kohinoor bangla anonymous

Kohinoor Bangla

Growing up, I had never once seen a Barbie doll that looked like me I asked my mom for one once, and a tanned brunette beach Barbie was the closest there got to me The closest representation to myself that I’ve ever seen on TV is the token Indian I am not Indian. I refuse to let my identity be reduced to a generalization. In the 6th grade, when my teacher asked me where my family was from I said Bangladesh She didn’t take my word for it Insisted that I was from India That Bangladesh was merely a part of India 11 year old me takes the desktop globe sitting on the classroom shelf and brings it up to her Points to the tiny country that is its own land mass, next to India Still, she cannot wrap her head around the idea of my ancestors being independent of India Like reducing the radiance of the Moon to being just a part of the Sun I am 11 I don’t know how to tell her that all brown people don’t come from the same place Our rich diversity, wiped away and erased from the ignorance, going unrecognized even whilst we take up space.

Fast forward 10 years and things are about the same When I tell people my roots trace back to Bangladesh Non-POC seldom recognize the name You know your ancestral language is a minority when Doug Ford releases a video telling people to stay at home during COVID-19 in 22 different languages, and yet, yours is still not included.

I struggle to see myself depicted accurately in anything So when I saw ‘Kohinoor Bangla’ in Microsoft Word, I didn’t expect that a font name would be the closest thing to resonate with my culture but it did And Kohinoor Bangla is the font That this poem is written in. x

WORDS by ANON ART by YVONNE SYED