People! It’s Not A Bad Thing To Have Emotions
Interview with Duniya Khandoker
In storytelling, we bring lots of emotions—characters and situations. Sometimes we bring our past, and the past is always a very emotional place for people. In our country, music, story, the imagination, dreams, all of those things are really emotional for us.
People! It’s not a bad thing to have emotions.
If you think you can’t be emotional it means you are a robot. Deep in the sea, scuba diving; if you do that, don’t you feel like you could cry? Scuba diving is something! There are no sounds from the world, but different sounds, feelings, lots of colourful things in front of you, and you can feel the music of the ocean. Someone who goes scuba diving, I feel definitely that she or he could cry. You know why? Because of what she experienced.
The people who are leading the world. They’re taking all the decisions. They are taking the lead to design development. But they don’t have emotions. Maybe they have emotions, but in practice, they don’t use that emotion. They think: if I get emotional it will be a weak point, maybe someone else can use my emotion … It means they are working with someone they really don’t trust. They are together, but they don’t trust each other. They can’t cry for their families. If they feel sick, they can’t express it, because maybe the other person might use it as a weapon. Mad. Madness. That’s why it becomes so brutal.
Who was responsible for partition? Some people without emotions. If they had had emotions, maybe it would have been different. Maybe when they were cutting people off from each other, maybe with emotional experience, experience and expression, maybe their personalities would have been different. Then the decision might have been made differently.
If they were no longer afraid to show emotion, maybe they would. And maybe things could change, maybe all the world could change.
Transcribed and edited by Ruth Kelly
Dhaka, December 2019
It all started when…
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A Coat
William Butler Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eye
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Tongue Touch Nambi Myth
Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
(For Bonnie Shullenberger)
Nambi, daughter of God,
Unfolds the stairway of heaven
For a glimpse of a world
Away from the elevation of the skies.
On earth her eyes lie on a man
Who eats dung for food
Urine for wine
Her eyes repose
And the daughter of God lends
Vision desire.
She creates a language desire
She says:
There is a banquet in heaven
Come my arms will support your flight.
Come to where rivers wave waists
And hills sit crosslegged
Where trees swing yellow fruit
And mountains wear snow crowns
Where cows have long conversations with swans
And streams murmur to gesturing reeds.
Come witness the laughter of waterfalls
Laughter that dives into rocks
And glides over space
Spraying souls with dizziness
Of freedom and shock of courage.
Come see the mirrors in the stream
How they turn faces over
Shaping unimaginable possibilities
See how they tease you with what you know
And make a mark on chances of discovery.
The rolling stream is your seeing
Your contradictions
Like feathers floating in the midriff
Of a slithering brook.
Come enter into our heaven
And let your cow graze among ours
Become part of our being
Do not seek to understand our habits
Venture to know them.
I am part of our world
I live here as my father’s daughter
I do not seek to deny paternity
Nor do I dissolve my individuality
Look I am a community and yet a single soul.
I choose to come with you
I choose my walk
I see my point of exit
I come with the pride of my knowing
I choose to descend to earth
To make my own world
Come, listen I have a tale to tell.
I descend to earth
With seed from my father’s fields
With the cattle from his kraal
I come to live in my own world
Look I bring my father’s banana trees
But I do the planting
I fashion out my own garden
I water my own fruit
Look I take the millet seed
And plant my own millet field
I make my own life.
I have a tale to tell
I make my own hearth
And place these stones
To make a meeting place
To provide a talking place
To bear an idea haven
Listen I am telling a tale.
Anchored in my body
Is my mother
Holding me together.
I take many forms
Where I touch life grows.
(Death raging in oblique turbulence
Is not my relative
I did not invite him here
Or bring him in the arms of rebellion.)
I cultivate a circular field
No tree behind the other
Life sings in the branches.
I from the inside
Make the outside
Forming a place
Where
Our daughters and sons
Shall raise their faces
Shall reach out with their arms
As far as those mountains
Which dwell in the clouds.
I call from the compound
Putting thatch upon this roof
Every blade is adding shape
Every stalk points upward
To freer spaces
Listen I am singing
A song within this tale
A harmony
Where our daughters’ voices
Are clear and strong.
These daughters made of our flesh
Are stepping out
In the morning light.
Adorned in beams of a daring sun
Daughters defy the silence
In the smog of time
Pronouncing the presence
Of resolute voices.
Note: The poem draws strongly on the Nambi and Kintu creation myth from Buganda
Kingdom (Uganda).