Join the #MedHumChat community on July 1, 2020 as we discuss the experience of migrants and how we can better provide culturally safe care.
We are honored to be joined by special guest and Canadian poet Sadiqa De Meijer (@sadiqademeijer) who authored the first piece we will be discussing.
Sadiqa De Meijer: Red-Eye
Dear country, did you wait for me?
Did you halt yellow trains as they vipered the engineered rural,
did you quiet currents, letting duckweed
slowly lock the waters—have you been a grand museum
of immobile waterfowl and ruminants, flies
on their nostrils, millipede life under leaf rot,
stock still—where it rained, did glass drops hover
in a splintered universe of damp,
dear land, when I dropped the spindle, did you pull the main?
Did you freeze in the air the motions of bicyclists, hooligans,
vendors, classroom chalk scraping in cursive,
past imperfect—was there a static silence
on all radios?
Sunrise. Here is that private sea scrolling in,
typing you an endless letter. The plane makes its fluid, plummeting turn,
and my window fills with land. Here is the clay
that holds the brittle calcium of them who made me, have they waited—
because I waited for you, in my blind and percolating marrow
all the years I waited, sleepwalking, speaking a daft language flawlessly.
Now the roads are ribbons, and the cars begin to crawl,
and I would like to rise with you, I’d like to be so awake.
I’ve drunk repeated coffees from a small and unbreakable cup
that a child might use to serve tea to a wiry monkey
and a one-eyed bear. But I have left
her in another country, sleeping.
And my hands shake.
De Meijer on her poem “Red-Eye”: “This poem merges two moments in time. The first is when I was a teenager, after my family had emigrated to Canada from the Netherlands, and we went back to visit. We arrived at sunrise, and I had this wishful feeling that the country had fallen asleep during our absence and I would find everything as it was when I left it. The second moment is some twenty-five years later, when my sense of home has shifted. I can never feel the same way again about either place. All our old selves persist inside of us in some way.”
Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake
“But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive. It's the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. For it was one thing to be pregnant, to suffer the queasy mornings in bed, the sleepless nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom. Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she'd been astonished by her body's ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.
"How about a little walk? It might do you good," Patty asks when she comes to clear the lunch tray.
Ashima looks up from a tattered copy of Desh magazine that she'd brought to read on her plane ride to Boston and still cannot bring herself to throw away. The printed pages of Bengali type, slightly rough to the touch, are a perpetual comfort to her. She's read each of the short stories and poems and articles a dozen times. There is a pen-and-ink drawing on page eleven by her father, an illustrator for the magazine: a view of the North Calcutta skyline sketched from the roof of their flat one foggy January morning. She had stood behind her father as he'd drawn it, watching as he crouched over his easel, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his shoulders wrapped in a black Kashmiri shawl.
"Yes, all right," Ashima says.
Patty helps Ashima out of bed, tucks her feet one by one into slippers, drapes a second nightgown around her shoulders.
"Just think," Patty says as Ashima struggles to stand. "In a day or two you'll be half the size."
She takes Ashima's arm as they step out of the room, into the hallway. After a few feet Ashima stops, her legs trembling as another wave of pain surges through her body. She shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears.
"I cannot."
"You can. Squeeze my hand. Squeeze as tight as you like."
After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses' station.
"Hoping for a boy or a girl?" Patty asks.
"As long as there are ten finger and ten toe," Ashima replies. For these anatomical details, these particular signs of life, are the ones she has the most difficulty picturing when she imagines the baby in her arms.
Patty smiles, a little too widely, and suddenly Ashima realizes her error, knows she should have said "fingers" and "toes." This error pains her almost as much as her last contraction. English had been her subject. In Calcutta, before she was married, she was working toward a college degree. She used to tutor neighborhood schoolchildren in their homes, on their verandas and beds, helping them to memorize Tennyson and Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough, to understand the difference between Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. But in Bengali, a finger can also mean fingers, a toe toes.”