Sixty Years In The Shade (The Sheltering Green Flag) Poem by Frank Bana

Rushdie wrote of the concept and effect
Of shame, how it binds the feet and controls
The lives of families, pushes girls to arranged
Marriages, where fathers keep them bound
To face the violence of their husbands
Fuelled by power behind doors, in the closet
Of domestic life, escape rebuffed
Hardly able to see sunlight or emerge for air
Where relatives insist that they remain, terrified
The side will be let down, shadow of shame
Falling on and darkening the family name

Reviled if they should leave, try to take
The children with, criminalised if they
Are violated outside, God forbid, or fail
To deliver sons and heirs. All this from soil
Polluted and defiled with dirt of shame
And Pakistan, another midnight child, delivered
By partition, supposed by some mapmaker
Home in London to be workable
Wedged by careless pen between the mountains
And the coast, breathing with two lungs
And walking on two legs, eastern and west

Was sundered soon, before it ever found
Its feet, into four provinces, backwoods, hill tribes
And the elite, the leaders educated in the Oxford
Lexicon, democracy, Jinnah's successors
Jailed and hung, or overthrown, charged for corruption
Exiled, killed in airforce accidents, self-inflated
Little men and daughters rising in debating clubs
And all the while the earth trembles under the feet
Of the propertied be-medalled equine-breeding
Polo-playing, mother-lost and -loving
Cricketing, well-tailored and bespoke elite

Poor, burn victim, little Meena does not
Go to school, her mother small, born underweight
Stunted by repeated bouts of diarrhoea, she cooks
And cleans for her grandfather, glancing furtively
At books, divides the mango that he buys her once a month
With several siblings, learns from village boys
While all her skills are taught for naught but to prepare
For a day of marriage, the dowry she will bring, the chant,
The prayer, the ring, the henna on her hands and in her hair

While up on the frontier, far from Karachi's crush
On the chaos of Kashmir, the mullahs thrive, the hatred
Of the West, America and puppet shadows spreads in a slow burn,
The military cracks down again, the secret services
Employ intelligence for business schemes, not strategems
For progress, peace or poverty's release

So many threats crowd in, the Hindu neighbours, infidels,
Devout and angry students of madrassa
Who foresake the failing public schools. How long
Will narrow edifices stand, hasty conceptions last,
A modern nation state, founded on religion
Under sheltering green flag, outrun
The shame, the pain of women and
The deluge of the past?