AMELIA BADRI
An Abecedarian Cut in Half Like a Nose
As [British] officials saw it, if the murders were
caused by the immoral character of coolie women—
coupled with the misogyny of coolie men
following a backward religion—there wasn’t
much to do; after all, they argued, natures can’t be changed
— Gaiutra Bahadur
Mr. Laird, the math teacher at the school I worked at while I was pregnant,
never missed a chance to make fun of me, he’d pull his tape measure
out to examine my nose that was three times its normal size, at appointments my eyes
pinned to the ultrasound picture to see if I could tell the shape, width, and
quality of my baby girl’s nose-to-be, is it common knowledge that noses have a
rather stuffy history? Even Hindu gods got into it when Lakshman pulled his
sword out from his pocket to slice off Suparnakha’s nose for trying to seduce him of all
things, the epic tale portrays her as a small character, yet significantly evil enough to be
unworthy of keeping her ears, unhinging her nose, her story told under trees and dim
verandas all the way across the killer seas, like most beliefs held near hardened hearts,
women’s noses began screaming out of barrack windows, a cutlass would wreak havoc,
x’s marked spots like tainted treasure on their face and arms, some deities go to jail
yell Oh Ram as their last words, girls still dressed in their yellow best birthing new
Zorro’s baby, his rapier combing curls, eyes sharp, but whose nose do we have here?
Godna, 1947
A godna (goad-na) is a marriage tattoo that originates from India.
The tradition was carried on by indentured servants when
they arrived in the Caribbean and South America in places
like Guyana and Suriname. Many Hindu women who were
married before the 1960s had to receive this tattoo to be
accepted into their husband’s family.
Marriage is a brown woman
walking the back dam
dressed like a red hibiscus, plucked up
for her bare lips and birthing hips
and her family’s plumpest sheep.
But before the couple can kiss
and dance,
twisting in newly adorned
gold wrists,
she is branded like a cow.
Blue-black ink
sunken deep
into the crook of her arm
for a man who wields
rum bottles and machetes
and stares deeply at the stars.
She bleeds away all her dreams to be his.
While an artist asks
if it’s a bird, a garden or a heart
she wants carved into her skin.
