Your Body is Your Country - original oil painting on wood

YOUR BODY IS YOUR COUNTRY - an original painting in oils on wood, inspired by the poem:

The Sari by Moniza Alvi.

Inside my mother

I peered through a glass porthole.

The world beyond was hot and brown.

They were all looking in on me –

Father, Grandmother,

the cook’s boy, the sweeper-girl,

the bullock with the sharp

shoulderblades,

the local politicians.

My English grandmother

took a telescope

and gazed across continents.

All the people unravelled a sari.

It stretched from Lahore to Hyderabad,

wavered across the Arabian Sea,

shot through with stars,

fluttering with sparrows and quails.

They threaded it with roads,

undulations of land.

Eventually

they wrapped and wrapped me in it

whispering Your body is your country