Mother of Resistance

Hello my children, my name is river. The mother of the river. Some of you might know me as the water flowing by, or through my gifts in your plate, the water you drink and become a part of you, but I'm also the clouds that rain on everyone with no judgement, the flooded rice fields, the multispecies communities along my body, the fauna and flora, the people who call myself home. All the folk stories and spirits, the songs, the myths you children used to sing in praise or fear. 

I'm also the sand they rob me, scratching my skin until it hurts, shipping parts of me far and near, the sand in every brick on all the construction you see around. So, in a way, you always keep a part of me in your house -- but a non-consensual one, a part that is homesick and wants to return to the whole, if one cares to listen. Like everything else that composes me, from a small spring sprouting in a mountain millions of years ago to the nourishing sediments I give away asking nothing in return, all the neak tas and lok yeys who make my multiple personalities, guardians in theory, powerless watchers, all contained in the name river, mother of all rivers and streams and ponds. The grandmother of all life. Who just wants to flow free in search of a dream of ocean in the order side of borders and troubles, who wants to break the tensions brought by these humans tickling my surface, the dams shaping what was once shaped only by mountains and valleys, wise and patient geologies I considered loyal friends -- now replaced by cement and disconnection. 

The mother who just wants to protect and be respect, wishes to regain some of the agency that is my natural right in order to continue my mission of feeding fields, broken shields that can't fight modern wills, extractivism and forgotten links to the family we call whole, a grief harder and harder to fight, a desperate need to breathe, in and out, tonle sap lungs constrained on their seasons, a diaphragmatic lake tasked with drumming the rhythms of cambodia, the ebbs and flows that used to orchestrate rice fields into the fermenting foods on our table.

How many more breaths can I stand?, water and land, where's my guardians?, where's this story going? Adding tears to the river’s long windy cry, a thirsty snake shedding too many skins to survive. I am the Mekong, mother of rivers, streams and ponds, of all waters, a family of all.

Am I the mother of resistance or of letting go?