This Country Calls Me Forgetfulness
And now, I have accepted my fate to live and be called an African,
Even a Nigerian, whose focus strays away from home and,
Becoming even a stranger in what calls him home and roots.
I have accepted it—to live in forgetfulness of myself,
For nothing here tries to remember me.
I mean, each time I try to live here, the country calls me by a name, forgetfulness—
Our ancestors were never called less of the earth and her world.
I mean, each time the country calls me,
A name is tagged on every one of us:
Either by the colour of our skin, or the tone of our tongues
In the embassies around the world.
Behold, here comes the one judged—
By his stray-away feet, or by the things done as retaliation.
Forgetfulness, you would better be one,
As the little things that made me belonging are taking away from your eyes.
You are taking away from what would’ve made you.
Yesterday, a news read that we’re now country-bound within the new world,
So we said, ‘Amen’ to this—and everyone forgets dreams of leaving home that
Doesn’t want you to be found in it.
But your president’s wife travels to the same country and back home;
The citizens who voted them aren’t allowed to.
And you must forget about it—
Yourself and the dreams of your becoming.
Sometimes I wonder why there’s wisdom in not living in this state of forgetfulness.
The Weight of What Happened Here
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- William Faulkner
If this land had a spine,
Would it bend or break
To hold the weight of what happened here?
If these streets had a voice,
Would it whisper or roar
The names we have forgotten to say?
If our bones were the ink,
And our skin the parchment,
Who would dare to speak our names?
We are architects of amnesia,
Hammering nails into the echoes
So we cannot hear
What the walls still remember.
The Basket I Found at Birth
Lord, let me get what I deserve.
This tightness in my chest—is it what I sowed?
At least, let what I sow come back to me
In the same manner in which I sow them.
I was born in a town not named after my people.
That's to say: a runaway soldier, unable to trace home after wars.
Are these what I deserve: not to be there
When their birth pangs sprang up?
My father wasn't there too, to see my face first—
At my birth, Lord, is this what I deserve?
Who at this point permitted my coming?
With what hand did he write it—
That all I must experience will,
At some point, demand my life?
Lord, why transfer my father's sin to me?
The herb he ate, the pill she drank—
Are they now the stiffness in my own knuckles?
The first taste, metallic on my breath, holds me.
How long does the thatch smoke before the rain scrubs the sky?
Hands that blister from planting are hands that hold more.
Here, there's work, so that
We forget the taste that came for free.
Lord, after these years, are they both mine—
The sin, the shelter?
Lord, how long must I endure this waiting?
I am born in a thatch house.
Roof-leakage soaked the mats we slept on.
Lord, are these my sins—
To endure these things?
My mother drank and swallowed pills.
My father ate herbs and vanished.
My mother walked me to a house.
The eyes in the house were blind,
But its arms were wide enough to offer help.
Lord, are these my sins—
Born away from home,
Never to return?
Lord, is it all in my basket—
The basket I found at birth, packed and waiting?
How do we say we have sinned
When no trace remains in us?
Lord, how many roofs must leak before the debt is paid—
When I am accused of being the originator?
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