I was born an enemy

I was born an enemy, but I did not know it then

The Sandman came and shut my eyes

The Clatterer lurked in dark corners waiting to pounce

And only a sacred verse kept it at bay

In the morning I was the sparrow and its mate

In the afternoon a dog looking for shade

Come evening, a woman whose glimpsed hair flashed in the sun’s dying light

As she flung it back bathing in a stall without a roof

At night a mouse pretending to be a lion’s companion

Sometimes a prince dispossessed of his State

I was born in many lands

I have traveled across many seas

Scaled mountains and trekked through timeless deserts

I have been many people

Mujhay dekho tau sahih meray jism kay kitnay tukrray hain

Ek ek hissa kabhi jis ka naam tha

Aur wo apnay naam sey pahchana jata tha

Aaj gumnaam hae

Yes, each part of my body had a name once

Cherished and pleasing

No more

Like me, it is now without a name

Kuchh nahin, kuchh bhi nahin

A nameless fragment of many wholes

And those wholes with no face, no hands, arms, eyes, ears, legs, feet

Those wholes without a heart, lungs, liver, guts

Those wholes that have but one designation now, a generic one

Dushman

I was born an enemy, but I did not know it then

I read about myself in books growing up

Not knowing yet of race or color, caste, class, or creed

Not understanding yet differences in belief

Oblivious to gender

And I affianced myself with those who taught me,

With the language they spoke,

And those who wrote the books I read,

Their ideas and their judgments

And I came to see myself as a stranger in my own land

As an alien among those I grew up and lived with

As one unfamiliar with a language my own

But as confrere of those that brought to me the flames of their scripted words

And I learned one by one all shades of difference

I learned race and color, caste, class, and creed

I learned beliefs

Calibrated carefully to context

Those that must be despised and those held in esteem

I learned to separate myth from religion

Religion from legend, parable, and fable

I learned some tales were history, some history legend

That what was outside the province of a preceptor’s intimacy

Was all fable and superstition

A false shadow of the real and the true

I learned gender, male versus the female

Biologically and mentally at odds with each other

Each behaving in ways ascribed to each to maintain integrity of kind

One above the other, always

But differently in different societies

Oppressive and abusive in mine

Broadly co-equal and honored, within a play of delicate differentials

In another

I learned to deduce inclinations and attributes from the penis and the vulva

And the relationship of one to other of tiller and tilth

In my world, exploitative, in another cultured and cultivated

No matter how intensely I learned to admire those who taught me

Strove to observe laws and etiquette they had established

Honor their rules, precepts, and axioms

Respect and celebrate even their rituals of euphemism and equivocation

Their subtleties of differentiation

I was not the right color, the right race

Not from the right society, not the right society

That I aspired fruitlessly, and entirely at my own risk, for things unattainable

That I was born an enemy, and my learning but to establish

The unalterable nature of this simple truth

Caliban to those who taught me, forever a suspect

Waiting for a chance to rape some underage Miranda

Waiting to overthrow some sage and learned Prospero

Forever conspiring, forever prone to treachery

Forever preparing to commit an atrocity

Polluting with my foul thoughts and native words the language of my masters

Born to the wrong people, with the wrong genealogy

In the wrong place, with wrong beliefs

The wrong color, the wrong aspirations

I was born an enemy, though I did not know it

And here I am, a peevish and fretful poet

Clumsy and uneasy as I recover

Almost as if by accident

Bits and pieces of lost, severed, and discarded selves

Torn limbs and body parts that were once mine

From the maqtal, the wael-feld, that is my present

From the wasteland that is also the graveyard of histories

Primitive and odd, contemporary and outdated

Neither this nor that in the wilderness of life

Adrift in vagaries of gendered forms

Beyond race in the power play of races

Of no class, or status, or rank

Woh jis ki koi auqaat nahin, koi wuqqat nahin

Fighting, I am told, modernity and progress

With a combustible mix of words and worlds

Cross-pollinated by strangered languages

Stoked by a kindling of wild thoughts

Dukhan di roti, soolan da salan, ahaan da balan

Caught between damning desire and deadly rage

Forever condemned to render my dry bones

As the final offering at the altar of indifference

Yet why does my heart falter when I look up and find

You, armed and ready among those I am preparing to resist?

Waqas Khwaja

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I was born an enemy