FOREIGN DIRT
I see myself differently in Bangladesh.
This young mangrove country of pride and poetry. Founded in mountains and rivers, in mud and blood of revolutions. It gives itself unwillingly to me.
I'm a white man seeing myself for the first time through Bangla eyes. Through a rickshaw driver who has chicken soup in the shade. “I stopped dreaming” he says “cause my time is at its end” and then he suck the bones dry.
This young mangrove country of pride and poetry. Founded in mountains and rivers, in mud and blood of revolutions. It gives itself unwillingly to me.
I'm a white man seeing myself for the first time through Bangla eyes. Through a rickshaw driver who has chicken soup in the shade. “I stopped dreaming” he says “cause my time is at its end” and then he suck the bones dry.
This land is our collective bad conscience. A land sinking into industry and pollution. Into the sea. And I fear one day my children will meet and disown these people all over again. As refugees from an unwelcome time and continent.
The dirt seems foreign here. Cities become lakes and lakes desserts. International mining companies reduce jungles to gravel and dust. Climate refugees bathe in black rivers and walk through barren wastelands made for real estate and big money.
I'm watching past, present and future simultaneously. Cause and effect of civilisation. What used to be six beautiful seasons now seem like three violent ones.
It's the unwanted by the edge of the world. Sneaker factories and future climate refugees at the brim of a rising sea.
Like our parents before us I feel a pending doom. Not from nuclear holocaust or a world at war but from this earth repelling us. It seems closer here and more real than ever.
But then the night rolls in and the dust settles. The twisted nature takes on another form. A peaceful one. And I imagine our end being one of beauty.
