Stateswoman

Safa Ahmed

Walkin around this quarantine be like
Seems like yall became muzzies overnight
Suddenly covering up became morally right and and everyone’s niqabi and they’re heroes, alright
Mecca might be closed but my sisters all in sight
Even Trump said wear a scarf in a viral soundbyte

Bowing down to pray and suddenly everyone understands
Washing up’s mandatory and the bars are dead lands
And now it’s not weird when I say I don’t shake hands
Man
Sharia’s become your national security
Feels good for once to be the majority
What a twist in your Brexit/MAGA/nationalism story

And I’m not making light of tragedy but as I’m sitting here I can’t stand the hypocrisy
Sayin you can’t take it when you’ve been watching Kashmir and Gaza from your TV screen
And once Miss Rona heads down South then were will you all be
Even Ebola only gets a side-eye until white people bleed
Meanwhile I sit here and wonder if brown doctors helped Boris Johnson breathe

But why am I surprised, this isn’t the first war we’ve fought in your name
As doctors or as soldiers, isn’t this your favourite game
We’ve always been your martyrs by proxy
The antithesis to your orthodoxy
Standing on our shoulders is your only path to glory
Then you pay it back by saying get out of my country
You shoulda seen this coming, you colonial-capitalist-empire junkie
I’ve got more to say but I don’t want my mom to worry
She says they’ll take you away if you talk any less gently

Am I rambling? But everything feels like spider web
Of history and policy, we are the voices of the dead
I know Karen’ll see line 10 and the rest of this’ll be misread
So can you blame me for sitting and laughing through the dread

Coloured folk seen this before, and we know where it ends.

On ‘Stateswoman’

In this poem, editorial assistant Safa Ahmed reflects on the Covid-19 pandemic and the way one virus revealed so many others - racism, hypernationalism, Islamophobia, and neo-colonialism - lurking just beneath the surface.

Poetryjfa27 January 2022Comment