Brown

I search for my culture

in the pages of scriptures written too beautifully to comprehend.

Scriptures that write about softness, and omniscience.

Scriptures filled with a light so bright,

and told with tales filled with mosaic colour,

it makes it almost impossible to imagine the sheer depth, the nuance and complexities using merely the English word.

I read lines from the Bhagavad Gita which question all-devouring death and probe the principle of all that is yet to be.

I find myself questioning

what it is that I am,

what it is I want to be.

I search for my culture

through the song of a bansuri.

A quiet one that sounds like

the whistling of leaves on a breezy day,

the tune of a small blue bird nestled on a branch, and rain, rhythmic its elegance.

It’s unassuming bamboo encased sound, invading and reaching deep into my soul

clutching so strongly at my heart strings

I find it hard to breathe.

I search for my culture

in forest green curry leaves that flavour my food.

The ones my Amma collects carefully from her small patch of garden,

picking each stem and carefully placing it into a cracked white ceramic bowl.

The curry leaves that give colour to masala,

so dark and so seeped

in flavour, in spice,

in the deepest and muskiest sense.

So provoking that your senses are very nearly intolerant.

And then there’s the orange saffron

and yellow turmeric,

so rich in colour you’d mistake it for a sunset.

Colours that are sharp and vivid, if you saw them in the right light, you’d call them oil on canvas.

I search for my culture

in the petals of marigolds

the ones that are unsure of who they are.

You know the ones?

Mixed with specks of red and orange. Vibrant and chaotic in their uniqueness.

They say something in the seeds from different flowers mutate, morphing petals into two colours.

A beautiful mutation.

How strange that for a marigold, it is considered beautiful to not belong

to one thing.

The marigolds found their own spirit,

they set themselves free.

But, instead I find my

Culture

in pain, suffering and loss.

I see it in generational trauma, in forced assimilation, the enduring effects of colonisation, artefacts stolen and put in the wrong museums.

I see it in a land being ravaged by a disease, spread by those with money

I see it in appropriated standards of beauty, and hear it in the everlasting question of

where are you from?

Where am I from?

I am from a land, so rich in colour

it struggles to contain itself.

I am from a place, so filled with vibrancy

it still suffers to reclaim everything it is owed, that was taken, that continues to be taken.

I am from a land coloured with political arrogance, an unjust system and graphic inequality.

I am from the land of the most colour,

A land that has given the world its colour.

I search for my culture

in the layers of skin that cover my body,

so opulent, so spectacular,

so covered in scars

And so, so brown.

I am from the land of colour,

and my skin is brown,

like the soil that keeps us alive.

In this brown skin,

I’ve found my culture.