I’d rather talk about Shetland ponies
than talk about fascist thugs
long hair don’t care!
Dancelist:
Bob Vylan: We Live Here: this song ends with one of my favourite words. I wrote a whole essay about it for my masters. Bob Vylan I need you now. And I needed you when I was 16 years old.
Real Great Britain: Asian Dub Foundation: If you know me by now, I always bring this one out.
Aunty Joan Armitrading: Love and Affection: soothing truthing.
Or curlew sandpipers. Lapwings. Mountain hares. Wimbrels. Curlew-curlews . Big skies. Hailstorms. Atlantic Ocean. Aurora borealis. Deserted beaches. Raspberry jam on toast. Freshly ground coffee. Sleepless nights. Perhaps a haunted house?
This is me BE-ing me. Dal Kular. Almost fifty-seven years old post-menopausal silver streaked irreverent Punjabi aunty-queenji. Bookmaker by the sea fantasiser. Urban-wildster. Ancient zine-maker. About the right size to be a Shetland pony-rider. Idler. Potterer. Sometimes writer. Bob Vylan kitchen headbanger (softly).
I don’t want to talk about 110,000 - 150,000 people protesting in a far right demonstration in London, wishing to unite the kingdom. What long-lost-if-ever-there-was a kingdom are they talking about?
I don’t want to talk about the 20 year old Sikh woman walking along a busy road at 8.30am last Tuesday in Birmingham, who was raped by two men who racially abused her during the attack.
On top of all the world-fuckery going on and on and on.
I’m trying to hold love and compassion in my heart whilst blasting a mouthful of expletives into the air.
I want to talk about Shetland ponies. I want my life to be full of talk about the gorgeousness of Shetland ponies. Nothing else. Just Shetland ponies. Maybe I want to be a Shetland pony?
I think about these Shetland ponies, hanging out together on a hillside by the ocean. Perhaps because they’re little. Like me. With big wild spirits. I think about them munching grass, nuzzling each other, sleeping, standing, staring, roaming. Coming towards me for an apple that’s not there. And letting me stroke their nose as they release big Shetland pony size sighs. BE-ing. Themselves. Seeing me, BE-ing myself.
It’s hard to reconcile the love from creatures and landscapes with the hatred and fear from others. In this remote place where I find myself now, I’m the only PoGM I’ve seen. I’m being called the ‘Brown Woman’ – a man driving a mini bus almost crashing as he turned his body 180 degrees to stare at me. The shop owners who can barely look at me or scowl at me as if I’m a fowl smell yet smile wildly at my white friend. A level of consistent hostility I’ve not experienced in years. Is it because I’m a stranger on this island? Maybe it’s notbecause I’m brown? And maybe it is and/or/both. I can never take my brown skin out of the equation. You’re a curiosity people say. They’ve never seen someone like you up here they say. Oh fuck off I say to them in my head. I’m too tired to offer grace and be someone’s curiosity or cultural education. I’m too tired. That fuck off is getting closer to the end of my tongue. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold it in for much longer. The power of an expletive appropriately and proportionately fired…
A friendly local (who’s not local) tells me the mini bus driver would like the whole of the Middle East bombed. And Gaza cleared.
Breathe. I remind myself I’m here for the wild.
I’m here for the wild. I’m here for the wild. Breathe.
And then.
The gathered hatred and fear last Saturday in London. The aerial footage of that march: the visible underbelly of far right hatred that has fully resurfaced in the last 5 years. Emboldened. I fear that Saturday is a tipping point to something far more dangerous than we’ve seen for a long time here in UK. All those marchees, their imaginations have been appropriated under false pretences and false promises.
Most of us are tired out with this world. Though none of us are remotely anywhere near as tired as the people of Gaza. Or Sudan. Or Congo. Or all the other places of conflict and displacement.
It feels wrong to say I want to hang out with Shetland ponies. Colonialism functions to keep us hooked into fight. To feel wrong. To always be looking over our shoulder. To not give/allow us enough space to discover who we are beyond the ridiculous racialisation of our entire beings.
This is a rant. An offload. No apologies. No trying to be all nice to get even the remotest smile. Today I channel my mother’s tongue ~ her unedited, unselfconscious truth-telling pointed-arrow tongue.
Send us all back ‘home’ then. Repatriate us. Let’s take voluntary flight with the wild geese. Live at sea like Manx Shearwater. And from afar watch this entire country fall to its knees. Collapse. For many hundreds of years this non-united kingdom has needed us to BE-come what it is now. We are here because you were there – how many times do we repeat this plati-truth? This country would fall apart without the labour of People of the Global Majority; the nurses and doctors and scientists and artists and musicians and street cleaners and cabbies and takeaways and bus drivers and business leaders and carers and factory workers and and and.
What would those fascist thugs do without their weekly dose of Chicken Tikka Masala after attending a far right rally if they send us all back home? They’ll have to get a jar of cooking sauce, mate. But will their shops stop stocking Patak’s curry sauces too? God forbid they remove poppadoms off the shelves. Then there would be riots saying we stole their poppadoms and they want them back.
Mate, if you’re sending me back home then I’m taking all my poppadoms back too! After all, that’s all I live off innit. Poppa-dom-dom-dom! Perhaps I even am a poppadom but nobody ever told me?
Growing up I often heard my parents say, ‘what if they send us back home?’. A real fear. Whilst my Dad got his British passport becoming fully citizenised rather than colonial-subjectivised, my Mum refused. She kept her Indian passport and instead opted for indefinite leave to stay. And definite ability to leave if she had to. By the time my Mum and Dad had passed in their 80’s I don’t think they could ever imagine that many PoGM in this country are still living with the same fears as theirs.
***
My default is flight. I’m bored of all this same-same rewind – colonisation and capitalism is devoid of any kind of imagination. I want to run away. I want to migrate with the wild geese that I see flying above me everyday right now. Or practice singing with curlew. I want to feel ME. The way I once felt myself on Dingieshowies beach on Orkney. Two days of storms and gales. On a caravan on cliff top. Feeling all the layers and labels and compressions of overcultres stripped away from me until I felt myself element and otherwise. Something otherwildly. Unrecognisable to the me I’d been conditioned to be. Some true-to-the-core being that I intuitively recognised. Somebeing without skin and without time. She’s still with me, breathing.
I believe that the necessity of resistance against the far right and colonialism requires a responsibility and obligation to flight. Not just fight. Perhaps flight is my fugitivity. To be unbearably and unapologetically myself. This mash-up of many worlds and everywhens. To be that bookmaker fantasising about a studio by the sea. I’ll make books under the instruction of my ancestors and passing sea creatures. That resistance can be standing alongside comrades at an anti-racism march and to spend hours and hours folding and tearing papers, making words flow together, contemplating waves, being thoroughly effin useless to capitalism. Sharing all of this with my people.
I fight / I flight / I refuse to freeze / I refuse to shrink / I refuse to hide / I refuse to give into my fear / I refuse to be quiet / I refuse to forget / I will challenge / I will dream better wor(l)ds / I will lean into difficult conversations / My anger is my fuel / My tongue is my mother’s-tongue.
And maybe I’ll ride one of those Shetland ponies right into that there local shop, steal all their poppadoms and Patak’s sauces, then gallop past that minibus driver waving a Palestinian flag. I doubt he’ll be happy when he later goes into that local shop and can’t find the ingredients to make the nations favourite takeaway. Ah well.
