eternity. Here is the first flux of new identities.
You being at the centre thought you were Majesty, as you owned your body law and territory.
As for us, coming from disposable colonies, We found ourselves in the lost communities, Lost at home, as conquered and resilient entities, Stored in a depot, trapped in a ghat, lost on the seas, Made more strange than strangers in the tide.
For you we were all slaves or coolies. But in fact we were the matrices of diversities: Some spoke Marathi Urdu Hindi Arabic Gujarati Some Wolof Kikuyu Zulu Swahili Malagasy. Some read the Ghita some the Quran some Confucius. Others sang Tulsidas old epics and griotic poetry. And many chanted hymns and prayers from ancestry.
We were diverse between ourselves, a bag of mysteries Combined with the unknown beyond the kala pani. We were the coral peoples sent to coral island. Our coral identity is the backbone of fluidity.’
Auteur
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