By Nikita Parik
Two poems from her newly published collection: Diacritics of Desire.
Mother Tongue
If you plan to rule over
a people, material imperialism
is never enough.
You must take hold
of the language,
seize its sounds,
cause them to choke
in the very throats
they originate from.
Next, you must strip it
naked, cause shame to
the tongues that speak it.
Then, to be really sure,
plant the seeds of doubt
carefully, and when the brains
begin to question
the very tenets of
the uncivilized truths
of a once-enslaved language,
give yourself a pat and
consider your job well done.
My Mother Speaks Odiya
In brief moments of complex linguistic exchanges,
the water-fetchers from the sea-state
of Odisha connect to my mother
in a way I never could.
The mutual pleasantries shared taste like
sea-salt on the tongue, the phrases vibrant, like
conch shells buried under the tides
of a shared history in a shared land.
Oh how now the rhythmic, chant-like banter
shape-shifts before my eyes into frothy saltsprays, now
Rathyatra-chaos, now rushed rustic
banter in breezy paddy fields!
Every time my mother speaks Odiya, she exposes me
to a history- latent, unexplored- and in its lilts
I imagine the lulls of a sleeping sea,
the sounds- all its phones and morphs-
transporting me to another time, in another state,
where the colors of the sky write themselves over
the playfully turbulent seas in the same rhythms and cadences.
About Nikita Parik:
Parik holds a Master's in Linguistics, a three year diploma in French, and another Master’s in English. Diacritics of Desire (2019) is her debut book of poems, followed by Amour and Apocalypse (2020), a novel in translation (Hindi to English). She has been invited to read her poems at the Sahitya Akademi Multilingual Poets Meet and Sahitya Akademi Young Writer's Meet programmes. Her works have appeared in Rattle, U City Review, The Alipore Post, Vayavya, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and others. She currently edits EKL Review.