Let me explain.
My father once said,
'You cannot cage the Water God'.
He told me as I sat at his knee, asking him why he was sad.
He told me that the same day he told me we could not return to our home, for it would be miles below a sheet of water.
He did not tell me that water would look endless and still as death itself, stagnating with my home steeping below the surface making vile tea out of my people's pain and homelessness. He did not tell me, but he could not stop me from seeing.
I recall him telling me of the Water God, the Great Python. He told me of how the Great Python would sleep deep below the earth, his body creating caves and hills, sleeping away the time until he was ready to be born as the Water God and make his journey. When his time came and he awoke, he shook the earth from his coils and slid into the waters of the great Rajang river (if you ever see a landslide near a river, that's the Water God being born, remember that).
His body carved a path through the earth, his sides widening the breadth of the river, his belly scrapping the bottom to a deep furrow, his slithering pulling the current of the river out and out and out. Finally, he was on his journey to completion (journeys are good as long as you come home to where you began, remember that).
He swam out and out till he reached the ocean, dove deep into the depths and rested till he grew weary of the deep and dark. He decided he was ready and swam on and on into the river in the sky, curving over the earth like a great shield, blocking the sun and the moon, and from his heavenly vantage, he saw his homeland. Flying down from the sky, his body dragging with him the celestial waters that fell as rain on his homeland, nourishing showers from his scales that watered the rainforests and farms (always give back to the land you came from, remember that).
Once more in the river, he plotted his course anew, and so the cycle continued. So long as he swam, the river flowed.
'They're going to build a wall.' my father told me. I thought of the walls of our longhouse. That wasn't so bad.
'They're going to build a wall to cage the water. The flow will stop and the water will collect and collect, turning into that deep and dark of the ocean.'
I did not understand a water that did not flow. Neither did my grandparents. They looked at my father like he was insane. (They understood soon enough; they died understanding stagnant water. Remember that.)
'We have a say?' I asked him.
'We have no say. They want to be the Water Gods now.'
With a dial in one hand and a key in the other, they control the when where how and why of the water flow, and with their key they prove to me that my land is not my land, my river is not my river, and my Water God is dead.
I may be the last to remember the times when he yet lived, me and my generation, as we sit by the stagnant water overlooked by our soulless 'houses' (but it will have to do, remember that).
So now there is a river in my veins.
It flows through my flesh like water flows through the land,
Carving its path through my earth and sometimes breaking free in a flood when it gets overwhelmed, breaching its banks with a flurry of passion or violence, but always returning to its source in the end.
And in my heart lies a Water God.
A reservoir where he does not belong (but it will have to do, remember that) and with every beat he sets himself free to flow and flow to the sea in the soles of my feet and the sky in the back of my skull and once more to his home in my chest, and if he cannot flow in my land as he once could he may flow through me.
In my veins, there is a river.
