Her-story is History
-- Kathleen Fernando
A man,
Falls from a King coconut tree.
He is dead.
The newspaper quietly
Proclaims it as news
With the headline “He died from a fall”
Like as if a fruit had fallen from a tree.
With no electricity
To register the shock
Of a man’s body hurtling
Down in space
To a sudden thud
And a definite end to
Many strands of unfinished life.
The only detail they allow is that he had a wife and three children.
There is no dirge
No elegy
No description
No space to elaborate
How she shrieked when
The news had reached her
About how she would tell her children,
That their father was dead,
Doing something he didn’t even get paid for.
About how he had gone off to the city to look for work
Some months ago,
And how he had almost entered the Army
Before he realized that he would be paid
To kill children,
And how his conscience had refused him this
Kind of blood money,
And how he had found another job
Laying bricks for a tower
That seemed to defy the gods,
And how he had crushed his hand
Under some heavy machine,
And how he had been refused a cent to even go to the hospital,
And how he had come home to her
And lay on her bosom and cried unashamedly
And wondered how they were going to get food
And how she went to work
In a Mudalali’s house
As a servant, a slave
Where they paid her so little
And treated her with little dignity
But gave her all the scraps from their table
To take home to her children
Because this gave them good Karma,
And how once she was accused of stealing
A diamond ring that had been lying on a table,
And how the police had asked her many questions,
That made her look like a rogue
And how she had gone home that day, never to return.
And how they had found the ring under the bed later that same day
And how she had gone back to work for them
Because she had to put food on the table,
And how she had asked her crippled husband this morning
To climb that cursed tree to pluck a coconut
Because her master was thirsty for some coconut water.
Her-story and his
Don’t count as History.
Kathleen Fernando grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and is the author of
Journeys: A Collection of short stories and poems. She now lives in
Gambier, Ohio with her husband and two children.
