Soul
You have not earned the right
to use this word,
a white professor said to the
Persian girl
as he ran his eye over her
poem. And filled with shame
(at her own presumption)
she scratched out four letters
that she had not earned
the right to use.
The word disappeared
along with her mother’s laugh,
the sizzle of turmeric in a pan,
cool floors, lemon trees, the heat of
summer sand, a honey cake placed
tenderly into her mouth,
her heart dipping and lifting
like a wayward kite,
scoldings, kisses, anger, fright…
brushed away like messy crumbs
from a rich man’s table…
Then suddenly she saw her pen
remake the word (she had not earned)
And in the lovely shape of it
She felt her soul return…
Don’t Be Afraid (Jangan Merasa Takut)
Don’t be afraid of this new sky –
the vast blue blast of it over our heads,
Jangan merasa takut
karena langit ini sama dengan langit
di mana-mana,
Don’t be afraid because
it is the same sky everywhere.
Don’t be afraid of girls named
Cheryl and Belinda flicking their blonde hair
and looking disdainfully at the contents of your lunch box.
One day their children will be trying to make
chilly sambal and roti canai on Masterchef.
Don’t be afraid of new syllables,
scented with strawberry lip gloss
and vowels flattened like burst balloons,
Deadset as soon as you learn to speak Australian,
you’re in like Flynn. It doesn’t matter that
you look a bit different.
Don’t be afraid of living secret lives,
Hidupan rahasia.
The one where you are a good daughter:
Anak patuh yang belajar baik-baik dan
masak nasi untuk makan malam,
Studying hard and cooking rice
for the evening meal,
And the one where you sashay down the street with your friends
in hotpants and a boob tube
keeping a look out for Asian aunties…
Don’t be afraid of the lurid pink icing on finger buns or of
eating a pie and sauce while you yearn for sate ayam.
Don’t be afraid when coconut tanning oil,
on an Australian beach, starts to smell the same as nasi lemak
Or when you can’t quite recall the cicak sound of geckoes
scurrying on the ceiling in your grandmother’s house.
Don’t be afraid when you’re not sure if you prefer
a banana paddle pop or an es kacang on a hot day
Or when your memories fade like fallen rainbows…
Don’t be afraid because your heart is big enough to hold this new sky –
and your mouth will always know that the taste of
apples can never be the same as the taste of rambutan.
Jangan merasa takut
karena ingatan dan pelangi pasti kembali
setelah angin ribut,
Memories like rainbows will surely return after storms
So don’t be afraid…
This poem: Don’t Be Afraid (Jangan Merasa Takut) is a little letter to my teenage self – a skinny brown kid growing up in Cronulla (possibly the most insular and white bread Sydney suburb) in the 1970s. It does make reference to how things have changed in multicultural Australia from that very Anglo centred time. But mostly it reflects on the issues of identity that confront those of us who migrated here as children or teenagers. An identity that is as deeply embedded in Australia as it is in our country of origin. We are not just caught between physical worlds but between imagined worlds and remembered worlds. Shifting from one world to another means that all the boundaries become blurred and we start to accumulate a different set of dreams and memories.
Peribahasa (Proverb)
Spilt milk cannot be drunk
or scooped back into a cup
tapi nasi yang sudah menjadi bubur
masih bisa dimakan,
but rice which has become porridge
can still be eaten
and fills my mouth with
pearly softness
and the salty certainty of
kecap scented hope,
(enak dan hangat)
the taste of morning comfort
in my grandmother’s
tropical kitchen…
Later in my childhood
I will cry over milk
spilt on winter hard asphalt –
an irretrievable white splatter
among shards of smashed glass,
I will cry because of angry voices
and because this milk
(unlike hujan yang jatuh ke pasir)
does not melt tenderly like rain into sand
but lingers maliciously in sticky trickles
on my shoes and books,
I will cry because this bottled milk
in a cold school yard is not a
bowl of fragrant bubur
waiting for me
in a kitchen far away…
I love the tiny wisdoms in proverbs and the fact that they reflect the human condition. So this little poem is based on two proverbs one in English and one in Indonesian which offer the same message. The English proverb is Don’t cry over spilt milk and its Indonesian counterpart is Nasi sudah menjadi bubur (The rice has already become porridge) which I think offers more hope than the disaster of spilt milk. I relished the savoury rice porridge that I ate for breakfast during my childhood in Malaysia and I hated the bottles of milk that we were forced to drink at primary school when my family moved to London. This poem is about proverbs, memories and food.
