Lament of a Relocated Person
They came with bulldozers
And a gun carrying police force
They gave no notice
They held no dialogue
They turned the house I built
Brick by brick
Over thirty years
Into unusable rubble.
The utility connections
Legally acquired
Paid for by my wife’s savings
Through years of bisi committees
Are now just dangling wires and pipes
Disconnected from the life of the city
Soon to be buried under new construction.
They have dumped us in the wilderness
Where my child has no school
And my wife no job
And I spend hours in expensive commuting
With no time for them.
They have dumped us in the wilderness
Far from the joys, sorrows and friends
Of our childhood and adolescence
And from the spaces whose evolution
Gave us a new vision
And transformed us
From members of different clans
Into equal citizens of an expanding city.
They have robbed us of our identity
Made us poor again
Told us by their actions
That we are the residue of the city
Who can own no land
For it only belongs to the rich.
One Comment
Dear Mr Arif Hasan,
I would like to use your poem for a paper about Low Income Settlement in regard to the topic Health and Housing and I wonder if you would give me the rights to use it in my paper for the World Slum Improvement Forum 2018 in Karachi.
With the 1st World Slum Improvement Forum in Karachi we want to start a biennal forum a weekend for the World Urban Forum and we want to organise it in Karachi to honour Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Perween Rahman and the others who work 24/7 to improve the life of millions throughout the world as OPP is also a model for participatory bottom-up development initiatives!
With kind regards,
Erik Van Loon
+316 E VAN LOON (+316 3 826 5666)
+1865 2 E V LOON (+1865 2 3 8 5666)