In our city’s history, immigrants have always played an important role. They build our economic prosperity, diversify our culture, contribute to our social vitality.
Medicine – Poem by Jamaal Jackson Rogers for Welcoming Ottawa Week 2018
June 19, 2018Medicine
By Jamaal Jackson Rogers, Ottawa’s English-language Poet Laureate
This poem was written for Welcoming Ottawa Week (WOW) 2018 and performed at the WOW launch on June 18, 2018
She said, “Our diversity is our medicine.”
She said, “Our diversity is our medicine.”
Gathering all the beauty in the world in one unifying sentence
And how could I challenge her? When I have sampled a taste of utopian togetherness; trading in a lens of ignorance for a culture of multiple expressions, narratives and languages
When I was younger, I never spoke about how intense I studied the human condition
Hoping to make sense of complex emotions show by world travelers and globetrotters that would eventually settle on Canadian soil
Watching moments of contemplation flash like brainstorms only to transform into revolutionary actions
Actions that would ultimately alter my understanding of what it feels to know when one is home
My earliest memoirs begin with my father’s Guyanese shoulders embracing my mother in moonlight shuffle
As if they had memorized a famous routine from a champion figure skating couple
When he would halt his waltz to kneel to the ground and tuck us in under blankets that warmed our bodies from the bone cold floor
Those were days when we first arrived to Ottawa
Shelters becoming natural habitats until this glowing city of growing capital helped us back on our feet
In these days of decades past I would meet faces attached to stories that carried history from all across earth’s marvelous landscapes
It was on Elmira Drive and Iris street where I crossed cultures from everywhere
I found lodging in the communities that shared the same longing as me
Spoken in a language of triumph and resiliency
Witnessed in the silent pride of a Cambodian man’s smile
Who hides the pain of all that he and his wife left behind to find new hope in a country that promises a better life
He shows no teeth but his grin is chin high and his eyes beam with glory, as if the future told him that eventually, it would all be worth the journey
A language that reflects the ancient family lineage recited from a Somali mothers call for her children playing chase in the twilight of August’s eve
As if tribe and siblings had the same meaning, she sings out names from the corner of her mouth like I’ve never heard before,
Samatar, Abdi Fatah, Muhammad, Nasra
And all at once I can taste the camel milk flow from the horn of Africa
Sweeping peninsulas to exotic islands in the Caribbean
Where Haitian diasporic doorsteps play zouk and kompa
And elders hands fry fish and chicken drumsticks
Sizzling stoves blowing smoke through windows that would invite the auditory senses into a euphoria of nostalgia and hospitality
When the Creole escapes from their throats
You can hear the resistance still chanting freedom songs from motherland mixed with the chance to start a new renaissance on the frontiers of a liberated land
It didn’t take much for us to celebrate the everyday
And when special occasions came
Ceremonies to honour joyous commemorations
We danced the Lebanese Dabke as if it was taught to us through breathe and lung rituals that match the rhythm of the sacred loud and tabla
Or at least watched in awe as men with frames the size of goal posts dipped low and leaped beyond whatever struggles their fellow countrymen faced back home
All that I was searching for
From subtle sunrise, midday sunshine and moving well beyond the shimmering sunset
Could be captured in these intense interactions of harmonious rapture
A place where my heart could be embedded in the art of solidarity
And my understanding of our collective Canadian identity unraveled in that single moment of affinity
When she said to me, “Our diversity is our medicine”
I will never know what memories she carried beneath her skin that would lead her to share such welcoming empathy
An indigenous woman who spoke truth beyond her own history of trauma that has robbed her of her rightful claim to reconcile home
Maybe it was her native traditions that reminded her that we are one once we defeat the walls of ignorance and isolation
But in one unifying sentence
With wisdom beyond my experience
She showed me
That if we ever want to know how deep our beauty and empathy resides, we shall see it in the hope, the healing, the stories, the joy, that lies in a newcomers eyes.
