Political Poetry #4: Rohingya Poets on the 25th of August, 2017.
The 25th of August, 2017 marked a devastating day for the Rohingya, when the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army launched multiple attacks on various police posts in Rakhine State. The Myanmar military used it as the justification for ‘clearance operations’ that resulted in the displacement of over a million Rohingya. These operations did not just displace, however, they involved burning entire villages and the mass killings, rape, and torture of civilians. It has frequently been referred to as an ethnic cleansing, although arguably aligns more with definitions of genocide.
I’ve created this post to compile the words of various Rohingya poets, mostly refugees displaced to Bangladeshi camps, and to document their words on August 25th.
25 August: A Black Day
“Many destroyed villages
Houses still burning
Mass graves of bodies
The culprits still praising
Around a million displaced
Borders still hosting survivors
Thousands of women and men raped
Victims still suffering
Streams made of blood
The corpses still floating
Storm created by state-sponsored gangsters
The east still smelling of burnings
Trauma triggered children
Orphans still looking for their parents
Genocide happening against the Rohingya
We still survive in panic
25/8 stays the darkest day for us
We can never forget”
“Seas of Tears”
Twenty-fifth August broke into a morning of mourning
Of our village women shrouded in black and black of a weeping maria
Rifles cough out louder than thunder rumbles
Bullets strayed in the gloomy sky like clouds of hungry locusts
Voices of motor guns and AK47 chatted in laughter
Tasty fire tongues licked our village pole to pole and post to post
In tears children find shelter under the broken tents of their mothers
Husband looks for wife; wife looks for husband
Mothers with flapping breasts scream children names in a trembling squeak of hiding mice
Crippled found legs in his hands, and the blind see through the rudder of darkness
Eyes shed tears lavishly flooding every threshold of our village
Corpses of children clinging unto mamma’s back laid bare with bullets logged in heads and chests
Twenty-fifth August sold us pains branded in sweet sorrows
Children, wives, and husbands ate and purge at the graveyard latrines
Oh August twenty-fifth, how callous you are!
You stole my brother, my sweetest Bambi
You slit his throat
and sent him to be with other comrades at the belly of mother earth
Oh August!
hungry beast of the 8th order
You ate innocent ‘Rohingyas’ and ate all
Under the nose of the ICC* and IIFFMM** you munched with a mouthful
United Nations wags no tongue
You killed us and deleted our shadows
But by tomorrow like Lazarus we shall rise and sprout anew
and our shadows shall grow tall and dark.
No more genocide, No more pains!
25th August 2017
“A day I will never forget
until I die
I remind my sons
that I witnessed and experienced genocide
Casualties were indescribable
I remember how many were unremoved
from the bottom of my heart
Yet worse inside
Rape, sodomy, killing, burning, beating, looting, bulldozing
Killed ones engraved without funeral
many burnt alive to ashes
many casted in rivers and ponds
Others decayed and missing
Survivors were traumatized
only understood
by those who lost their inmates
I understand because my family was merciless beaten and slayed
Fleeing Rohingyas were refuged
By the heartiest people of Bangladesh
Provided with food and water
many gave cash and other help
We no longer want to be refugees
missing our homeland is the eternal truth
Tyranny’s motive not decreasing
The ways they exterminate us
What is our luck?
What is next for us?”
Genocide Day
“twenty-five August,
mass exodus of my tribe
memorial day.”
Concluding Statements
Let us remember these words and the courage of those writing them. The 25th of August, 2017, for many of us, is a historical day - a moment in history where life and human rights changed. But for others, it signifies something much more: the loss of a homeland, martyrdom of loved ones, and a day where they were forced to leave their old lives in exchange for one much more painful and unjust. Remember these poets, honor their lives - the ones they lost and the ones they so courageously live now. We owe that much, and more, to them.
