- Jupaka Subhadra
Original: maa avva dukkalni dunniposukunna tokkudubanda
From the Telugu Dalit Writing blog – A Shared Mirror blog featuring a selection of Telugu Dalit Writing in Translation
Avva, my mother
she is not a wick-lamp, that’s protected
she is the sun that went astray in sky’s rug
she is the famine in the stretched out sari-end*
of the mother earth
Avva
she is a timeless full moon,
the embodiment of struggle sans dawn.
Her head placed in the mortar,
she is an empty grain bounced against the pestle.
The sun that rises at the cockcrow warms itself in her eyes
She sweeps the stars at the dawn,
smears dung-water on the front yard
wakes us, feeds us, and leaves for work.
Neither the cow in the forest
nor the calf at home would long for each other.
Avva
she is a slave unrecognized.
Quite often she falls in the furnace of ayya, father’s anger
because of over or under cooked rice
because of a sand grain or hair in the rice
or to grab her wages for drinking.
Avva
she is like served platters for us all.
A seed in the furrow,
she sprouts into green crops
planting and weeding in the knee-deep mud fields
even after the dusk,
that’s my avva!
It’s my avva
who blows the song into the village holding a spade.
Carves tunes shaping ridges in paddy fields.
When avva is at work,
her sweat turns into fountain in a desert-sink.
She becomes un-extinguishable fire in the mud stove.
I had no memories of clinging to the waist of my avva
I never heard lullabies or tales while being fed baby-food
with her soot-formed, hardened hands.
I had no occasions of sleeping in her lap, yawning.
The memories of my screech for food
holding a dented bowl are not yet put out.
My avva
she is a drumbeat on the broken drum
she is a tune denied of crop.
Having taught the earth to bloom and to give fruit,
having become leather for the sandals,
hers is the agony of the top
to escape from the string in the hands of the landlords.
Though she fed the mother-earth by her breast,
they kept her at a distance from the plough.
My avva,
she is a slab at the doorway that gathered sorrow.
As an unfastened bundle of history,
having tightened the sari-end around her waist,
my avva is a question with a flaunting sickle in her hand.
The wretched alphabet!
It never accessed even the peripheries
where my avva had walked.
* * * * *
*Dalit and sudra women stretch out their sari-ends forming like a bowl when offered grains, food etc
Translated by K. Purushotham
Read the poem on the Telugu Dalit Writing blog here
