Broken Words | ভাঙা শব্দ

We begin: A collective poem from the Bangladeshi Identity Project team.

Photo: Farah Billah

The way you sing “shey je amar jonmo-bhumi” makes you glow

With pride as if you belong

in the flower-full soil

You’re inseparable from a land

that didn’t raise you,

that doesn’t claim you

Yet you are still singing the sacred lyrics,

craving to belong

— Farzana

Let me tell you the steps of

coming to belong Here -

where the rain doesn’t rattle

into the corners of your bones;

here — where the sky is always too clean

and fresh, so you say thank you

and begin to fold accents into your mouth;

this is how you come to belong here -

one broken word at a time

— Samira

& back home when people ask you say, “Bengali,”

and not American-Bengali,

or Bengali hyphenated American,

because your favorite food is daal.

Your favorite flower, lotus.

and somehow even back home

You are not from There

— Farah

And struggle we do

To find ourselves in the midst of the pressure

To conform to here and stay true to there;

Of finding our identity.

Because home is belonging;

and we are somewhere else altogether.

— Tarun