In a white land
where the antithesis to homogeneity
is a face of colour
sprung from the root of diversity,
it’s easy to feel colonial privilege
weighing down heavy on your sprouting dreams
through closed doors and lost opportunities,
till your voice is voiceless
and you are relegated to nothing more
than a statistic that paints
your otherness grey.
In a white land
a man of colour
sticks out like a sore thumb
at a job interview where the employer
suffers from snow blindness,
or at a routine traffic stop
where the police questions your identity
with their fingers poised on the trigger.
In a white land
a man of colour
struggles to be valued,
to be seen,
to be.
Jeevan Bhagwat lives in Scarborough, Ontario. His work has been widely published in literary journals and websites such as Queen’s Quarterly, The Windsor Review, The Feathertale Review, The Prairie Journal, and is forthcoming in Canadian Literature. In 2003 and 2005, he won The Monica Ladell Prize for Poetry from the Scarborough Arts Council, and in 2015 he was the recipient of the Scarborough Urban Hero Award for Arts & Culture. His poetry books include Across The Universe Poetry Anthology (The Ontario Poetry Society, Beret Days Press, 2024), Luminescence (IN Publications, 2020) and The Weight of Dreams (IN Publications, 2012). You can find him on Twitter/X at @j_bhagwat.
the Decolonial Passage 