My Name is a Spell By Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran My name is a spell It can't be held In the mouths of oppressors Reminiscent of territories Of bodies, invaded The database collects my name But cannot understand it Yet the database decides Where I will go in this life Life, is a series of borders Built and policed by those Without access to themselves But if we can be sorted, ordered, owned By walls, by data Then so can they Eventually, borders creep But our inner worlds Cannot be stolen, like land Land is a source Of our innate, ancestral power The soil and water That nourished my infant body Lives on in me Even here at the borderlands Where my Tamil is broken And our people Indefinitely imprisoned To be imprisoned for seeking safety For fleeing a genocide For escaping the erasure of language, culture For leaving a broken country For resisting the regime that broke this country For being born in a country broken by Empire For being ripped from our homelands For sacrificing ever being home again, whole again Is to be imprisoned for existing Existing is not possible Without building worlds Made up of music Sound and stillness In frequencies their ears can't hear Our 'selves' are fluid Complex, interwoven with 'other' 25