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An Ode to a Nobel-Prize-Winning Racist
Natasha Chopra

“Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia docking in 
Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo 
but sail on to Europe. And when conscience-stricken British officials 
wrote to the Prime Minister in London [Winston Churchill] pointing out 
that his policies were causing needless loss of life, all he could do was 
write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died 
yet?’”       -Dr. Shashi Tharoor

You orator,   you historian and scholar,  you
Owner of  honorary Air Force wings, you
Not surprising  chancellor   of a PWI,  you
Nobel prize winner  in literature,  you
Knight   of the Garter,  sir,  you
Prime Minister   of England,  you
Prime Minister     of Colonization, you
Defender  of Avoidable Famine,  they
Called you    king     of defending
Exalted   human values,  do they
See the irony    in the white
Of the paper  they write  that on, they
Hired Mr. Oldman  to play  you
In that film that won  too many  awards, do they
See the irony    in hiring  an abuser of women
To portray  an abuser of  an entire nation,
Do  they?

Do they know the British didn’t   have tea until they
Were the largest exporter of tea   without growing
A    single    leaf     on their  own  soil, they
Stole the crops   from under amber noses, were they
Bothered by  the brownness    the boiled leaves
Left   in the water?     Is that why they
Mixed in milk of  Indian cows,  to counteract its
Brownness,   to whitewash yet another  delicacy,
To dilute  the news    of my ancestor’s starvation,
To distract  from the fact   that India was starving,
To tell themselves that       India wasn’t starving,
To convince     themselves
that Gandhi wasn’t dead (yet),  to convince themselves
They had    no blood  on their hands  (yet)?



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The winners rewhite,    oh I’m sorry,  I think
I meant  the winners rewrite    history, they
Created    an entire   Wikipedia page
Just for your lengthy list of honors,   but they
Didn’t make one      for your racism, I
Find that     interesting     that I
Didn’t learn  about your racism   until I
Saw the sadness   in my father’s eyes,   did you
Know that he inherited  that glossiness,  that distance
From his parents  –  his parents that were born  under
A Union Jack,  the amalgamation   of imagery
Representing     other      colonizers,
Colored white   from the skin of the supremacists,
Colored blue    from the droplets of the Indian Ocean,
Colored red     from the blood of my family.
Colored anything     but brown.