A singing river on my tongue

This poetic reflection navigates the intersections of memory, gendered space and sonic inheritance, weaving personal recollection with cultural critique. Inspired by the hum of my late grandmother’s song – one I never heard but which remains alive in familial narratives – this work reclaims the kitchen as a site of resilience, history and intergenerational transmission. Anchored in Begum Akhtar’s song ‘Jochona koreche ari ashe na aamar bari’, this poem traces my grandmother’s migration from Bangladesh during India’s Partition in 1947, evoking the national silences of courtesans and the gendered silencing within our homes. The lyric ‘Jochona koreche ari’ literally translates to ‘The moonlight is sulking away’. In Begum Akhtar’s ghazal, ‘ari’ signals melancholic estrangement, while in Bengali childhood-play, it gestures towards a tone of mock sulking – a tender expression of intimacy, anger and attachment. This layered affect allows the moonlight itself to become a character – personified as playful yet wounded, withdrawing affection by choosing not to illuminate the beloved’s home, the beloved being my grandmother. The light travels into alleys, across spaces, but withholds its presence from the speaker’s doorstep. In this withdrawal, the moon becomes both witness to and agent of migration’s grief – a celestial register of absence that mirrors the internal experience of displacement. When all else changes through forced migration, moonlight becomes one of the few constants by which the dislocated body recognises ‘home’ – but even that now refuses to arrive. By centring the kitchen’s everyday soundscapes – the clinking of utensils, chopping rhythms and unvoiced hums – the poem engages with feminist poetics, listening with intention to the echoes of silenced histories. A singing river on my tongue thus becomes a meditation on sound, memory and agency, illuminating the ways in which poetic practice can reclaim maternal and marginalised voices across borders.