Sometimes I wonder what the tent peg was made of. The tent peg that became a weapon, a tool of self-defence, when a woman rammed it up the prolific arsehole of Donald J. Trump as he sexually assaulted her.
I wonder if it was made in the USA (domestic terror?) or shipped over from China, whether it was metal; what kind? Aluminium, probably… So bauxite? Jamaica, Guinea, Queensland?
When will cancer research wink wink, nudge nudge at the cyanide and arsenic used to separate raw metals? How many homelands poisoned by Western empire to create the anchor point of a temporary home which, in this instance of rape, invades an invader.
Hewing dunes, silt, beds.1
Tents are no longer such temporary shelters for people in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, of course, and too often become coffins in the slow or instant killings of famine, flooding, freezing, disease, or air strikes, fire.
As I try to trace these genocides and climate collapse back to a place, or a person, or a logic, I get lost. Extractavism is a long game and a paradox. A tide, not a wave, obvious yet formless, still, unnatural.
In another time of mass death,
Practiced a safety relentless.2
Identifying threat is how we survive, an ability warped, or lost somewhere, or rung out of us with scenes of preventable hell breaking through the ongoing advert for individualist escapism.
What would it mean, to defend the land as if we were defending our own bodies?3 If we understood our extinction as autoimmune?
Circling back briefly to Donald Trump’s arsehole – is his sphincter one of his borders? Is a fart escaping his body also an invasion of US airspace in the same way that a Canadian forest fire threatens his sense of security?
We are more porous than we usually want to bear in mind.
Arrival and departure halls all over my body, and I spend a lot of time in them bidding farewell to one version of me and welcoming another.4
A sphincter, or a mouth, nostril, eyeball. Ocean, river, current in an ocean, river in a sky, spine of a mountain. Layers of changes that make our natural borders.
With the rain sounding like the bullets I grew up with back home and the clouds of London mushrooming like the clouds of dust that rose in my hometown after bombardment, I opened the window and sat on the ledge – everything passes, love remains.5
However high a border wall, the wind will not stop for passport control.
There was no pushing, no thrusting. He arrived inside me like a sensitive visitor who takes their shoes and all their expectations off and leaves them by the door.6
What do hurricanes, mudslides, forest fires, acid rain, drought care for fortress, Frontex Europe?
Until the solid wall of my body is pierced
By wind, hole by hole
Like an old rotting sieve
I will not pay any price for breathing7
- Nat Raha, “Invocation”, Wasafiri, Vol 39, #2: Abolitions: Writing Against Abandonment, 2024: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690055.2024.2315776>. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Linda Quiquivix, “A Maya Critique of Global Capital and the Nation-State”, The Funambulist, : <https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/the-no-state-solution/a-maya-critique-of-global-capital-and-the-nation-state> ↩︎
- Sulaiman Addonia, The Seers. London: Prototype Publishing, 2024, pg. 130. ↩︎
- Ibid., pg. 69. ↩︎
- Ibid., pg. 62. ↩︎
- N. M. Danish, “Protest”, Wasafiri, Vol. 39, #2: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690055.2024.2315764>. ↩︎