the things they didn’t teach in history class, by Shruthi Shivkumar

Untitled (Self Portrait), by Amrita Sher-Gil (Hungary, b. British India (now Pakistan) 1933.

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the things they didn’t teach in history class

they call you
the indian frida kahlo
& how did i go eighteen years
without knowing about a woman like you
 
i stare at the canvas
not a mirror
but a wish
brown skin girl of nineteen
with thick eyebrows
queerly peering at
brown skin girl of nineteen
with thick eyebrows
 
immortalized with deep brown irises
& you’re caught in my vision’s reflection
 
all i could ever hope to be,
cherish the rounded nose and
coy smiles that don our faces
let them shine as brightly as
you do under your lacquer
 
a painter of us, 
melanin and fluidity in sexuality, 
and who knew that a woman like me
existed all the way back in the 1930s, 
 
tied down and muffled up
in the history books somewhere between
washington and the cold war, and the
roaring twenties, eurocentrism, all the “isms”
 
you and i, we’ve been here all along
but i just have had the chance to know of
your melancholy visage, a work of art,
persona as bold as your brushstrokes-
 
hello ms. amrita,
i am shruthi,
and it’s a shame we 
haven’t met before,
but thank god i know you now.

Shruthi Shivkumar

Shruthi Shivkumar has been writing since she was able to form letters with a pencil, and started writing poems shortly after. She is a student at the University of Pittsburgh double-majoring in Biology and English Writing, and loves the colour turquoise almost as much as she loves the wonderful humans in her life.