Do I Belong On This Island of Strangers?
By Zarith Hanipah
As you stand behind podiums
Polished shoes on centuries of stolen land
Calling this land an Island of Strangers –
As if it were ever yours to define.
As if the “Great” Empire didn’t sail outward
To scorch the world
And now shutters the door
To those carrying its ash and legacy
Your echo ghosts –
Powell’s bile, rebranded
Rhetoric soaked in polite venom
But history does not forget
And some of us carry memory
Like open wounds that teach us
To walk differently
I came here – Not by pity
But on wings of intellect
Crossing 10,000 kilometers
From a country, you once imagined as jungle
Where we swing from branches
Although that was Your story of us
But I came here to lift the first place of trophy
In a world innovation competition
A trophy gleaming in a country
That still treats me like a temporary breath
Only to be crowned by minds that saw my worth
And, still, still, still
This country asks me to wait
23 years ago I came to this “Island of Strangers”
Now only 10 years to go
For the right to move, to breathe a tad freer and a tad deeper
On the soil that does not want me to
Even though my life’s work depends on it too
I ask myself, Do I belong on this island of strangers?
I am rooted in motion, not in a country
I feel alive in constant movements
From Australia’s burning blue skies
To France’s cracked marble corridors
And Southeast Asia’s vibrant concrete jungle
To many more aching spires of Europe
Each border I crossed made me who I am today
Each job, each article, each atom I investigated
Forms the compass of who I am today
But here, in this cold bureaucracy
I am nothing but an unanswered form
Even today, as I barely stand
Upon the spires of Cambridge’s renowned embrace
I recount every bit of gratitude
Which will once again inspire me
To continue to write
To continue to contribute
To continue to speak
To continue to slowly rise
While wearing the robe of smokes of uncertainties
So where do I go to now?
Back to my motherland who calls me a criminal?
For loving the many men I have loved
For exposing the robber who was wearing the same Armani suits, like you?
Who was then the Prime Minister like you too?
Which cost me the prison bars and the weight of national humiliation?
And exile from a flag I once saluted
Not even science could save me
Not even journalism could anchor me
Not even love could protect me
As I thought I could finally start to build a home with my Ukrainian valentine
Only to be left homeless in London
Tossed like unwanted love letters
When the landlord learned that we loved each other
In a way he feared and rejected
Do I really belong on this Island of Strangers?
To me, it feels like an island of amnesia
Of cherry-picked welcome mats
And iron gates slammed shut
When brilliance sometimes wears coloured skin
Of queerness enwrapped in rhinestoned jumpers
This island is not strange to me
But it insists on being strange to me
History will not remember
The ones who begged to belong
It will remember
Those who turned belonging
Into a weapon
