Translating powerful poem for AAPIs
Respond was thrilled to partner with the amazing filmmaker Kitty Hu, to translate a powerful poem, written for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Respond translated the poem into Bangla, CHamoru, Guyanese Creole, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Nepali, Punjabi, Tagalog, Tamil, and Urdu. The poem, as well as the translations, are closed captions for this video
Poem Text in English:
Everyday I’m reminded that the reason I even has a voice is because my story has never been just mine
It has always belonged to the village
A family heirloom from my ancestors, who fought for their lives so that I can fight for ours
This is how I know that more than anything, our stories have the power to change everything
Why else would this country delight in our silence and be content with leaving our history out of the narrative?
Why else would they worry about us coming together in protest and in prayer?
Why else would our colonizers come for our language after taking our land?
Our stories are not shiny ornamental fixtures meant to uphold heritage months
Our stories are the blood we did not lose and the war against our liberation
They’re the fire that refuses to die
Our stories are not unique, they’re just urgent
My story is just me preparing to be the kind of ancestor that our children can read about one day and say, “Wow, she really did try to come for everything that was due to us”
All of us are ancestors in training
The clock started long before the grief and violence swallowed us whole this year
I am angry as hell but I am tender with you
And with the long road towards freedom because our children will wonder what we did to ensure their survival and I want to be able to say that we came for systems more than we came for each other
We chose to be in complexity instead of simply in community
I want to tell our children that we stopped fighting for more representation and a seat at tables that could care less about our cultures, our names, or our lives
I want to tell them that settler colonialism came for our islands, but that all of us from Asia to Oceania fought to put Indigienous lands back into Indigenous hands
I want to be the ancestor who says, “We knew the root of this violence and the empire, imperialism, and militarism it comes from”
The white supremacy that disguises it so that we never say its name and the soil it grows in
But I want to name the soil it grows in without flinching
Because I’m not willing to mask this moment in anything but the truth
And the truth is that it is easy to say stop the violence when we think it started with us
And not with systems that have been coming for our people for centuries
It is easy to blame each other more than settler colonialism, anti-blackness
It is easy to get loud about the violence against our elders and not the violence against our water, against our islands
But I’m not convinced that easy is our legacy
I’m not convinced that a heritage month will heal us
I’m convinced that our children are watching
They are listening to what we stand against and what we stand for
Watching who we hold accountable, who we do not, and if that includes ourselves
It is hard to see that all violence is state violence
But I see it and refuse to whisper it like its a secret
Because I’m trying to be the ancestor who is loud as hell about ending the violence of poverty of militarization, of deportations
The ancestor who is lead by indigenous sovereignty, and black liberation more than by American values
The ancestor who knows that it's hard to have hope in the face of ongoing violence towards everyone we love
It’s hard to have faith that things can change when its 2021 and we have so much work to do
To get to a better world than this one
But, it's also hard to lose hope as our collective liberation is forcing us to come alive
It’s forcing us to keep going
The thing about liberation is that we may not agree on how we get there
But we get there together like our lives depend on it, because they do
Grace was right, now is the time to reimagine everything
So that one day when we look our grandchildren in their faces we can say, “We were afraid the entire time we were fighting for the world you deserve, but we did it anyway. We did it afraid. We did it in struggle. We did it for the culture. We did it for you. The way our ancestors taught us how. We did it this way, because nothing else came close to freedom.”
