Feb 12, 2021
Indigenous Feather
Art of Durga Bai Vyom
Flocks and flocks of color makers are moving from the green mountain to the black plains. Their queen, untouchable, only has passion for the blue and the maroon. Visitor, the fluorescent green, asks the same question always: Why? She answers the same always: My brush is of the convert.
Somewhere not far away a well is being poisoned by the priest. A boy has been thirsty since he was born. A girl has been at the bottom of the lake. This drinking and sewer water, this lack of, and drowning water, has all made it to my background: not red.
My thought is chewed by the english speaking artist introducing compositions of the language-less queen, having rejected and renamed them earlier. She is silent and shaking. He is moving his hand over her map. Dull white.
Artist* gone famous after death is hanging himself now. Something about a headless collector licking the same lines over and over again, about a gatekeeper still crushing the body of dove, about a room of labor held hostage by rich plywood. English speaking reader is holding the artist's last work, the indigenous feather. Owner of the museum doesn't have the budget to ship the body back. Fungi pigment.
Head of the descendant deer has grown into branches of the mythical tree of the green mountain. Snake heads purple. Yellow red dotted lizard. Brown cow. Swan lake. The queen, untouchable, has painted our sky orange, the brightest. She has written stories** of all the thirsty boys and all the indigenous bodies without budgets. My thought is pink now. Water is potable.
.
V Paliwal
.
**http://www.tcj.com/reviews/bhimayana-experiences-of-untouchability/
