Tsunami Relief:

Untitled poem on the tsunami

By Yasmine Khan
UC Davis Student

Yasmine Khan

I never thought I would learn to pronounce
The word "tsunami,"
To speak of it in everyday passing conversation,
To learn its scientific definition
And theories of shocks and aftershocks and tectonic plates.
They capitalize the word
In e-mails and weblogs and personal narratives
And in newspaper articles that relay
The heartbreaking, gut-wrenching stories
Of miraculous survivals and smashed families
To share with us the crushing weight
Of the word as we sit safely in our homes across the world.

Who would have ever thought that there would be
Any sort of relationship between
Sri Lanka and Somalia?
That one day we would mention both in the same breath
And wince at the irony of the juxtaposition?
Who would have thought that the faces of strangers
Would light up in painful recognition
Whenever I mention
I am Pakistani?
Before, they used to say in halting confusion,
"Oh, Pakistan.
That's in India, right?"
Now they instead echo Clint Eastwood's nonchalant remorse
At the recent glittery Golden Globe Awards
And question,
"Oh, Pakistan.
So what do you think
Of that tsunami thing going on
In Asia?"

That tsunami thing.

Let me tell you what I think
Of that tsunami thing.
That tsunami thing has killed
Two hundred thousand people, last I heard.
That tsunami thing
Leveled homes and savaged the fields
And broke the bodies of children
And threw railroad tracks off course
And tore people away from the arms of their loved ones
As it single-mindedly shifted the geography
Of island nations.
Like you, I watched the aftermath of
That tsunami thing on television.
Like you, I watched the faces of the people
Left behind,
Dazed and broken,
Shell-shocked and shattered.
What do you do when your world
Literally falls down in ruins
Around you?

What you do is this:
You scrabble in the cold, hard ground
And lift out chunks of dirt
To dig graves with your hands
To bury your children.
You pray that the vast world beyond your boundaries
Will be watchful and compassionate enough
To ensure that you receive
Clean water and medicine.
And food, too, yes, food.
But you can't help but weep
In irony, in frustration,
When they send you endless bags of rice
And you have no clean water with which
To wash and boil the rice in.

And what you do is this:
You close the gaping eyes of your loved ones
And cover their faces with shrouds
And step back to watch as they
Fill the mass graves of victims of
That tsunami thing.
And you whisper fervent prayers over the bodies
Because you so desperately want to believe
That there was a reason for all this,
That God was not absent
From the world the day
The waters rose up in walls,
Only to leave behind the horror and stench of decaying bodies
And vestiges of colorful rags
And empty, flattened villages
In the wake of that tsunami thing.

You look me in the eyes and ask
Where God was that day
And what His reasons were.
All I can answer is this:
That those whom God loves, He takes early.
That those whom God loves, He never burdens more than they can bear.
That those whom God loves, He tests inexplicably.
This is the vast expanse of my faith
And the limited scope of my comprehension.
This is easy for me to say,
Though the words often stick in my throat,
For I myself have never been tested so.

And that sound you hear is
My tongue stumbling over
Places whose names I still can't pronounce:
Nicobar Islands
Nagapattinam
Cuddalore
Pottuvil
Banda Aceh
Phuket
Where the numbers are ever-rising,
And where the surviving children are asked
To sacrifice their white school uniforms
To be used as burial shrouds
For their classmates,
And where the trailing zeroes on the collective death toll
Hint at an emptiness that we,
Across the world, can't even begin to fathom.

In photographs,
The color of their skin is my mother's
And their eyes are like my father's
And their marketplaces and alleyways echo those
Of my own ancestral village,
To which I am forever bound
By affection and the steady, strong roots of family heritage.
At the core of our humanity, their stories are my own.
I hear of fields from which they harvested
World-renowned coffee beans
And seas from which they caught fish
To sustain their livelihood,
Following in the footsteps of
Generations that came before them.

I wonder how strong their ties that bind are.
And I wonder who will be left to remember the trailing zeroes
And the endless inked names on reams of paper.
They say the human spirit has
A remarkable resilience.
But I've never been asked to be resilient
And I, at least, have the choice to forget
What I couldn't possibly know.

But I hope we will not forget.

Meanwhile,
The survivors dig the graves with their hands.
But our hands reaching across the ocean
Can in their own way be
As powerful, as majestic, as unstoppable
As the tsunami itself.

On them all:
Peace.
On the living and the dead.
On the found and the looking.

Yasmine Khan is a senior at UC Davis majoring in human development, and social and ethnic relations.