Komori

The komoris' eyes fix the camera from around and in the straining double bandoliers' hump the babies shaven heads strain The body dares not face the camera The frontal posture is not for the servant heads turned bent regards meek and in stress hair hastily gathered in the dark now straggly with their loads and in the eked-out smiles the years of sleeplessly fading pallid faces the rough cotton kimono drab thick resistant to baby-faeces and crachat And in their stilted sandals their meagre dignity in a stoop the bare adolescent feet still showing Whose mothers are whose children? Notes "KOMORI is a generic term that consists of a noun, ko (a child), and a verb, moru (to protect or to take care of); Japanese use it to refer to any person, male or female, old or young, who takes care of children. (...) Like their European counterparts, nursemaids and nannies, komori began to appear in what Michel Foucault has called the "discourse of power" in the late nineteenth century..." from Mariko Asano Tamanoi's "Songs as Weapons: The Culture and History of Komori (Nursemaids) in Modern Japan", in The Journal of Asian Studies, 50, no.4 (November 1991): 793-817. © T.Wignesan March 9, 1992 [from the collection : longhand notes: a binding of poems. Paris: 1999]