'POV: You Are the Brown One at a Table Full of White Mental Health Workers' by Sumitra Singam

POV: You Are the Brown One at a Table Full of White Mental Health Workers

And you’re all discussing this young Indigenous woman, and everyone is shaking their heads, how could she not have known she was pregnant? And it’s so lucky we sectioned her, because that poor baby doesn’t need more drugs. And they furrow their foreheads with middle-class bewilderment, but why does she keep trying to run away? And they all look at you to explain this ingratitude. And you are immediately filled with a bushfire of rage in your belly that you must gestate like a phantom pregnancy because you think of her ochre skin, lit from within, lit by this land, and how it is slowly dimming in this place, and you think of how you also have taken something from her by your migration here. And somehow you must be the bridge, birth the right words to unblind these people, stop them shrugging, I suppose she doesn’t want her baby taken away, and instead wail, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

 

 

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Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian author who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2