Kalpani Dambagolla
I have been cornered in the schoolyard,
white faces laughed at me;
You are coloured, you are not one of us!
they repeated…
not even your mama or papa is coloured
you have been bought from the coloured shop…
hahaha…..ululululu….
Who are you?
Stop this!!!
I am asking the same question from me
every day, every night
ever since I started speaking
ever since I started looking at myself in a mirror
Who am I?
I asked the same question a thousand times
from careless breeze… from steady trees…
from free birds…. from aimless cats….
Who am I?
Mama… Papa…, who am I?
I asked them the same a thousand times…
You are our daughter, who else!
they replied gently as always
but,
I am so afraid that one day
I will be nobody in nowhere….
people will truly not know me …
sometimes I had bad dreams,
my mama and papa ask me suddenly
why are you in our home? we don’t know you! Call the police!!!
Who are you?
2
I want to know where I belonged
who is my birth mother, who is my birth father,
from which land I come…
to know who I am….
will you help me to find who am I?
but just don’t ask me Who are you? …. I don’t know….
Note:
The story is inspired by the videos on the Romanticised Immigration Instagram page on the baby
adoption farm, aka illegal adoption, that happened between 1970 – 2017 in Sri Lanka.
Accordingly, over 11,000 Tamil, Muslim, kaffir, and Sinhalese children have been sold for
international adoption to Europe on fraudulent documents from Sri Lanka.
When I watch the story of Priyanka Samantha, I felt a deep sense of her inner conflict on identity
in a foreign land, even though she possessed adequate living conditions.
