Written piece
A Colonial Still
Raj Doobay
Canada
About this piece
This poem questions the meaning of individual freedom and sovereignty through the experience of a postcolonial subject removed from India, brought up in Guyana, and forced to move to Canada, who then attempts self-liberation via a Commonwealth scholarship to England.
In Guyana’s sweltering heat, where the silty Demerara flows,
The first golden DNA threads of my young life were the three Sisters Fate
The Ganges, Thames, and Demerara
In Providence’s fields of cane where ancestral sorrow grows,
Where the Whitby docked, its black voyage pains like bad nara.
That wooden hull, a needle through the cursed sea,
Stitched indentured souls to the muddy crab-trodden shore;
I felt the weight of who I’d come to be,
In the ancestors' shadows steeped in lore.
Puberty encroached when body but not mind departed the mud and salt-wind’s haze,
I met the mapled north, the Ontario frost;
In Whitby’s streets, through immigrant-thick days,
I felt the angst of multiple diasporic identities nearly lost.
Shaken by cold, and cursed to discover I am a colour,
The Black Atlantic’s triangle of pain,
The maple melting pot, now, that was crueller!
Pulled at my seams, a ghost-ship in the night,
Commonwealth dollars paved a path, like Judas silvered rain,
Broke through the clouds to bathe my path in light.
To the land of the original Whitby, I thought I could coast,
Bought by scholarship, the liberators' golden key;
To face the "Mother Country’s" ancient ghost,
And studied “Race” to set my spirit free.
To understand my colonial master’s thought
Inside my Id and the Ego fought.
In lecture halls, the heavy threads of trade
Wove the silk of graduation liberation’s gown;
I saw the loom on which my soul was made, like the loam
Of Demerara’s clay.
And laid the burden of the empire down.
This scholar’s journey, paid by history’s hand,
Mends past and present in a joyful weave;
A sovereign man? Across a fourfold land,
With no more colonial shadows to retrieve.
The Whitby is no longer just a slaver in my brain
But a vessel from the past I have yet to defeat, words being my gun.
I’ve stitched my joy through loss and winter’s ice rain,
A colonial-educated Guyanese Master? Bright beneath the sun.
The fabric of my life is rich and strong,
A tapestry of triumph, knowing I sort of belong.