By rui zhou
after Wafaa Bilal & Ronak Kapadia
In the body, where everything is out
of place. i want a map tattooed on my back
There should be a map key of tea pots and sim cards &
when a Muslim auntie pours lemon ginger for a sister in Mazar-e-Sharif or a Uyghur uncle calls
his mother in Kashgar: how are you &
your tomatoes and apricots. That’s when i globe around my shoulders & find my people
i want a map on my back & if they come for you i can’t turn my back even
if they don’t come for me yet even
if mama spits shells of sunflower seeds & squints
what the fuck are you crying for even
if study suggests china isn’t syria & even
if my body domesticates disasters by holding hostage another country’s rivers
This map can’t be made by the cia calculating
billions into cold mines & coming out hot blooded monsoons
This map can’t be body counts & body cams
This map can’t be minced by hellfire missiles
This map can’t be plotted by gps or grief or grenade
This map can’t be about brown pain or cause brown people pain. Nobody
can hold this map upside down like columbus sucking the marrow out of my peoples’ land—
gold or coal or petrol—without choking on my ribs cus i swallow pipelines too
Nobody destroys high-value targets to save my grandmas & cousins & nephews
No one shoots a terrorist, no, not even in video games & when i stitch my people onto my torso
No one wipes you out with a drone-soap, oops, system error: one million corpses
No one is stopped-and-frisked. No shrapnels in my lovers. In the spine
i want the map guide me to grandma’s lullabies: lavender field in bomb bunker where we
silent dance party all night to songs swollen in your stomach
i want the map a recipe: cinnamon, coriander, cloves, cumin, curry leaf—my people
slice onions, tomatoes, chili peppers & sauté & simmer in my pelvis—my people
slow stew protection spells in apricot preserve & when you disappear I save you
jars unopened for your return
In the body, where everything is out
of place. i want a map tattooed on my back where patrols are orange peels—my people
in one piece, spiral indefinite extension from Sheikh Jarrah to Altishahr to Guantánamo &
When mama sweeps sunflower seeds shells & asks
So what the fuck are you crying for, i turn my back & show her—my people
are everywhere even we always miss each other
Mama, i am part citrus, part cyborg & i offer hands full of jam
by which i mean sticky prayers spread thickly across my back
Stay safe. Take care.
Yours,
*Written against the “global war on terror” & in solidarity with the peoples affected by the forever wars. For a full statement of meaning, see tinyurl.com/notes139.
——
Notes:
- This is a love poem & small prayer for the peoples affected by the ongoing “war on terror” in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, in diaspora and beyond. As someone from China and someone not racialized as a “terrorist” body by the forever wars, I want to reclaim “my people” in multiplicity and solidarity, and speak against both US and Chinese imperialist-nationalist definitions of “the people” vis-a-viz “the terrorist”. It is an attempt in homage to & in conversation with the Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal’s 2010 performance … and Counting and the scholar Ronak Kapadia’s essay about Bilal’s work. In a 24-hour live performance, Bilal’s back was tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell.
2. This is also inspired by poems of love: in particular, Fatimah Asghar’s If They Should Come for Us, Danez Smith’s Dinosaurs in the Hood, and Solmaz Sharif’s Reaching Guantánamo.