Burning Our Nation: Caste in My Guyanese Family

Editors’ Note: “Burning Our Nation” is the inaugural essay in the new monthly collaboration between KtB and our sibling site The Commons.

My father always feared that people from India do not recognize him as Indian. He has a story about how my uncle wanted to marry a brahmin woman in Britain and my Nana (my maternal grandfather) was excited, but the woman’s family didn’t allow it since Guyanese was not Indian and Guyanese brahmin was not Indian brahmin. There are four main categories of people in the caste system of South Asia and its diasporas: brahmin (highest priestly caste), kshatriya (warrior/ruling class), vaishya (mercantile caste), and Shudra (the servant caste). Outside of these are the scheduled and Dalit castes that are not afforded any honored place in caste society. Being from the Caribbean with a mixed-caste history means that I have to be dexterous in how I reiterate my own family story.  

There is a kind of anxiety in which a new diaspora in the United States challenges my family’s sense of cultural identity since the local Indianness that was created from a Creolization of indentured laborers does not match the Indianness, filled with regional coding and linguistic differences, of the current subcontinental situation. I drank this inferiority complex as mother’s milk, believing that I was lesser than the immigrant Indian, a hybrid, disfigured thing. It would take time for me to learn my centaur magic, to know my Indianness as Americanness and diasporic consciousness.

Because of his caste differences I don’t think my father ever felt completely comfortable with my mother’s family, as though—according to him—they didn’t fully accept him despite agreeing to their wedding. As my father tells it, my Nana thought he could control my father because of his class privilege over my “crabdog” father from “backdam.” Being Indo-Guyanese means that we do not have a simple relationship with our historical origins, and when in the United States in a country where people want an easy, less complicated narrative of who we are as either good or bad immigrants, it becomes easy to erase ourselves to speak simply to Empire. Indians, Americans, etc. My family left India to work sugar cane plantations as early as 1865, longer than some of my white friends’ familial immigration stories to the Western hemisphere. But since my skin is brown, belonging becomes harder to accomplish—especially where there are other kinds of brown “Indo-” folks around.

From this anxiety that occurred early on, I knew that I was different than others—different from my high school classmates Molly and Rakhee, Pretesh and Chirag who didn’t ever really associate with me outside of class. I wanted to be Indian, to have a simple caste story. I wanted to claim origin in Uttar Pradesh and hold my mother’s brahminness as proof of my worth before the others who would then be able to place me and my Endianness. My strategy was to learn Hindi and try to blend in with the ABCDs, the American Born Confused Desis, instead of claiming my Guyaneseness and all the complications and paradoxes of my heritage. It was my evidence that, like my father, I would never be good enough to marry an Indian person– that “Indiaman na abi nation– Indians from India are not our nation.”  

In college I drunkenly confided to a brahmin friend that I was mixed-caste, and he was shocked but said that the sin of my birth was not my sin—that it belonged to my mother and my father, that I was innocent and should practice the dharma of my father’s caste. This gave me some solace until I learned a little bit more about my history and the history of caste and caste oppression in a Guyanese context. That and that I couldn’t keep cows in a suburban or urban place where I wanted to live. What I was experiencing was anxiety of my own hybridity: diasporic and mixed without people that I am from giving me lessons on my own descent. I did not yet know how to canter on my centaur hooves and buck at patriarchal casteist bullshit. I had to unlearn so much that had been instilled in me– my inferiority complex.

I often hear from Caribbean people their expressed desire to understand more about our caste stories—what we tell ourselves. Many have confided in me at literary events, community parties, and writing workshops, that they have seen caste exist in our spaces, that it’s not as the academics would have us believe: that caste “broke down” and no longer exists in Guyanese spaces. I know this to be false– the idea that caste no longer exists– given my closeness with my Aji (paternal grandmother) and the other subtle discriminations—namely anti-Black bigotry– to preserve some kind of self, revealed through iteration and reiteration of caste fictions. I was recently reminded by a South Asian scholar that being Caribbean means that I can hide my caste and that it does not have the same weight as someone in South Asia who cannot hide their caste. While this is functionally true, as soon as I tell South Asian immigrants and their children that I’m from Guyana they assume that my ancestors were scraped from the basti (slums)—the only people they imagine that could be duped by Empire and conscripted into servitude. There is no hiding. I have heard it over and over: Your family couldn’t possibly be of anything but [Insert Dalit caste here].

Since my family contains Muslims, Hindus, Christians, I have been exposed to myriad ways of being, which stoked the beginnings of an exploration of my lineage that once I learned it, I cannot look away. There is not a simple, straightforward narrative. It’s convoluted and confusing. I have to think that this is actually the history and truth of caste—that it’s not linear and easily understood. To understand it means, for me, that I can begin to destroy it—burn it down in the architecture of myself. To stave off internalizing the inferiorly that I believed of myself, I must go deeper and deeper into the histories of my oral cultures to understand how to practice a liberatory politics in my daily life and in my writing. 

Aapan Jaat: Abi Nation: Our Caste 

I never really thought much about the idea of caste as being a factor in the way that I saw myself or how that we make ourselves up through the stories we tell. Things change from childhood into young adulthood when the expectations of marriage and continuance of familial lines are at stake. The first time I met my Nani’s sister—my great aunt– she told me from her wheelchair in Clairmont, New Jersey, “A-yuh must marry you own nation.” What she meant was not that I should marry an American or even an immigrant with a similar migration story to mine. Rather she meant that I should marry someone of my same religion, ethnicity, and caste. In my Guyanese family, “nation” refers to the Hindi word “jaat” or “jaati” meaning caste. And this does not even bring queerness into the story as such.

My Nani had a complicated story that always positioned her on the outside of her married-into family. This had largely to do with ethnicity and caste, which represents a large, knotted situation of belonging and existing in the wrong body and mind. One of her parents was a Tamilian, or Madrasi, convert from Hinduism to Christianity named Kissnasammy, a version of Krishnaswamy, who learned to read English from the Bible. He changed his name to Viraswammy. As story has it, he belonged to a “low nation”—quite possibly referring to Dalit status. Nani’s mother, Maude Watson Vera, was orphaned on the ship that bore her to the Caribbean in 1894. We are not sure of the circumstances of Maude’s mother’s death, other than it must have been terrible, dying at sea as a bound Coolie. When Maude reached Georgetown, her ears “pierced in Muslim style” with studs up and down her cartilage, a Black family adopted her and kept her as a servant in their Christian household. 

Before she was made to convert to Christianity, she may have been named Janaki, which is a Hindu name, or something else, though my great aunt was sure she was Muslim. Maude Watson and Viraswammy married and had four children, the eldest of whom was my Nani, Emma Lousia. They were poor and lived a life of destitution in Guyana. That’s why when my Nana (my maternal grandfather), Hari Prashad, an already successful entrepreneur, came by both Viraswammy and Maude were willing to let Emma marry Hari despite being two decades her senior.

After their marriage, Emma was compelled to change her name to Amla Devi to satisfy her husband’s (my Nana’s) own religious and caste identity, and to possibly erase her low caste status through the patriarchal sacrament of marriage. Hari Prashad, the son of Sant Ram Mahraj and Etwariya, belonged to a khsatriya caste on his father’s side and a brahmin caste on his mother’s (I make it a practice to not capitalize savarana jaati, or upper-caste names). My suspicion is that when caste is undisclosed, especially for women, it means that they belonged to a lower than “acceptable” caste identity whose mention would tarnish the already suspect caste identities of those who claim “high nation” status (as in the case of my father’s paternal grandmother, for instance). Hari would claim brahmin caste identity based on his mother’s father’s caste instead of the patrilineal caste of his kshatriya father. This particular configuration of caste identities gave my Nana the upper hand and privileged in what his demands for my Nani could be: conversion / reversion to his brand of Hinduism. 

All my family know of Etwariya (my Nana’s mother) is that she was actually the brahmin and her husband, Sant Ram was kshatriya based on their ship passes. Her father was called Sewraj. After she worked the Lusignan contract as a laborer and bore four sons to Sant Ram, she left him and lived with her sister in Epiphany Village. Hari Prashad, her child born in 1898, my maternal grandfather, had eight children in total—all of whom now identify as brahmin despite the records from Baytoram Ramharrack’s book.

No story of my nation is complete without also thinking about the patrilineal narratives iterated to me. Since my community suffers the misogynistic ills of patriarchy, my mother’s family stories become less important to the patriarchy than my father’s. Relatives have said to me earlier in my exploration of my familial history “Why concentrate on your mother’s family. You’re a Mohabir,” which admonished me to have pride in my patriliny. 

The legend of our jaat, our nation, on my father’s side is just as complicated as my mother’s side with just as many unknowns and similarly cause for suspicion. My father’s father was an Ahir, a cowherder caste, and his mother’s status was unknown. My Aji claimed a chachri (kshatriya) caste, citing her gotra as raghuvanshi on her father’s side but brahmin status on her mother’s side. Such a combination was not impossible due to the arrival of brahmin widows to the Caribbean, but also highly suspect, since the claiming of caste identity meant access to control and power, if not materially then definitely spiritually. Widow émigres to the Caribbean escaped lives of celibacy and inauspicious status—often times reviled as a curse-bestowing presence—to remake their lives as they saw fit in the colonies, twice-bound by Empire and patriarchy.

The combination of my father’s and mother’s caste identities produced my brother, my sister, and me, who according to my friends who quote, but don’t actually know the shastras in Sanskrit, I’m told, means that we are only fit to burn human bodies—our very existence an affront to dharma (rightness of action / religion). It is a sure sign of the Kali Yuga—the last epoch where wickedness walks the earth and dharma writhes in its death throes.. But of course, this depends on who I ask. In my family it has been established by my grandparents’ generation that my own caste identity actually is that of my father—that the strictures of caste have augmented and changed in the New World. My family accepted this change as it was the cultural norm, but more than this needed (and presently needs) to have the vocabulary to orate our being: that our stories of ourselves make us human, make our history real and lived. Unfortunately, one of these stories trades in the fictions of caste: who one’s father’s father’s father’s father was. What I see here is what remains essential for caste logic is patriarchy. Only the men matter—the men who can prove a reproductive futurity. I am not the least bit surprised that caste identity is tied to the penis. That the intersections of postcoloniality, caste, and patriarchy ensures that descent is traceable through the flagellate like tails of sperm.  

Since Shudra (servant caste), Dalit, Bahujaan (“the majority” scheduled castes, Adivasi castes, and others), and mixed-casted people are spoken of with such scorn, I wonder if I can reverse this “joke” of being fit only to burn bodies. I wonder if I can use my words as a cremation ghat upon which I stoke the flames to consume the casteist brahminical power that I have been exposed to, and in doing so reverse a colonial order to allow a complex understanding of transformation and diaspora. I am not interested in reinscribing the logics of caste, rather in asking what would a spiritual text look like that is used for its liberatory power? What is a holy text for a new kind of deity, queer, bloodthirsty, with their tongue lolling out of their fanged mouth?  

Anatomy of Caste

As a student looking for answers to the history of Indian indenture in textbooks, I majored in religious studies and fervidly consumed as many books and articles as I could that could help me in my questing after self. Colonial record did not contain me, the questing for self was a spiritual task of connecting with my ancestors. I found story after story about what the documented reification and codifying of caste in South Asia looks like. None of them would be a place for me to fit. 

According to the Laws of Manu a story was told. That from Purusha, the cosmic man, came the different castes of people. From Purusha’s head came the brahmins, the priests who were righteous and service to whom would lead to correct dharma and liberation. From Purusha’s arms came the kshatriyas, the warriors and kings, chosen for the virtuous task of ruling the land. Next, from Purusha’s legs came the vaishyas, the merchants, who would spread wealth through trade across the globe. Finally, from Purusha’s feet came the Shudras, the servants, who were created to serve others. There is no mention of the Dalit folks, of those who exist outside of the caste system—the outcaste treated as pariahs. 

The brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaishyas are allowed to learn the Vedas, the holy scriptures revealed to humans from the Divine. They are supposed to go through an initiation called “janeo” where they don a holy thread from their left shoulders that show they have studied Sanskrit and are versed in shlokas and mantras. It is the Shudras and the Dalits who are not allowed to learn the Vedas and if they should by chance hear them uttered must suffer from molten lead being poured in their ears.

I remember learning this in a religious studies classroom from a brahmin who taught us the difference between shruti literature, that which is heard, and smriti literature, that which is remembered. In fact, all throughout my education every South Asian professor that I have ever had has said a version of the following to the class, “I don’t believe in caste, but I am a brahmin.” Not “I am from the brahmin caste,” nor “My name is brahmin,” but the proud claiming of ontological wholeness of a caste identity. “I am this, not that,” lending credo and ethos to the teaching they were about to perform in the classroom. This direct statement of caste by avowed “unreconstructed Marxists” and humanists alike means to me sitting in the classroom that I do not belong, or that I cannot belong in any place that would allow me or my family access to their landscape. It meant that during Diwali and Ganesh Chaturthi, as an undergraduate student, I was the only one of my cohort not invited to their parties. It meant that caste politics and exclusions are very much a living, breathing demon in the United States—a nation of its own stratifications and racialized caste systems. So much for being able to “hide” my caste status.

As someone with a mixed caste identity who comes from a Caribbean family that has been living outside of India for over a century, these statements have always been a way to keep me out. Higher learning was not for people with my own history, not for the “stupid Coolie.” I was better off not studying, lest someone should find out and liquid metal, gleaming orange, should blister my ear canal. My mother’s family claims brahmin status though my father’s claims Ahiri status—a category of Shudras; the mixture of these two producing the “ritually polluting” Chandaals who must live outside of the city and never wear gold. All of my family’s claims and caste narratives are dubious, not to be trusted in many dimensions. The first, is this the actual history of the people we are from? The second, caste is fake, a violent ill of South Asian space. 

I have been told and told and retold by Indian nationals and recent immigrants that the British combed the slums of the East and South of India to bring their labor to the colonies. This was their idea of a history they knew nothing about. And this too, is a simple answer by people who have institutional power, either in the Caribbean academic scene or the South Asian one. What about our own stories? Why are these not considered as valuable sources of information?  

That caste is a fiction is not lost on my family. Our stories are valid historical accounts we tell tales of how we are human beings despite being colonized. This represents a major conflict in my thinking: wanting to validate our demeaned oral traditions and wanting to simultaneously believe that there are ways in which it is possible to bring into incarnation a more socially just, anti-caste mentality. We survived the plantations and reforged identities that didn’t exist until we did, so why not in the tradition of cultural creation, invoke and nurture an anti-caste politics? 

Since my family comes from an aural culture the site of Western science has long felt corrosive to our own epistemologies and ways of keeping record. I have never needed science, that once called people like me “lesser” because of my Dravidian heritage, to prove my humanity. I am tired of erasure, of casteism that I encounter in the United States. But what about the genetic veracity of caste? I often must arm myself in Western scientific language to discuss what I mean when I say that caste is a fiction. For example: An article published in 2013 in Live Science journal claims that a genetic analysis shows a divergence that only occurred two millennia ago, showing that the Vedic “truth” of caste is scientifically implausible. The original study was published in American Journal of Human Genetics.

I am generally not a fan of science “proving” or “disproving” non-Western religion and cultural practices, but in this case, I am very much in favor of changing caste logics and abolishing the caste system. Epistemological violence perpetrated by Western rationalism disenfranchises people still. Once upon a time, brown and Black bodies were not counted as human. How can I trust a system rooted in my dehumanization to describe me? But as far as the Vedas are concerned, they operate with their own systems of dehumanization that I work to denounce. Call this a sign of the Kali Yuga, the end times where dharma and virtue have fallen. I do not believe that someone is lesser than another by virtue of caste identity—and if this goes against dharma then it’s time to abolish dharma itself. 

Ramayana

But what does caste oppression in my own Guyanese American / diasporic context look like today? Presently I am working on collecting stories from the Ramayana, titled Banbas / Exile (Milkweed Editions 2026), attempting to piece together an iteration of this sacred text  that is purely Guyanese—based in stories from my unlettered Aji (my paternal grandmother). I was close enough to her that I was able to record our conversations that revealed her intense understanding of the narrative as a story of resistance to brahminical and patriarchal oppression. She relished telling the story of Shabri—or as she said Seori from the Bhojpuri Sevari—who fed Rama jhutha berries, berries she took bites from and thus ritually polluted for upper casted people. Seori was of scheduled caste status and Adivasi.

“‘E been bite da bair an’ gi’ Ram fe eat ‘e jhutha,” Aji reflected. I wondered if she saw her own distance from the “rightness” of caste as a way to of understanding this story. My Aji also told of Sita’s suffering after Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu, abandons her in the forest while she was pregnant. 

Many scholars of the Ramayana have noted this very story as offering relief for the oppressed folks in homosocial space, singing of suffering together, challenging the authority of the patriarchy and also of the state, whether colonial or postcolonial. Adding the Caribbean to this was a project of my own heart, using these old stories with their anti-colonial stakes against forced conversions, as liberatory. 

 I am surprised and not surprised to learn that many people, especially family members balk at the idea of a Caribbean Ramayana, that there is only “one” capital “T” Truth to the story, and that can be found in Tulsidas’s version. Through my studies, and through the performative traditions of Ramayana I know this to be false, something else undergirding their disdain. Since my Nana was a scholar of Tulsidas’s Sri Ramcharitamanasa and was regarded as a pandit in his communities, I thought including his voice in the collection would add a kind of depth that would illustrate the diversity of the story’s use in my own family. Including his translations would have provided another ancestral voice to my work. My Mamu, my Nana’s son and my mother’s brother, spent a great deal of time assembling all of my Nana’s kathas and translations of Tulsidas’s Sri Ramacharitamanasa into a volume that he sent to all of my Nana’s grandchildren, including me, my brother, and sister. 

I wrote to my Mamu asking his permission to use some of my Nana’s words—no more than ten pages—in my collection, to provide a very Guyanese accounting of the story of the travails of Rama and Sita. I was surprised and hurt by his response, which declined my request citing that “his father would not want his words adulterated,” and that he could not possibly fathom what I meant by assembling a “Guyanese” version of the story as there is only one real accounting of it. Clearly mistaken, his response showed me several things at play in his own brahminical brought-upsy. 

After passing the letter to my mother to ask her what she thought, we came to the conclusion that through the way he worded his response, that he was operating at the intersections of homophobia and casteism. Is it possible to disaggregate his disapproval of my sexuality from his disapproval of my non-brahmin status? Does this Mamu regard me as an abominable mixture of both low and high blood? How can someone like me dare to assemble the “holy” story? Does he count his Nation as something superior to what he thinks is my own? How come my Aji’s stories and songs are not good enough to exist in the same place as his father’s? Is this a function of her gender, illiteracy, or of her lower caste status?

I am left with these questions that have their answers in the logics of oppression—the very thing that the Ramayana, or at least the version that I am collecting, speaks against. Truth be told, I’ve come to realize that I am glad to not include my Nana’s words after all, because this kind of brahminical, patriarchal tyranny only reproduces the same kind of oppression that makes people like me “lesser than.” In my collection I hope to challenge these logics, or at least to ask the questions of how to overthrow oppression in the Ramayana.

A friend pointed out to me that it is particularly risky being a man and writing women’s songs and transcribing a woman’s retelling to create a Ramayana that challenges brahminical and heteropatriarchal authority. How can I as a man transcribe and translate my Aji’s words? My Aji trusted me with her songs and stories, and it is from this gift that I approach Ramayana with her biting wit and insuppressible joy.  I am an 80s and 90s fag and an antiman—this is my gender, not man. The end of the last century was a time of multiple slippages that are still slipping today. Does this accord me a place in the translation and transcriptions of these songs? This is a spiritual question. If I do not do it, who will? A white American academic funded by the United States government to study Bhojpuri and Hindi who will make their academic career on the backs of Coolie labor? 

This interaction with my Mamu shows me clearly the ways that casteism haunts my own Indo-Caribbean and Guyanese American family. It takes the space of patriarchal oppressions: my mother and her mother and her mother do not matter. I now belong to a position of my father’s caste, and with the queernesses that I inhabit and shift through, I am a disappointment to patriarchy as reckoned by Guyanese brahminism.  

A Chandaal From Some Place

And why should my Mamu be suspicious of my work given my sexuality and my caste? My Aji used to whisper about so and so being Chamaar or belonging to the leather-working caste and therefore outcaste. She used this caste name also as a biting swear word when I would do something naughty, like asking her about why she never remarried after my Aja’s death left her widowed at forty-four. Chamaar kahi ke! and Chandaal kahi ke! Chandaal from some place! she would swear at me, though in play. These caste names were low enough to insult my Aji, though she admitted that my brother, sister, and me were actually considered to be Chandaal.

I also remember her talking about an uncle and how she did not approve of his marrying her daughter because of his Chamaar status. The Chamaar community is one of leatherworking in India and interactions with them were considered to be ritually polluting. But my Aji did not disown her daughter and loved her grandchildren despite her reviling their caste inheritances. These were my Aji’s favorite grandchildren. Maybe this is why she eventually claimed to some relatives to be Christian– to escape their pressuring her to convert as well as to escape the caste oppression of her generation. Ironically, even the Christian members of my family are aware of their caste identities, echoing my Aji’s own words, me mumma been a brahmin.

What people in the Caribbean and Caribbean studies like to say is something like caste broke down in the Caribbean because of the ways in which people lived and worked– it required mixing socially and recreationally. Indeed, there was not the population of Indians in the colonies that reflected India’s own staggering population, so having a thriving and complicated social structure of caste had to be altered. But it was altered, not extinguished. The ways that caste and this 19^th century South Asianness endures in my family is through mandates about what we can eat and what we cannot. For what I know, Hindus in my family are admonished to not eat beef and pork as they both together represent the dietary restrictions of South Asian Hindus and Muslims combined. 

Since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-1858 was during the period of indenture (1834-1917) the British human traders must have been careful to avoid the conflict that led to the anti-colonial rebellion. It was widely believed by the British Indian army that the bullets that they had to bite into to load their rifles were tainted with fat from cows and pigs—an insult to Hindus and Muslims. And because of this, the army revolted, and the British doubled back and oppressed the Indian people even more. 

And now, in the Caribbean colonies, the British learned their lesson about what happened if various communities united against them—they were even more determined to prevent this from ever recurring, so they spread the flames of hatred between Black people and Indians in Guyana. With her caste awareness my Aji was also tied into anti-Black racism, which in Guyana was a complication of our colonial and postcolonial identities. Many have written that there were many commonalities between Black and Indian communities that threatened British rule, and as a result they flexed their power to pit Indian against Black and Black against Indian, culturally and economically. She was very fond of saying, “Me pickni tuhrn Blackman” (my children have all become Black) when commenting on how her children converted to Christianity, the religion of the white and Black populations of the Caribbean—representing a kind of bigoted prejudice against folks who would have made natural allies. 

Now my own caste identity is kept by my family through patrilineal descent, there is a confluence of patriarchy and caste that survives the diaspora twice over—the first time in Guyana and secondly in North America, though I hope in my recounting my family story to show how fatuous caste is and how it can damage and delegitimize human beings even if its memory is relegated to swear words and appropriate marriages. 

Our new nation is Coolie, which necessitates an anti-Blackness based in colonial logic. Coolie is a word that many have reappropriated and imbued with a politics of resistance and survival. What was once a derogatory slur used to defame, now binds together from the inside. Many feel that this hangover from colonization can never be reinvigorated through a new context. I like it like I like the words queer and faggot and antiman. I use them like my own bow and arrow to slay cisheteropatriarchal casted expectations of my brown body.

The Nation is a modernist project, experimented on and discovered through European colonization of what we now call the Global South, including settler colonial projects of South Africa and Israel—replete with genocides and enslavements. The practice of national inclusion and country was and remains at the forefront of the ways the Indo-Caribbean thinks of them self. As theorists and artists have described, to be a Coolie is to perform what Andil Gosine calls the “wrecking work” of the Coolie—the upset of Empire and the South Asian by presenting an ontological reality at odds with the purity of the West and the East. The conflation of “jaat” with “nation” represents this history to me: that we as formerly indentured peoples were taken from an India not yet independent to work a newly created colony to displace Indigenous people, dispossessing them of their land. My great-aunt and Aji both conflating “Jaat” for “Nation” is a particular irony that illuminates the history of our struggle for recognition and endurance. Since the Caribbean was a global space long before the concept of “globalization” was agreed upon by scholars in the West, trends in human migration make the categorization of people based on fictions of race and caste inane. The British were the ones who tried to keep us all separate, from standardizing caste practices to creating animosity between ethnic groups in the Caribbean in order to protect their colony. It’s time now for change. It’s time now for revolution. What could possibly be more spiritual than to destroy and rebuild the Self through Maya, or cosmic illusion, that is steadfast in belief in hierarchies of animacy. This is a body that needs to be thrown on the pyre, its ashes scattered to the wind to fertilize wildflowers and wildfruits. I am amassing wood and kindling to burn this system to the ground—after all, according to my entire history, revolution is in my blood. It’s my nation. 

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This essay is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/