For Ricky Reel, Stephen Lawrence and their families.
Ruptured concrete suburban skin
leaks poison that is paved within.
Feet sweet against the sting;
you’re cushioned sole up.
Your fingertips trace
the A-Z veins
and change the cartography
of the metropolis.
Have travel card will travel
zones 1-6, the world
your oyster, but London
killed you.
It was like any other day.
Nothing unusual, just the same;
walking to the bus stop/walking into town
after a while it’s a blur
kingstonelthamkingstonelthamkingstoneltham
nothing unusual, just the same
nothing unusual, just the same
It was my mate who saw them
He said ‘RUN’!
I said ‘No! we haven’t done anything wrong.’
Battery acid tongues siren,
their unavoidable existence.
internal morse heartbeat screams: FLIGHT!
trained feet seize up in a fit of dignified pride
thoughts like, ‘but they’re as human as me…’
translate into reasoning syntax
that escapes like gas
into the dense onyx sky and zeros
into the void between their eyes.
A breath later
you are running like the hunted,
A breath later
you are kissing blood into water,
A breath later
you are kissing blood into concrete.
When it comes it’s not like the movies
When it comes it’s like a joke
Because you can’t believe that it’s happening for real, you know?
And I didn’t see my life flash in front of my eyes
I just heard my mother’s voice
‘Ricky beta… tu kider gay-a? Mai karh tinu ureekdi hai…’
I just heard my father’s voice
‘Stephen, son… where you go? Me still waiting at the door for you to come home…’
Raman Mundair
Background to the poem
On 22 April 1993 an 18-year-old British student called Stephen Lawrence and his friend Duwayne Brooks were making their way home after spending the day together. The boys were rushing to catch a bus in the south-east London suburb of Eltham when they were confronted by a gang of white youths. The gang set upon Stephen Lawrence. Stephen was beaten and attacked with a knife - he collapsed after 200 yards and died. The police claimed to have investigated the murder fully and were unable to find Stephen’s murderers. It later emerged that the police were fully aware of who the murderers were. The parents of Stephen Lawrence campaigned tirelessly for justice for their son. What eventually followed was the ‘Lawrence Public Inquiry’, which put the police and British justice as a whole on public trial, and the McPherson Report, which raised the issue of systematic corruption and institutionalized racism in the UK.
Ricky Reel, a student at Kingston University, went missing after being racially abused in Kingston, London, on Tuesday 14th October 1997 and was found dead a week later in the River Thames. The police have always maintained that they did not believe that Ricky’s death was racially motivated, going as far as to say to Mrs. Reel that Ricky had probably had some arguments with his girlfriend and, on a separate occasion, that ‘Asian families were always having disagreements’. They claimed that Ricky had probably just ’slipped and fell into the river’. The Reel family paid for an independent pathologist who showed that Ricky fell in backwards, and as such third party involvement could not be ruled-out and therefore the inquiry into his death should be re-opened. The police have not viewed the investigation as a priority. The Reel family still does not know how Ricky died.
For more information, please visit the following sites:
news.bbc.co.uk
www.guardian.co.uk/racism
About the Author
Raman Mundair was born in Ludhiana, India, and grew up in Manchester and Leicestershire, England. She is an artist and writer of poetry, prose, plays, and writing for the screen. Other work includes visual art installation that presents text and narrative in a visual form; ‘Let me hold you’ (part of ‘Fragments of Identity’ www.cuttlefish.com/fragments) and ‘Txt Me’ (exhibited as part of ‘Fold’ at Leicester City Art Gallery).
She lectures in South Asian Literature at Loughborough University, and is a freelance workshop facilitator. For more information about her work visit: www.ramanmundair.com
The text to ‘An Elegy for Two Boys’ is the copyright of Raman Mundair, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author. The poem can be found in Raman’s debut collection of poems: ‘Lovers, Liars, Conjurors and Thieves’, (Peepal Tree Press, 2003).
