This Otherness is two poems in one—the short one, in bold print, is embedded in the longer, more autobiographical one.
This Otherness
By Zaman Stanizai
I was a passenger
on a southbound motorcycle.
All the Afghanistan I owned
was a dusty clump of earth
wrapped like a mummy
resting in my pocket –
the elixir of my loyalty,
from which I was going to rebuild
my self.
Swerved past the checkpoint
I became a stranger in a blink.
The longing began instantly,
I turned back for one last look,
felt the presence of tomorrow’s nostalgia.
Will I ever see my country free again?
A country in which I died
many deaths and survived
through hushed lips and a pretence
that now reflected theirs.
They made the plight only look impossible.
They just wanted my country
bled empty of its people.
The motorcycle jackrabbit takeoff
spun images wildly in a flashback:
the haunting surveillance,
the search for my brother’s body,
the delivery of the death threat letter,
my newlywed neighbor’s wife
fleeing with her father
the night they took away her husband,
being a number on the ‘death list’
nine, ten, eleven,…
the strangers in my living room.
The last words I scribbled on the board
the day I left the class untaught –
life, love, liberty.
At the border
between nowhere and nowhere.
I stood, facing the world, to be accepted.
My garb, a stranger’s.
my accent, acceptably fake,
my identity, a pretense.
This otherness I tried to own
didn’t know me.
The I, I was, was no longer,
the I, I was to become,
had not yet eased into my being.
My disguise succumbed to hungry gazes.
No freedom, no redemption.
A man took me to an office and said,
”This is a refugee.”
A refugee?
The word explained itself in layers of
unfolding sensitivities,
crushing my ego under its weight,
and demanding that I wear it
as my new identity.
I suppressed a loud scream within.
“I am not a refugee!”
Its echo triggered an avalanche of denial
in the Baba mountains of Afghanistan.
All these years I’ve watched
that avalanche melt away into slush
and gushing white streams that flow
to the heart of the blue ocean
trying to convince me that
I am.
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