kaala; kala
By Ria Raj
my mother traces her fingers along my mahogany-skin
and calls me kaala,
hindi for black.
my mother traces her fingers along a film photograph of her homeland,
and calls it kala,
hindi for art.
i find it particularly lovely
that art
is intrinsic
to Blackness
in the hindi language
ka(a)la
the ubiquity of the
english language
is contingent
upon Black destruction
and as the
english language
continues to
dismember Black bodies,
i wonder if my hindi might illuminate a semblance of Blackness,
keeping it from
its premature death.
Ria Raj is a queer, South-Asian-American writer. She is deeply interested in the intersectional constructions of brownness, queerness, and womanhood in the literary archive, and how her work might fit into this constellation. She has upcoming publications in Eunoia Review, Moonbow Magazine, The Greyhound Journal, Zhagaram Literary Magazine, and Fleeting Daze Magazine.
Photo by Debbie Hall, poet, photographer and Writers Resist poetry editor.
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