This poem is a clear expression of indignation towards colonialism that dehumanises labourers as experienced by the collective persona. To the colonisers, these labourers are vital to the development of a colony yet their existence is akin to a “worm” – an organism with a role yet often dismissed. It calls for the end of labour exploitation and expresses the anticipation of the end of colonisation itself.
We have crawled through life
Like worms in gorgonzola cheese.
We the inheritors of the earth
The producers of wealth.
*
We have gone on and on
As shadows silhouetted against time.
We the toilers in the factories
The tillers of the soil.
*
We are the multitudes
But leave no foot-prints on the sands
Or build the sandcastles
That are swept away by time and tide.
*
Our lives smell of cheap fish
Putrifying sweat, unwashed grime and the rubber tree,
The garbage dumps with buzzing bluebottles
And the sour-smelling shit of sick children.
*
Even as a foetus we are chained
To the gearwheeled electic driven chariots
Or the tapping knife hangs over our heads
On sarong shreds like a sword.
*
When broken by teethed wheels
Or spent by hookworms and fever
We are cast away in salvage dumps
Like broken bits of the machinery we have tended.
*
Broken bits are gathered for scrap
But as yet we have been spared in our death
Our skins and bones make no Belsenic lampshades
They let us rot in cheap plywood coffins.
*
This cannot go on forever.
When we turn we shall no longer be worms
We shall ride the electric driven chariots
Or shatter them.
Till then we are worms
That rot in the hot sun.
**
J.J Puthucheary : The New Cauldron Hilary Term 1952/53