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ewa gerald onyebuchi personal essay january 2024

November 2023: Trans-ekulu, Enugu.

All my life I have viewed death at arm’s length, through the lens of a stranger. Even the death of other family relatives smelled differently, almost like a faraway thing. But when I think about my parents, I wonder the colour grief would assume when they exit this earth. When it finally strikes home, would death take on a smell too putrid for catharsis? Would grief succeed in stealing the rooms in my body, becoming too intimate to eject?

*

A light rain patters down the roof of our house while I thumb through an old album of pictures. I am sitting in one of the four black sofas, tucked in a rectangular ring. I don’t know if this is my mother’s favourite chair, but she never fails to plop down on it whenever she strolls into the living room. I believe when someone does something or uses a thing, unconsciously, over time, that action or thing becomes a vital part of them. Just like this sofa has become a repository of my mother’s body, imbibing her scent and warmth. The sofa sits on the left, beside a glass center table, directly opposite the TV plastered to the wall. It’s a privilege to take my mother’s seat, to rock my body against the spaces she’s been. At this point, I stop fiddling with the pages, and close my eyes. Instead of me, I imagine her on this chair, and train my ears to the gentle tap of her hands on the arms of the chair. On most evenings after a shower, my mother wears a faded blue and black patterned wrapper. Even now, I picture the wrapper flung around her body and inhale the dry muskiness that speaks of age.

Mama, a retrenched bursar, is not dead. She’s in Abuja, with my father, who works with the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development. My parents are both alive but sometimes I fear that one day, the thread holding their existence in place would snap and all that would remain are memories heaped on history’s back. My father is 5.8 feet, taller than my mother, and he wears a dark skin, while my mother is the colour of ripe pawpaw. Both have fairly large noses to accommodate their round faces; unlike Papa, Mama has a pair of beautiful bright eyes. But sadly, these features are slowly eroding with the passage of time. My mother’s hair is now glazed with specks of white, and unlike her, my father wears a cleanshaven head and beard, as if he’s determined to make a case against nature, a demand for his youth. In the pictures, my parents’ bodies have witnessed a series of metamorphoses. There’s a picture of them, taken when their eyes were full of light and ardor. A time when they wore their afros with style, thick and glossy, and grinned. Against a black and white background, Papa can be seen sporting an afro, a craggy beard and a pair of bootcut trousers. He poses in front of a tree, his arm resting on the shoulder of another man in afro. There’s a tenderness to my mother’s pose: the tilt of her head to one side, the smile on her face, the graceful arch of her back as she plants a hand on her waist, her knee-length gown devoid of pleats. In today’s world, their pose could be tagged prosaic and their clothes too simple to meet the new wave of high fashion taste.

There are other pictures of my parents taken at different places and events. Some of them make me laugh, smile and cry at intervals. I hold a picture against the light and blink back hot tears. It was probably taken in 2013, but the memories are fresh as dew. Somewhere in Kogi State, we are standing in front of a church building, posing before a camera: our parents and three brothers, my sister and I dressed in white beside the Bishop clad in a purple vestment. We have just been confirmed, newly conscripted soldiers of Christ, and everyone else is radiant with smiles except me. I don’t know how to smile before a camera and each time I force it, my face comes out squeezed. I remember that day, the sun boiling over our heads, the sweat dribbling down my face as the photographer urged me to smile a little, and my parents glaring at me.

Years later, I wish I had smiled. I wish I wasn’t a mimosa plant, always shutting myself out of the world, away from my parents each time they stepped into my space. Growing up, love was measured in small dosages and passed around. When we greeted our parents, we added sir or ma, thanked them after every meal, chanted“Daddy welcome, Mummy welcome”, following their return from work or the market. There were no hugs. It wasn’t a taboo to hug our parents or siblings, but it could be viewed as perfunctory, too elastic to be real. Our parents were the adults I was first introduced to early in life, and without the strings of cordiality properly binding us together, I saw them only as parents—people who had decided to be married, have children, protect them and provide their needs. I didn’t fully understand the reason for the chasm between my parents and me or my sudden withdrawal each time they tried to reach out, to show affection. Perhaps, it had something to do with the countless times they fought in our presence without a speck of regard for us, their children, our feelings. Or the moments Papa launched vile words at Mama from the quiver of his mouth that ran like a faulty tap, unashamedly, even while we pleaded with him to stop. Maybe I couldn’t comprehend how two individuals, living under one roof, could become depositories of distinct attributes. How they could so easily morph from the sweet-loving couple they had been moments ago into ravenous wolves determined to tear each other to smithereens.

Still, one thing stood out among us: our love for the mundane. Like telling stories or spending the whole weekend huddled in front of the screen, watching Africa Magic or Telemundo (despite my love for both gradually fading away). My parents, especially Mama, fed us with stories of people, places and moments in their past life. She told us about the Biafran war, how some people fled their homes in terror, and those who could not escape the onslaught ended up as dead bodies lining the streets of Okigwe. How a mother had flung her crying baby into the bush to escape being seen by the soldiers and returned hours later to find the spot where she had thrown the child empty. The baby was gone.

My growing up was bushwhacked by bouts of illnesses that ate into my time for school and house chores. Yet, I remember being struck by malaria and fever at the same time. It was so profound that I was confined to my bed for days, only wriggling off to the toilet to vomit. I thought I was going to die. One evening, the door squealed open, and my father walked in.“Imeriagha?” he said. “How is your body?”I could barely nod or open my mouth. His eyes were laced with fear as he asked if I had vomited again, and I nodded my response. He leaned in and touched my head and said my body was too hot. It felt awkward, his hand on my body, his outright display of warmth and affection, the way he said “ndo.” I was so used to my mother’s touch—her hand running down my body, as if trying to massage the hotness away, her measure of love—that his felt alien.

*

Over the years, the gulf between my parents and me has congealed into walls; so, I’m making a deliberate effort to break through them. I am 27 and still living with my mother. As a teacher working at a private school, it’s almost suicidal to plant my hope on monthly salary. After school, I scuttle from house to house for home lessons, because I’m trying to make ends meet. Because I’m so passionate about being successful, and because I want to be available for my parents. To help oil their path towards senescence, to support them financially just as they’ve done for me.

Despite all these, I try to carve out time to be with my family; and although it’s difficult to fully comprehend my parents when they talk, I provide a listening ear. Where needed, I humour their dry jokes, cringe at the death of an old friend, stifle the urge to lash back at my father when he insults me. I don’t blame them when they fail to recall what I told them some days ago. Neither do I remind them of the staleness of their stories. On second thought, who gets tired of old wine?

Maybe everything happening to my parents—the sudden loss of memory, the stories they tell that sound like songs on repeat—is all part of the ageing process. But I’m scared of losing them. In the pictures, I compare their lives from whence they started to where they are, and I feel so hog-tied at the hapless reality of their slipping away. I scroll through my phone’s gallery and pause at a photo of them standing beside my younger brother, dressed in a convocation gown. This picture is the most recent I have of my parents, and I can’t help but imagine how stilted they look from those wrinkled lines, how fragile the smiles on their faces appear, the exhaustion on my mother’s face. It’s mentally tiring to picture a moment when their smiles, faces and voices would become bags of memories I’d have to carry throughout my life.

*

Two months ago, Mum slipped off a flight of stairs at the back of the house and twisted an ankle. Whenever I remember this incident, how I had been absent from home when it occurred, my heart hammers against my chest. Sometimes I imagine a different scenario: what if her head had landed heavily against the block of cement and not her hands? What if she lay on the ground, still, her eyes wide with tears, blood oozing out of a gash in her skull, the world moving on without her?

The X-ray showed that she sustained a fracture, and the doctor suggested a bed rest. Still, Mama has a resilient spirit. “I’m healed in Jesus name, no need for any bed rest. That doctor thinks I’m going to return to that hospital. God forbid!”she says each time I beg her to take it easy on herself. Then, my father calls to complain about his sight failing him, perhaps cataract, and he wants to go under the knife. I don’t tell him that I hope he doesn’t have the surgery, that I’m scared of losing him. Instead, I pray for him to be healed so he doesn’t have to go under the knife.

Nowadays, I know I have no control over anything: my parents’ complaints, the fear of losing them to the cold grip of death before I finally find my balance in this shifting world.

In “The Slipping Away,”Chinonso Nzeh concludes his essay on a brighter note, stating his resolution to live in the moment that includes his parents.“I want to enjoy the now with them. Every moment with them holds meaning for me. I count one to ten when they provoke me; it cools the burning fury in me. I ask them if they need water or food. I call them to check up on them.”

Just like Chinonso, I do my best to live in the moment with my parents. I don’t wait for birthdays or any such precious occasions in their lives to gift them presents; I do it before, when the means unfurl. I strive to make them laugh while I continue to fill my head with the possibility of having them alive for many years. I choose to bask in the euphoria of their joy, laughter and tears.


Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is an Igbo storyteller from Nigeria. He writes short stories, essays and poems with deep interest in feminism, sexuality, queerness and religion. His works have been published in Isele, Afritondo, Uncanny, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. He was long listed for the Abubakar Gimba Prize for Creative Nonfiction 2023 and the Brigitte Poirson Short Story Prize 2023 amongst others. 

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fabienne josaphat poetry january 2024

Four a.m. My father is out looking for gasoline.

Night at this hour is a tangle of hair,

a bush only the gifted seers can navigate.

This is also where I was radicalized.

On my television screen, I watch Bill Clinton

introduce my people to rations. I watch him

change our rice to another kind.

We begin to import democracy and then,

We are all wandering the night,

Searching for one drop of petrol,

And those lucky to find it will be rewarded

with a day of schooling.

Maybe we can after all resist brain drain.


Four a.m. Another day of tires

and cars charred at the crossroads.

The charcoal sings in the gaping

Mouth of a hot iron, and the steam

Kills everything but the linen.

We learn to live like this.

To make fire from the slivered bark of pinewood.

To slaughter and use all of the animal.

To drink its blood or fry its curdles

So that the weak can be saved

From anemia. We turn to cassava bread

And coffee. We find ways. We survive.

They must not know us.


Four a.m. A child was kidnapped

For ransom and never seen again.

The sun seems to have lost its luster.

The children are not safe and therefore

no one is safe. Nothing is sacred.

Not the holy water nor the frankincense,

not the songs nor the processions,

not the libations poured too late for spirits

we have neglected for so long to feed.

There is always plenty of time

Until there isn’t. We’ve forgotten the time.

We rest our bones for tomorrow,

We wake up and start all over again,

Roaming the streets for petrol at four a.m.


Fires Burning

Too many fires burning at once.

Every commentary on T.V. does nothing

more than stoke the flames.

Paper ignites right around 451 degrees.

Water boils at 212. Do we know

the exact temperature at which

to rescue a man from a burning tire?

Rescue a monk from self-combustion?

Rescue a people from self-immolation?

We who have lost faith

And land and voice and agency,

We who have chained ourselves to olive trees

We who have seen our lakes

Burn up in black smoke and breathed

The air to die, we

Who were told to chop down our trees

And bury our elders with our teeth,

We who heeded the command

and felled our own memories:

We who continue to burn demand only

The kindness of sipped water.

Everywhere, a fire burns.

Every single one of us

is running out of blame.


The Way You Are Loved

You know, the way you enter the house

And the pot had been simmering in wait,

And your mother holds your face in both hands

And you can inhale all the powder fresh scent,

That honeysuckle from her bosom, and you want to live there.

The way your grandfather wraps you in

The cotton of his voice, warms you up in earthy breath,

And feeds you pulp and nectar from the fruits of his labor,

And sits you on his lap to spin you a tale

From a motherland country so far and far away it sounds fantastical,

invented, imagined, a myth like all the others,

a fairytale built out of sea salt and constellations,

The breath of Gods who crossed the oceans.

You know the way this place keeps you bound,

tied to the umbilical cord so you’re never too far away.

In Guinea There is where it all started, where this love was born.

In Guinea Where your parents sit by the fire and send you

Signals in the smoke, and a man to love, a woman to hold,

a child or three or eight and keep that fire burning for all of them

To keep going and find their way back home.


Fabienne Josaphat is winner of the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and the author of the forthcoming novel Kingdom of No Tomorrow (Algonquin). Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, was published by Unnamed Press. Her publications include poems in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Grist Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, and Eight Miami Poets, as well as essays in The Washington Post and Teen Vogue. She is currently at work on a third novel. Find her at @fabyjosaphat and on both instagram and X/twitter.

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gorleku sampson tetteh epistolary december 2023
Image by Gorleku Sampson Tetteh

Dear Mr. President,

I am a photographer with huge concerns for the environment. Please allow me to tell you a story about my Mama’s village.

You see, once upon a time, in the middle of the village, there existed a huge forest called Python-Forest. The forest seemed to bother the people in the village because it was home to many animals including some enormous African pythons. From time to time the pythons came and stole livestock, poultry, and the like belonging to the people of the village. One day they agreed to get rid of the pythons.

In doing so, they cleared the whole forest. It was a good bounty – trees were to be used as firewood, forest game as food, and extra land was acquired for agricultural purposes. In the end, everyone thought it was needed and mostly for the best. Decades later, somebody thought and realized that it did not rain like it used to. Years later, someone else thought and realized that when the pythons were around, it rained heavily. And in the rainwater, the pythons came from the forest for their livestock and poultry. Ah! The python-forest was no more! Nor was the rain.

You see Mr. President, the fruits and rewards of nature’s existence are enjoyed together by all. The rain falls upon every land where we then have sunshine for all and clean air for all to breathe. But when we convert resources of nature into economic resources, not everybody benefits. You would agree that the distribution of our nation’s wealth is unfair and unequal. You should agree because the masses agree, and agreement amongst the masses is the most powerful, more powerful than the office you occupy. It is my prayer that the masses know this.

Mr. President, I would like to bring to your attention the quarrying activities going on in Shai Hills. The activities going on in Shai Hills is a crime against nature punishable by death. Judging according to “an eye for an eye”, the activities are killing the people and destroying the beauty of our land along with it — the land our forefathers fought to protect, only to be destroyed by selfish individuals and for profit.

Mr. President, I am a photographer who has fallen in love with the beauty of our landscape. Have you seen the magnificent inselbergs at Shai Hills? To look upon them when they appear silhouetted in front of an enchanting sunset sky is truly magical. Please, pause for a moment and try to picture that. You will be left in absolute awe of our God. It really is a magical place to be.

Here is the problem: the quarry dust is clogging the lungs of men, women, and children in these communities. The quarries are too close to the people. Have these humble citizens been condemned to death? Must they rise up against you like their forefathers did against the colonial masters before the quarries stop?

The quarries are leaving big holes in the earth. How would you feel if you were living with a big hole in your tummy? The earth is alive, Mr. President, and right now it is dying with all her beauty.

You see Mr. President, though you should, we do not think you know of everything that is happening on our land. Given that countries have suffered the effects of quarrying and now have to invest billions into restoring the land, your experts will tell you this is true. Why then are we going the same way? Please tell us how it benefits our country and her people to allow those historical inselbergs in Shai Hills to be reduced to rubble? Tell us with every shred of honesty in you, Sir. If it’s the money, then I can tell you there’s always another way, as one would tell a criminal. And the way we are going as a country is an unpardonable crime against nature. Shai Hills holds unearthed history; lives have been lived atop the inselbergs; discoveries are yet to be made; the professors are out overseas seeking more wealth. Money seems to be ruling the world, and we have become the weapons of destruction of this earth.

By executive order you can end this. Declare the Shai Hills resource reserve a national park. That will expand the reserve’s land space and then the quarry licenses will be rendered invalid. Just like that. That should be the end of the wicked who destroy the land. It is what the people want. Your experts will tell you it is the right thing to do. You would then go on to plant trees to replace the quarries because trees protect the land, as the hair protects the head and its contents. The trees will heal the earth and clean the filthy air in the city, which is only 45 minutes away. You see, a huge, concentrated number of trees in a national park at Shai, just 45 minutes from the capital, is bound to attract a lot of our shit called co2 away from the city. The trees need the co2, hence they will attract it. They go for it, kind of like we also go in search for food. That is what trees do.

Let’s face it Sir, the capital stinks! If it didn’t, once in a while you’d find yourself turning off your a/c and rolling down your windows to inhale the fresh air (if any). Let us not leave the stench to only the windowless troskies. And outside of the cities, God knows there are limitless untarred road networks, even in Shai where the historical inselbergs are destroyed for construction purposes.

I have asked my fellow citizens what is up with the fighting in parliament? Have we elected a babbling, bumbling, band of baboons? Shouldn’t they be united in building our nation?

Mr. President, as Ansel Adams once said, “It is indeed horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save our environment”. This means the governed are fighting amongst themselves, and Christ the Savior of the Christians as the “Christians” in this country love to put it, said that “a nation that fights against itself shall not stand”. We want to stand tall, Mr. President, and we believe you do too.

Mr. President, if you really care about being a true son of the land, start acting in benefit of the environment. Make that executive order now! Stop the activities that are destroying the historical inselbergs at Shai Hills.

Our youth shall be employed to plant trees to heal the land. Hell, if they won’t, the world will send volunteers to do so if need be. God knows they want to come!

The quarrying will eventually bring down the Shai Hills resource reserve. I have witnessed the rocks atop the inselbergs cracking over time. It is just a matter of time before they come rolling down. People from all walks of life come to climb them all year round, people from countries where they are immensely cared about. We need to start caring, Mr. President, in order to prevent a disaster from happening. Better safe than sorry. It will ruin our reputation as one of the tourist hotspots. Tourism is the new gold anyway. Stop the quarrying and turn to it. That will yield more money since that is what we want. And it will protect the earth in the process.

 Abandoning a well-paying job to photograph our landscape has taught me that money for daily bread is essential. I believe the same for my country. Destruction isn’t the way; doing the right thing is. By doing the right thing, we are brought face to face with the help we need. Photographing landscapes is the right thing for me, just as protecting the land from vampires is the right thing for you to do.

Mr. President, I hang on to hope that you shall act to stop the mindless quarrying at Shai Hills. Always know that three things will last forever: faith, hope and love. Love is the greatest. Move for love, Mr. President. God loves all, he is more favorable to one who loves.


Tetteh Unity

Afterword

My photographs convey the simple yet wonderful beauty of nature that nature gifts us season after season. In the rainy season, trees blossom and bear fruit; the fields turn green; wildflowers bloom bringing with them beautiful insects like bees and butterflies; the sky is blue and snow-white clouds appear, travelling across the sky from east to west.

The trees shed their leaves in the dry season, teaching us that we have to change with the season. Bare naked trees become beautiful portrait subjects with a background of an enchanting December sunset sky.

We tend to miss nature’s gift of beauty due to our now busy lives, or worse because of urban and industrial development. In a hundred years, man has changed the face and beauty of the earth more than nature has changed herself. Entire forests destroyed; whole mountains brought down. We have polluted bodies of water killing the life in them, made filthy our shores, and the list continues.

Nature is our best chance at emotional and physical survival, yet we destroy her. Are we not harming ourselves? Poisoning ourselves by our own thoughtlessness and greed?

Ansel Adams (God bless his soul) once wrote, “Since all life and it’s continuity are dependent upon the earth, our ultimate security must rely upon wisdom, compassion, determination and the awareness of the unity of man and nature.” I agree.


Gorleku Sampson Tetteh is a Ghanaian and a landscape photographer from the Kingdom of Kasunya who is deeply in love with nature’s beauty. Through his lens, he captures the soul-stirring moments that connect us to the earth and fill our hearts with joy and wonder. He acknowledges how every sunrise kisses the land with warmth and color, and every sunset paints the sky with dreams. In the arms of untouched landscapes, he finds peace and purpose—a feeling he strives to share with all through his photographs. The images are a reminder of the magic that surrounds us and a call to protect the precious gift that is our planet.

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sean murphy poetry december 2023

Would-be angels, rejected or returned

to earth, ever eager to share their secrets—

which, suspiciously, all sound the same—

tend to talk about that white light

we’ll all stride toward, transitioning

from here to there, the strangeness

of dead lovers and famous names

(now friends) guiding them forward,

into some impossibly bright beacon.


And why does it always have to be white?

A white god with a white beard dressed

in white (never mind the poor souls

taught to run the other way whenever

they saw men in white robes), looking

like a slick car salesman saying No way

I can make a better deal on this trade-in.


Or consider the revelation of Malcolm X,

reading the dictionary from start to finish

as he bided time in the purgatory of prison,

unlearning what it takes to stay on the right

side of iron bars, figuring out as he did why

they say those who win write our history,

and why white makes right and the wrong

people get blackballed—according to a code

baked into words by the white pie in the sky:

a place where all will be revealed, baptizing

non-believers with the light of white, hot fire.


What did Albert Ayler see when he wept

into the East River, that night he disappeared

forever, having been driven more than halfway

to distraction by the voices that wouldn’t stop,

and why didn’t the Lamb of God put bread inside

his basket when he played the ecstasy of saints

marching in? Did he see a reflection—of himself

or the absent savior who died for his sins—or else

the void of all color & sound as a weary moon hid

behind the clouds, unwilling to witness one more

force majeure (holy ghosts keeping off the record)

amongst martyrs, the Devil, and the deep blue sea?


(*Avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler made albums at once decidedly—even provocatively—non-commercial, yet deeply spiritual and ecstatic, and like many other jazz musicians, despite being critically acclaimed, he ceaselessly struggled to make a living. In 1969 he wrote an open letter describing his apocalyptic visions and, after being asked why he was wearing a fur coat with his face covered in Vaseline in the summer heat, replied “Got to protect myself.” Ayler was found dead in New York City’s East River on November 25, 1970, a presumed suicide.)


Sean Murphy is founder of the non-profit 1455 Lit Arts, and directs the Story Center at Shenandoah University. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. His second collection of poems, Rhapsodies in Blue was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. His third collection, Kinds of Blue, and This Kind of Man, his first collection of short fiction, are forthcoming in 2024. He’s been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of Net, and his book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone was winner of Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Memoir Prize. Visit seanmurphy.net

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joel savishinsky poetry december 2023

The knack of reading history lies

not in the texts, but in the tokens

people leave: the broken pots,

courses of bricks, footprints in mud,

thumbprints in clay, the body parts

in wheel-wells. We learn, very late

in the game of learning, words may

matter less than the matter the wordless

have lost or abandoned. What would

you want to ask of Vesuvian ash, of

the shadows on Asian rooftops,

the wake left by feet fleeing down tarmac,

of the bones beneath the plow?


The shards of memory that will never come

to rest in anyone’s memoir cannot be cleansed

or catalogued because they cannot be grasped

by hand or mind, not heard, imagined or imaged.

They are as pale as punctuation on rain-soaked paper,

as silent as the sailors whose mouths have closed

on a watery cry deep below the waves.


Today perhaps you breathed in the DNA of Nagasaki,

washed off from dust from Dachau with Soweto’s tears,

 picked up echoes from a dark corner of Santiago.

Where else, who else, lives inside your body,

when every place is also someplace else?

These fates only seem mysterious, their reasons

lost in claims of complexity, in the overdetermined

testimony diluting the clues that follow the money.

You know it is foolish to watch and listen because

everything of moment happens out of sight and hearing,

yet you cannot stop yourself from believing in

the urgency of the latest news. In the end, as in

every beginning, there are always explanations from

those who know what they do not want us to know.


Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, won the Gerontological Society of America’s book-of-the-year prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, and California State Poetry Society award winner, his poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Beyond Words, Blue Collar Review, California Quarterly, The New York Times, Passager, SLANT, and Windfall. In 2023, The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. You can find him at ithaca.edu and Poets & Writers

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alan abrams poetry december 2023

Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon,
                      that have I given unto you
                                    ~Joshua 1:3


who will sort the bodies

    from the silent rubble;

who will push the barrow,

    who will wield the shovel

to dig the graves

    in this blood soaked ground—

blood of foe mixed

    with blood of friend,

who once had lived

    in hatred bound—

someone tell me please:

    what will Gaza look like

       when the killing ends?


On Some Lines by Mahmoud Darwish

      “On the day when my

          words were stones…”

                  ~from “Psalm Three”


Why do his words catch in my throat,

as though they were spiders in my soup?

They do not crawl or build a web,

they only lie on a page, line upon line,

like layers of sediment revealed by a road cut.


They are his voice turned to stone,

coursed like those ashlar temple walls.

They pave the road the poet had traveled,

and will linger long past his departure—

each flag, another line of his poem,

written as though the very ink

was squeezed from rock.



Alan Abrams dropped out of college—one semester shy of a degree—to work in motorcycle shops and construction sites. Later in life, he owned a design-build firm that specialized in green building. Nowadays, he tinkers with his collection of road bikes, and scribbles an occasional story or poem. His writing has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. His poem “Aleinu,” published by Bourgeon [now the Mid Atlantic Review] is nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize. You can find him at alanabramswriter.com

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adrian fleur flash fiction december 2023

In school we learnt History, but it was sanitised history about the British, the Dutch, the colonisers with their ships and riches, about how they came down south and did their business. And that was all it was: business, war and conquest—no mention of systemic sexual assault as a tool of war, no mention of the brutality women and children suffered at the hands of men. Even then.

In school we learnt about sex in Moral Education or Life Orientation or whatever they ended up calling that class so its name wouldn’t offend. (That’s the problem, isn’t it? How we cower at the idea of things, the mere mentioning of them.) So we learnt about penetration but not about bodily autonomy or consent, and when they showed us slides about menstruation or breasts the boys went Ewwwww! And the teachers never said Grow up! The teachers never said that one in three girls would be abused before eighteen, and one in six boys, and told us to look around the room and start counting.

In school we learnt Public Speaking, but when we should have been debating things like wind power versus solar, or legalising marijuana, we were arguing for the death penalty. We stood up in front of our peers at thirteen telling each other lies and our teachers never stopped us. We didn’t learn Philosophy, Sociology, or Statistics, we didn’t study any cases or watch any documentaries. We stood up in front of our classes playing Devil’s advocate and our teachers never told us that the Devil doesn’t need any more friends.

In school we learnt that boys could flash you, snap your bra straps or try and trip you. We learnt they could shout at you for blowjobs in front of their friends, they could corner you in empty corridors or backstage or behind the bins, they could spread explicit rumours about you, they could brand you a slut at fourteen, at twelve, at ten, they could call you misogynistic names and then years later they’d ask you out for a drink. And when you told them to go to Hell they’d be confused, because while we were learning how to defend ourselves they were learning rape culture.

In school we learnt a great deal about Voortrekkers and spear formations, but we never learnt about what black men went through during Apartheid, and how they left behind women who raised children in poverty and despair—alone. And they watched their mothers infantilized and their fathers worked to death in the mines, and they watched the government strip them of their humanity before they were grown. And then South Africans always want to know: who are these violent monsters? These ones who follow in the footsteps of our violent forefathers, in a country built and plagued by violence, in a violent story too familiar to us all? And then the decent folk always want to say: no, we don’t know them. No, they couldn’t be our fathers or our brothers or our friends, or the boys we went to school with who were learning how to hurt us, while we were learning how to make it out of school alive. And then we want to hang them, shock them, strap them up and inject them, we call for their death in the streets while we protest the blood that every woman in our country bleeds. We want to repeat history because it’s all we ever learnt, even though it never did us any good, it never healed our wounds, it never made us safe from the violence in our streets and in our sheets and in our homes.

In school, most of all, we learnt how to be good girls. Our gogos and oumas learnt how to be good to the men who constructed Apartheid, and our mothers and aunties learnt how to be good to the men who were traumatised by it. So we fell in line, us born-free babies, us sisis and meisies, we learnt how to be good women who raise good girls to continue this cycle. We never said no, and then when we did we were ignored, and then when we began to scream we were pushed aside for the next good girl who would shoulder the burden of damaged men. We just kept teaching that tired old history: the Zulus, the Xhosas, how they lost to the guns, how the land was won. We never said how our country was stolen by greedy men, our riches were sucked dry, our futures shaped by their sins—that being a good girl won’t save you from them. We never taught our girls that bigotry is deadly. We never said, You’re going to burn. If you don’t learn the things that school never taught you.

Girl, you’re going to burn. You’re going to burn in this fire, in this Hell, in this man’s country.


Adrian Fleur is a writer from South Africa. Her novel Zithande is a work-in-progress that explores themes of grief, joy, and the resilience of women across class and racial lines. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two young children, and chow-shepherd mix Ruby. You can find out more about her at her website www.adrianfleur.com.

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david agyei-yeboah flash fiction november 2023

Rain splattered across the window pane. It thwacked hard as a sheen shrouded the glass. Mensa peered across, at the dense foliage dripping outside with August globules, leaf blades ripe with gossamer as lightning flashed; at the lurid plumage trailing as birds flocked away. A big drum collected stray fluid from the roof. As his eyes dipped into the barrel, he closed the shutters. Chest heaving, he walked to another window and continued staring aloof into space, then closed the shutters. Jane walked up to him, curling her arms around his shoulders; her thick perfume that had teased him earlier, now strangling.

‘Today’s been absolutely the worst. Don’t know why I just can’t seem to get a job. I’m broke as hell. I’m shit. I’m –’ Mensa said.

‘Rest, Desi. Tomorrow is another day to hunt. Today, just rest in my arms.’

He loved when she called him Desi – shortform of Desire. She always said that he had wound his way into her heart, upended it, and set it on fire. Her warmth had always comforted him. But today, it felt like his inner demons quenched her fiery embrace.

‘Jane, what does that make me? A deadbeat lover, son, brother? I don’t even have enough money to cater to my needs. I’m still depending on daddy’s money and I’m 30.’

‘I know, love. It sucks. But I believe in you. Something will turn up. Something will change.’

‘Look at Amprofi. He has a penthouse. Four cars! Even Kwabena that I always taught in uni just got a job that’s paying in dollars. And Esi, my small sister oo, this small girl, just got an amazing job in Dubai. She was just sending me pictures of her new home. I – I can’t seem to understand why I’m still struggling when I’m intelligent and diligent.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘How the mighty have fallen!’

Jane squeezed him tighter in her embrace. ‘Hmm. It took me a while. But I realized that in life, it takes more than the conventional things we are fed with to succeed. Growing up, everyone says, ‘Study hard. Make good grades.’ But Desi, sadly, in this world it takes more than that to make it o. Sometimes it doesn’t even take hardwork to make it. Ghana is crappy as hell too. Our system is broken. Just makes everything worse!’

‘Hmmm. I have a tall list of applications whose responses are pending. If something good doesn’t turn up before this year ends, I’ll prolly apply for visa lottery and start life in a foreign land.’

‘And leave me fuckless and miserable?’

‘Jane, be serious.’ A laugh escaped his lips. Her embrace began to feel warm, like many nights before. ‘At least I have you. You’re like the best thing that happened to me since uni.’

‘I love to be wanted. What can I say?’

Their laughter poked through the still night. Raindrops pelted harder against the window pane. Mensa walked to his refrigerator to grab a sachet of water. “Want one?’

‘I want you.’

Mensa giggled. ‘You’re corny, huh?’

‘Desi, I really love you. I’ll never stop letting you know that. Bout the water, make that two. A bitch is thirsty from all that lovemaking. Weird how we can go from ecstasy to sadness in a heartbeat.’

‘Ghana for you. Will literally wreck your soul.’ Mensa dropped the sachets on the bed and lay his head on Jane’s lap. He twirled his fingers across her belly as he gulped. ‘How about we go another round. I need some joy seeping into my life again.’

‘Noo Desi. I’m supposed to be home right now. It’s past my curfew.’

‘Damn. Can’t believe your parents are giving you a curfew. You’re not a child, you know.’

‘But I’m still a college kid. You know how they get.’

‘If only they knew how naughty I make you. Scratch that, how naughty you are beneath that innocent face.’

‘Bro, sex is a need. It’s not a want. I honestly don’t see why people make it seem like it’s some evil thing. I need sex. I’m not ashamed to say that and seek it.’

‘Well, I ain’t complaining. It’s all joy from this side.’

‘Heey.’ Jane tickled his sides, then kissed him. ‘See me off?’

‘Of course. Let me put a hoodie on. You can order the Uber.’

‘And babe, you will beat this bad stroke of luck. Mark my words.’ Jane pursed her lips and shot her right arm in the air. ‘If I be a man of God.….’ her voice intensified.

‘Hahahahaha. I freaking love you Jane.


David Agyei–Yeboah holds an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Ghana. He graduated with first-class honors in English and Theatre Arts for his B.A.  His writing has been published by Deep Overstock Publishing, Freshwater Literary Journal, The Quilled Ink Review, Tampered Press, Lumiere Review, Journal of the Writers Project of Ghana, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the Totally Free Best of the Bottom Drawer Global Writing Prize in 2021. He enjoys everything art and anticipates an academic career in the future. He tweets at @david_shaddai and sings on instagram at @davidshaddai

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salimah valiani poetry november 2023

out the fifth floor window of her El-Biar flat   from where she had

watched The Algerian People’s Army open fire on students


journalist Josie jumped 


28 years after her partner died alone of leukemia  


16 years before militant Beatriz pulled the trigger[1]


O wretched of the earth


my partner said yesterday Malawi is headed Zim-way

different similar reasons  


all fingers pointing   fast climbing Rwanda  

economychildpregnancyrape  


O beloved Africa


*


a Vietnamese sex worker and mixed race daughter

heading out


the war had been won but little remained of the country

though the hegemon had lost he could still go home


38 years later trailer parks mushrooming

shanties of US America


and shanties of South Africa

inside suburbs   not just edging townships


This I like too the cabbie driving us to Museu do Amanhã

Museum of Tomorrow   But this is not Rio de Janeiro


*


fuel gulping subsidies surpassing $1 trillion in 2022


what a person can do in earthquakes tsunamis tornados forest fires floods

life skills taught to children


BelovedPangeawretchedoftheearth differentsimilarreasons

each piece at its pace  allpiecestogether

ecocide in world time


[1] Josie Dublé, activist and partner of Frantz Fanon. Beatriz Allende, activist and daughter of Salvador Allende.


Salimah Valiani is a poet, activist and researcher. Her poetry
collection, 29 leads to love (Inanna 2021), was the winner of the
International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry in 2022. She has
published four other poetry collections: breathing for breadth (TSAR
2005), Letter Out: Letter In (Inanna 2009) land of the sky (Inanna
2016) and Cradles (Daraja 2017). Her story-poem, “Dear South Africa,”
was selected for Praxis Magazine’s 2019-2020 Online Chapbook Series.
Her audiobook (also in print), Love Pandemic, was released by Daraja
Press in late 2022. Valiani lives in many places and crosses borders regularly.
She can be found at Salimah Valiani – Poet.

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ali motamedi personal essay november 2023

The airport officer opened my passport on his desk and looked at my photo. He put the boarding pass on top of it and held his pen. But he didn’t mark it right away. Instead, he stared at my eyes. I tried to act normal, just being myself. Four and a half seconds passed, and I started to worry. Had I doubted myself? He finally took his eyes off me and drew a half circle on the boarding pass. Then he handed me my passport, and I took it back. I started walking toward the airport inspection point which was crowded. One of the officers was guiding people forward. Behind me, people were waiting. I just wanted to pass through quickly. My passport had been issued less than a year ago. Have I changed so much?

For as long as I can remember, I have always liked the photo on my passport; but that was never true for my driver’s license and ID photo. The picture on my very first driver’s license was a little black-and-white photo attached to a corner of an opaque white card – imagine a guy with black hair and thick brows staring out into the world from a low-res photo wrapped in plastic, featuring a small hole. There is nothing in his eyes that I could say is attractive. He doesn’t seem bold or smart. And why is he so low-spirited? Why does it seem he doesn’t have anything to offer? No, it’s not like me. I don’t like it. I have never liked it.

As the airport officer stared into my eyes, I wanted to help him out. I wanted to say, “Come on, don’t bother, man. I pinky promise that it’s me!”

Like everyone else, I like some of my photos better than others. Perhaps the ones that were taken at a specific angle. Those taken from down and a bit to the left or maybe kitty-cornered or from some special angle! I don’t know. Those photos that reflect Ali. Those that are similar to me. In those moments when you want to be yourself in a photograph, which self do you refer to exactly?

In the photo of my very first passport, I wore a green T-shirt. I was a young pal with a pair of glossy eyes staring out of the frame. It’s like I wanted to get out of that two-by-three quadrangle. You can see the fearlessness, the soul in my eyes. “I want to go . . .” “I fear nothing . . .” It’s like I was whispering something like that to myself. Why not wear more formal clothes? Who takes his passport picture with a T-shirt on? The funny thing is, I used the same picture for my l-20 letter and also for the American Embassy. I didn’t care if the officer asked what kind of picture it was. Maybe that was the reason I could take my visa sooner than others. The photo was taken ten years ago. It’s Ali during those years, those days when I wanted to prove the freedom in life, with that round neck and green T-shirt! With that uncombed gelled hair! Could all of this be compressed into just a few thousand pixels? In those few inches of paper? Maybe that’s what photographs are made for — an attempt to fit all of life into a color or black-and-white image.

I put my shoes, bag, and coat in a plastic basket and left it on the conveyor to pass through the X-ray device. In front of me, there was a huge cylindrical scanner. There was a person before me, standing in the middle of it with his hands up, staring straight, waiting for it to take his nude photo!

I have never taken a nude photo before. A full-body nude picture! Well, I have seen myself in the steamy mirror of my bathroom, of course. Or when I change my clothes at home. But even those images are half-naked in my head. Not fully. Fully naked photos are frightening. Being naked is frightening. It was my turn. I took a few steps forward. I stood inside the big cylinder and put my hands up. The device turned, and a light passed through my eyes rapidly. Electromagnetic waves record your naked picture, whether you have your clothes on or not. It doesn’t matter if you’re smiling or not. If you’re beautiful or . . . I never heard that anyone would ever want to know how his photo in the airport inspection device would actually look.

The officer pointed with his hand, meaning that I could pass. I came out of the big cylinder and stood aside. I was standing with my arms folded, looking as the conveyor was pushing the plastic baskets forward one by one. My coat, bag, passport, and shoes were closing in, inside a big plastic basket.

Why did it take so long? Was it me that had changed so much, or was it the photo that was so different from me? I reasoned that if airport officers worked eight hours a day, and took ten seconds to match a person’s face with their passport photo, it would be three thousand people a day, sixty thousand a month, and more than six hundred thousand people a year. What in the world do they see in people’s faces? Fear of going, doubt of coming. Hope of getting back? If she won’t let me go. If he won’t let me come. Hope she doesn’t notice that I have changed. Is it actually possible to put all of these in a single photo? How much can a photo tell about someone anyway? They say you should not use a photo taken more than six months ago. Six months? No, not even that long, let’s assume six weeks, six days, or even just six minutes ago! Am I the same me, even right after the photographer pushed the shutter button?

I’m thinking about the airport’s scanners. Maybe those huge cylinders might be able to take a beautiful photo of you without even trying to do so. Even without your favorite clothes. Even without a smile on your face. Without shadows and highlights and without fear. That flawless art of nudity.

I like my passport photos best. My ID card and driver’s license are nothing to me but official certificates of identification. But my passports are permits. Permits for leaving! I know this by experience that any permit to leave is a blessing to me. Its photo is closer to the Ali that I know. Whether or not it’s colorful or black-and-white, it’s bright. It’s alive. It has color! And I don’t mean “color” literally, as in a “color photograph.” I mean that it is the perception of the world I create and give in my photos. I have seen black-and-white photos of myself that had more color than the colorful ones and vice versa. My passports have always been colorful, but my certificates of identification . . . not so much.

I took my things from the basket, put on my shoes, and walked to the gate. The hallway was crowded. People were carrying their suitcases. The airport-speaker was announcing the flights one by one. On the way, I was constantly looking around. I wanted to find a mirror.


Ali Motamedi, artist and educator, explores themes of travel, immigration,
and identity. His essays and short stories, published in literary magazines in Farsi and English, intricately weave these themes. Holding a PhD in civil engineering and having studied fine
arts at the City University of New York, he seamlessly combines his
engineering background with artistic vision. Additionally, his photography graces group and solo exhibitions in Iran and the US. Since 2014, he has led students in engineering, critical
thinking, and creativity courses nationally and internationally. He can be found on twitter and instagram.

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Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the nominations for next year’s Pushcart Prize Anthology. This list includes writing published from February to October 2023. Congratulations to the nominees!

Short Story

“The Sling” by Mungai Mwangi

Poetry

“crawling toward mirage” by Kathleen Hellen

“The Giraffe Titan” by Brandon Kilbourne

“Homage to My Peruvian Brother” by Alex Anfruns

“Homeless” by Patrice Wilson

“Mammy Does the Morning Chores” by Matthew Johnson

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Jen Soriano’s writing pulls the reader into her memoir in essays starting with a chronological history of medicine and its approaches to the nervous system. Soriano studied the history of science at Harvard; thus, her book has abundant historic detail. Included in her chronology are the Kahun Papyrus medical documents from 1900 B.C. written by women and focusing on women’s health. These documents were later obscured during Europe’s Middle Ages when St. Thomas Aquinas warned that women were weak, those who practiced healing were minions of the devil, and that hysteria was evil. By 1486, two centuries of witch hunts began across Europe. In 1894 Santiago Ramón y Cajal, founder of modern neurosciences, described the nervous system as organic and flexible, like a system of waterways. And it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychological Association stopped using the term hysteria and replaced it with stress disorder.

How does this history fit into the life story of Jen Soriano? Soriano describes herself as someone who has always been nervous. From the ages of twenty-eight to forty-three, she had a series of diagnoses connected to her nervous system. Not only has she suffered from nervous disorders, but she has also had a life of chronic physical pain — pain so great that it kept her awake at night and resulted in her being prescribed meds. So chronic that it led to suicidal ideation in her twenties. Yet Soriano didn’t accept her medical and psychological suffering as an individual circumstance related only to her personal life. Because she had experienced violent dreams of her grandparents for three decades, she was left wondering if she was experiencing transgenerational flashbacks from her grandparents’ trauma in the Philippines. She became certain that the war experiences of the Philippines — including her grandfather being tortured and then disappeared as a prisoner of war and her grandmother having to eke out survival while her home was enemy-occupied — lived on inside of her.   

Born in the US, Soriano realizes that not only her personal experiences, but the history of her body is connected to her forebears and the history of the Philippines. The violence that has been inflicted on the Philippines is hidden behind the American myth of Filipinos as simply agricultural and later healthcare migrants. Yet Filipino immigration to the U.S. has been part of the push-and-pull of colonialism and revolutionary resistance that began with three and a half centuries of Spanish domination. The Spanish viewed the island territory as an outpost for trade where they didn’t even bother teaching the indigenous population Spanish as they did in Latin America. In 1896, the Filipino population revolted against Spanish rule, and during the Spanish-American War that began in 1898, Spain sold the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million. The war lasted until 1913 and resulted in the deaths of more than one million Filipino people. In World War II, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they went on to bomb eight targets throughout the Philippines. In the summer of 1942, the U.S. surrendered the country to Japan. And from 1941-45 more than 1.1 million Filipinos were killed, and some as a result of horrid war crimes that included skinning victims alive.

When Soriano’s parents immigrated to the U.S., they left a large portion of that tragic history behind. Her father was a medical doctor and her mother, an industrial pharmacist. Both parents focused on upward mobility in the Chicago home where they raised the writer and her two brothers. Her father viewed his nuclear family – now cut off from the larger extended family in the Philippines — as a sign of progress. And when her parents took their kids back home for vacation, they stayed in hotels instead of staying with family. The effect on a young Soriano was the absence of a sense of secure attachment with her parents. She felt she hardly knew her dad because he was constantly working. Her mom was distant and did not assume the role of a nurturer. Also, during her youth, both of her medically-trained parents dismissed her complaints about body pain – a dismissal which caused her emotional pain greater than her physical aches. In sum, the writer viewed many of the experiences with her parents as emotional neglect.

The writer’s young adult years included both a process of self-discovery and learning to cope with pain. During her studies at Harvard, Soriano felt alienated from the White elites in her environment. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in her mid-twenties, she became part of a Filipino population much larger than she had encountered in the Midwest or on the East Coast. The move to the West Coast brought her closer to her ancestral shores and allowed her to immerse herself in political activism as well as ethnic studies. Performing in a protest band not only served as a therapeutic ritual that advanced social transformation, but it also led to her forming lasting relationships with some of the most significant people in her life. She describes hanging out with her Filipino friends as akin to constructing her own nipa hut that sheltered her from pain and isolation.

Jen Soriano sees the connection between our personal lives, our history, our communal experiences, and the natural environment. For this reason, she can draw the conclusion that nature functions like an autonomic nervous system regulator and our human health depends on the health of our natural environment, especially our rivers. She experienced the interconnection between the personal, social, and environmental firsthand while participating in a protest to resist the damning of the Chico River – the largest river in the Philippines. For centuries, the Chico River has sustained the farming, trading, and daily life of the indigenous people who live near its shores and farther afield. For more than five decades, activists have resisted plans for the construction of hydropower dams on the river system. For Jen Soriano, the Chico River symbolizes a critical crossroads between the exploitation of natural resources and a more sustainable way of being that is not reliant on colonialism, exploitation, and trauma. To experience the full force of this crossroads, we must submerge ourselves in the crystalline whirlpool of the narrative that is her memoir in essays — Nervous.

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april L. smith personal essay november 2023

I think about my ancestors often. Specifically, I think about matters like healing, faith, hope, and love.  Currently, my curiosity centers around how enslaved women were denied time for self-care. In historic photos enslaved women donned hair rags and hair wraps; the difference in wrapping could distinguish between a woman who worked in the house and a woman who worked in the field. Under the wrap one might find fine curls or course matted hair.  Mulattos, by no choice of their own, often inherited their enslavers hair. Some head wrappings were cultural, and some were worn as acts of resistance.

I am reflecting on hair wrapping as a result of being denied the right of self-care. Neglect of personal hygiene at the demand of an enslaver. I started thinking about this, trying to connect the lessons of self-care for our hair based on the lessons that have been passed down over generations without questioning if we should do things differently.

For most women our hair is a symbol of beauty and for some, hair can be a symbol of protest and independence.  My curiosity is focused on the emotional and mental trauma that our ancestors experienced in not being able to care for their hair. What was the psychological cost of enslaved women losing their hair because they were denied the personal right to self-care? This is what has been on my mind. The inability to relieve mental pressure by feeling water wash over their heads on a regular basis, having an itch that caused them to scratch until blood was drawn.  In some cases, if they wanted to untie the coverings, they were denied the right to expose their hair.  

I can’t imagine working in a field among flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers, and caterpillars and not being able to return home and wash my hair. I cringe at the thought of scratching my scalp infested with lice or creating remedies out of bacon grease, butter, and kerosene while being denied the right to cleanse my scalp.  Imagine hearing a sermon in church about cleanliness being next to Godliness, but being denied the right to bathe.  I am pained by the thought that my ancestors, being treated as property, were made to feel inferior to white women enslavers. White women could flaunt their tresses that enslaved women had to wash, and comb, and care for, while covering their own tresses in a rag. Is there anything more painful than providing the highest level of care to someone that looks at you and calls you property? 

Today we are hyper-focused on our hair because our hair has a history in enslavement, oppression, rejection, and classism. Our hair has a connection to our African ancestors and our white enslavers.

I grew up getting my “hair done” —  meaning washed and pulled into an afro puff, or washed, pressed and curled once every two weeks. Unless it was summer, which meant I went swimming every day. I am grateful that my mother never required me to wear those gawd awful rubber swimming caps. She did, however, demand that I wash and deep condition my hair after my swimming excursions. Water running through my curly, wavy hair felt comforting. For me water is healing, cleansing, a source of renewal and rejuvenation. After immersing myself in water, I feel pretty, clean and shiny, like a new penny. 

My cousin and I celebrated rainy days walking in the rain, no umbrella. We bought Tropical Punch soda pop and walked home slowly. The fun and laughter on those walks still rank as the best days of my youth. Our faces so wet, raindrops hitting the top of our heads; it was magical.

During COVID, I stopped using chemical straightening products in my hair, gaining the pleasure of washing my hair more. I love how water opens my mind, clears my head. Great ideas come to me in the shower. Watering my crown from the top with no protective covering is like watering my garden on a summer’s day. I ache thinking of how the ancestors, after laboring until broken, after being beaten, raped, and forced to produce babies, survived the atrocities of enslavement without being able to wash them away.  What kind of monster was an enslaver to make bathing an option? I mean, water is recovery.

Harriet Jacobs wrote about her life of enslavement; she hid in the attic of a shed for almost seven years to avoid the wrath of her enslaver. She survived summer heat, the cold of winter, fever, and near death. Harriet writes in Incidents of a Slave Girl, “I suffered much more during the second winter than I did during the first period my limbs were benumbed by inaction, and the cold filled them with cramp. I had a very painful sensation of coldness in my head; even my face and tongue suffered, and I lost the power of speech. Of course, it was impossible, under the circumstances, to summon my physician. My brother William came and did all he could for me. Uncle Philip also watched tenderly over me; And poor grandmother crept up and down to inquire whether there were any signs of returning life. I was restored to consciousness by the dashing of cold water in my face.” The mental trauma, emotional toil, and physical hardships are unmeasurable. Thinking about her hair might appear trivial. Yet imagine what she must have felt when her scalp started to itch uncontrollably? Surely, it must have felt like the torture experienced by prisoners of war. I would love to ask her about her journey back to health. I am sure it began with water. Water. I wonder how they made it over, from enslavement to freedom, without the daily ritual of a water dance.

When a mother’s water breaks, she brings life into the world. Water is a representation of all things new. Water is used to dedicate our lives back to the Creator. Water is used to keep the body hydrated, the earth moist, plants, animals, and the universe from overheating and dying. Water is the spiritual renewal of life. When water hits my face in the mornings, I feel renewal. Enslaved women, rising at daybreak with stiff bones, and aching backs, were crippled early in life by the demands of a slave breaker daring them to bring underweight sacks into the storehouse. If working in the field didn’t break you, a whip for not meeting your quota would. I linger in the shower knowing it is a privilege provided me by my ancestors.

I decided to make washing my hair a priority, not for styling, but for connecting to my crown chakra and, in a sense, connecting to my ancestors. The crown chakra gives us access to our intuitive energy and wisdom. The divine feminine is supported innately by the spirit of the Creator through our intuitive understanding. I require connection to creativity, nurturing, maternal connections, and healing support for my self-care. I can be more supportive of others when I am fully centered. The process for spiritual renewal is immersing the whole body, starting at the top of our crown, in water, dedicating ourselves back to life. My water dance feels like that moment after the rain; my body opens like a flower, tired muscles relax, my skin softens, letting the rain roll down my body.

After experiencing macro and micro-aggressions, our crown requires renewal.  I believe our ancestors would consider washing our hair several times a week a privilege. I want to honor them as I work to ensure my own self-care at the highest level of love. Maybe our blood pressure would be lower, maybe our mental health would be better, maybe our thoughts would be clearer. Just like the dew of morning, the mist of water on my brow connects me to something greater than myself.

Black women were not created to be a human resource, a tool for production, an appliance for usage like a machine. We were not created to support everything, everyone, and women of other cultures while neglecting ourselves. We are not made of steel. We can’t carry the anger of the world around us because everyone except us, men included, are immersing their entire bodies in water for renewal daily; meanwhile we wait to refresh our entire body when it is convenient to wash our hair. We are delicate, we are made to be graceful, we are meant to seek our help from the Creator. Ours is a culture of peace.

Our hair is not our crown; it is the ornament of protection decorating our crown. Our hair doesn’t determine how the rest of our body, mind, and soul respond to the issues of life. Yet, great hair is beautiful when topping a nurtured crown. In the end, it is our crown that enables us to radiate from the inside out. When we care for ourselves, we honor our ancestors. 


April L. Smith is a writer, literary agent, and motivational speaker. She is committed to eliminating mindsets that obstruct diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, especially for African American women. April is a Yale Writers Workshop alumnus. She loves spending time with her two adult children Kinnidy and Zackary. April lives in Raleigh, NC. She can be found at The Kinzac Group Literary Agency and Marketing Company and on instagram and facebook.

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rosario patricio martinez & kim jensen poetry october 2023

They couldn’t do it with firearms.

Later they came disguised

as kind-hearted people.

We bring word of a merciful God, they said.

Little by little they imposed their cross.


The cross they brought from the one true god,

brought the death of ours.

If we refused to believe in their god

the edge of the sword gleamed

to destroy our teachings.


To rip out our roots

they learned our language

exchanged our deities

for saints and the images of virgins.

Out of fear for the scorching flames of the pyre

we turned ourselves into seeds

to germinate at the appointed time.


Germinar en el tiempo

No pudieron con armas de fuego.

Más tarde llegaron con engaño,

como gente de buen corazón.

Traemos palabra de Dios bondadoso, dijeron.

Poco a poco impusieron su cruz.


La cruz que trajeron del único dios,

trajo la muerte de lo nuestro.

Si no queríamos creer en su dios 

brillaba el filo de la espada

para derrumbar nuestros saberes.


Para arrancar nuestras raíces,

aprendieron nuestra lengua,

cambiaron nuestras divinidades

por santos e imágenes de vírgenes.

Por temor al fuego de la hoguera 

nos convertimos en semilla

para germinar en el tiempo señalado.


Muxp mää tyemp d’ukpääty

Kä’t ojts jëën tujn tamädä’kt.

Janëm jadëjk ojts jyä’ät jënë’np,

tamëgueexy tyaxy’oy jä’äyë’nt.

Yos kyajpxy ëëts nakmentëp, nëm ojts wyä’nt.

atyä’äky ojts ja’ kyrus jakmëpëkn.


Ja krus mëde’p dakmend ojts,

o’jkë’n tëko’oyën ja’ yakjä’tëp.

Ku kä’t ja’ tyios pën tjajanchawëyä’ny,

nejt jakxon pujx y’äntä’äky

jëts adom ja’ nja’ dakutëgoy’änt.


Ku äätseptpy tyimtyonä’änt,

jabety adom n’ayuujk ojts dakyujt,

ojts adom ja’ ntsämääx yakkontëkätst

ta syänt ojts tpëktä’äkt.

Ja’ yaktsë’ëkëp ku jä’äy xakto’yën,

taa ojts ntëmt jëmpijtyë’m

jëts nmujxë’n mää tyemp d’ukpääty.


Mixe Boy

Every time the Mixe boy

made a few words bloom

martyrdom arrived in form of the teacher.

At times, only silence protected him.

Other times, a simple yes or no

saved him from punishment.


Whenever he caught sight

of an eraser, a ruler, or a rod

an icy tremor seized his body.

Every word in Spanish 

was a piercing thorn, a wound. For him

school days were an unbearable torment.


Niño Mixe

Cada vez que el niño mixe

hacía florecer unas palabras,

llegaba el martirio hecho profesor.

A veces, sólo el silencio lo abrigaba

y otras veces, un sí o un no

lo rescataba del castigo.


Cada vez que sus ojos descubrían

una vara, una regla o un borrador,

un temblor frío invadía su cuerpo.

Cada palabra en español eran espinas

que lo herían en los días de clases.

Para él, la escuela era un tormento.


Mutsk mixy ayuujk jä’äy

Ku mutsk mixy tu’k’oojk tu’koojk

ijty kyajpxy myatyä’äky ayuujk,

jaa yak’ëxpëjkp tyëk tëtyunp.

Ja’y junety amëny y’ity

jëts junety wyä’ny sí uk no

jëts kedee yaktëtyu’nt.


Ku ijty mää t’ejxpääty

tu’uk mä’ts, tu’uk kejpxk uk tu’uk jo’ots,

timyubejp maxu’unk nye’ekx kyojpk.

Ku jä’äy tmëdey amaxän kyajpxy

kujp djaw timykuujmëp ku y’ës’ëxpiky.

Kajanaxy ëxpëk tmë’ayëy.


They Only Looked at Us

When they looked at us with night-ridden eyes

they thought we were senseless creatures

and didn’t believe we had a soul

because our words didn’t move to the rhythm of theirs.


Looking at us through clouded eyes

they didn’t see the universe that blesses us,

nor the stars that protect us day and night,

nor could they see that the sun and moon

gathering between mountains and hillsides

gave us the color of baked clay.


.

We are little quails.

On the watch for danger

we turn ourselves into fallen leaves

or sometimes into rock or stone

while the universe protects us

from any pest that wants to stamp us out.


Sólo nos miraron

Cuando nos miraron con ojos de noche

nos creyeron seres sin sentido y

nos imaginaron ausentes de alma

porque nuestras palabras no marchan al ritmo de las suyas.


Al mirarnos con ojos turbios,

no vieron el universo que nos bendice,

ni estrellas que nos protegen día y noche,

tampoco pudieron ver que el sol y la luna

nos coloreó de barro cocido,

entre las montañas y laderas.


Somos pequeños codornices

que al acecho de algún peligro

nos convertimos en hojarasca, 

en otras ocasiones en roca

mientras nos protege el universo

para evitar que algún bicho nos extermine.


Ja’y ojts xjën’ixyë’m

Ja’y ojts xnë’ijxyë’m,

Kä’t ojts nak’ixyë’m tam jä’äyën

Kä’t ojts t’odät ku jajp n’änmëjä’n

Ja’ ku nayde’n nkakäjpxtääjkyë’m.


Ku ojts nakjën’ixyë’m,

Kä’t ojts t’ejxt ku et näxwiiny adom xpëdëjkyë’m,

Ku matsä’ xkuno’okyë’m ja xëëjny ja koots,

ni tka’ejxt ojts ku xëë ku po’o

adom xakaxë’kyë’m nääjxte’kn,

ku tun kojpk mëëd njuujky’äjtyë’m.


Muskte’nety adom,

pën jaa tee ka’oypy xnëjä’tyë’m

Ääy ujts natyapëdejkyë’m,

Junety napyëjktääjkyë’m tam tsääjë’n,

Ku Et Näxwiiny xnëkë’yëm xnëxäjyë’m

Jëts kedee tee xak’ojkë’n xaktëko’yë’n.


This poem was previously published by IHRAF/IHRAM.


The Essence of Corn

When we learned about wheat bread

our tortillas of corn

became food for the poor

who don’t know any better.

Bread makes you smart,

they told her again and again.


She longed to be smart.

With her baby on her chest

and on her back, a basket of corn and beans,

raised by her own chapped hands,

she traced her footprints from sunup to sundown

to reach the village of baffling language

to trade her grains for yellow bread. 


“Bread makes you smart,” she repeated.

She was trapped in the deception.

She forgot the essence of corn,

lost the path of the elders,

the wisdom of the corn could no longer be heard,

the offerings and hymns for the earth vanished.


One day she was visited by an owl,

the messenger of the lords of the night,

delivering his news with a song.

At dawn, her feet did not move.


It was a wijy jä’äy[i] who interpreted the meaning

and helped her to heal.

It was the essence of the corn

that gave her strength to go on.

[i] The one who can read supernatural messages by consulting with kernels of corn. Sometimes called a curandero or a healer.


Esencia de Maíz

Cuando supimos del pan de trigo

la tortilla de maíz se convirtió

en alimento para los pobres,

quienes carecen de sabiduría.                    

El pan te hace inteligente

le pintaron a ella una y otra vez.


Ella ambicionó la inteligencia.

Con su bebé en el pecho y,

en la espalda, un canasto de maíz y frijol,

cultivados con sus cuarteadas manos,                

dibujó sus huellas durante todo un sol

para llegar a la aldea de confusa lengua

y canjear sus granos con pan amarillo. 


“El pan da inteligencia”, repetía ella,

la había atrapado el engaño.

Olvidó la esencia del maíz, 

extravió el camino de los sabedores,

las palabras del maíz dejaron de oírse,

el brindis por la tierra se desvaneció.


Un día tuvo la visita de un búho,

mensajero de los señores de la noche,

entregando con su canto la noticia.

Al amanecer, sus pies no respondieron.


Sólo un wijy jä’äy[i] interpretó el significado

y le ayudó a encontrar su energía.

La esencia del maíz le brindó fortaleza.

[i] El que puede leer los mensajes de los sobrenatural, al consultar con los granos de maíz. Otros lo nomrarían como el curandero.


Moojk myëjk’äjtë’n

Ku tsäpkaagy ojts yak’ex’aty.

Ayoob jä’äy mojk kaagy daktundëp,

pën ka jënmä’nmyëëdëdëp,

jëts tsäpkaagy yë’ den tii yakwëjp yë’

nëm ojts jä’äy ejtp nyi’mxy.


Kajaa ja’ wijy’äjtë’n timcho’km.

chimy myaxu’ung jyëntuujy jets,

jyëxkixpy, tu’uk kach moojk xëjk,

tëë tunk kyë’ë tniaktsa’pxkëxn,

tu’kxëë ja’ tmëyo’oy

ku agätsetpy nyijkxy

jëts tsäpkaagy t’ëstakukonä’ny.


“Yakwejp yë’ tsapkaaky”, nëm ijty ejtp wyä’äny.

Tëë näjty yakjën’ëëny.

Ojts tjatyëgoy ku moojk de’n timchopätp,

taa tyu’tëgööny, kä’t wijy jä’äy t’uknënëjkxn,

Kä’t moojk ayuujk t’ukyäjkn,

taa kä’t nääjx y’ukakjëntsë’ëkën.


Ja’ xëëb ojts këxexpuuj jyä’äty,

tsuuj koots ojts nyaskax,

ojts ja ayuujk t’ësyaky.

Ku ojts xyëntyä’äky, kä’ t tyeky y’ukmadäkn.


Wijy jä’äynëm ojts tnëgajpxy tii tunäm jätäm

jaanëm ojts jyotkuk.

Kaagy moojknëm ojts tamëjkpiky.


Rosario Patricio Martínez is an Ayuujk ja’ay (Mixe) poet, lawyer, interpreter, and cultural worker, originally from the community of El Duraznal, Ayutla, Oaxaca, Mexico. She is the current president of the Indigenous Plurality cultural association and was the coordinator and translator of the National Anthem into the Ayuujk language. A promotor and teacher of the Mixe language, Rosario has published in various print and electronic media, as well as national and international poetry anthologies.

Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, educator, and translator whose books include the novel, The Woman I Left Behind, and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters. Active in transnational social justice movements for decades, Kim’s writings have been featured in many journals and magazines. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction. Kim is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she co-founded an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and social justice in the broader community.

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ayokunle falomo personal essay october 2023

There is no place like home. So, the idiom goes. And generally, it is agreed upon as true. Or, as containing some element of truth at the very least. Not every idiom about home is as literal as this one though. To say a man’s home is his castle doesn’t mean exactly that. To say, in a patriarchal sense, that it is the responsibility of a man to bring home the bacon doesn’t exactly mean that either. If it did, one might ask, jokingly, where that leaves the vegetarian or vegan family.

In a recent PSA by PETA, the animal rights organization appealed to people to stop using anti-animal language. I agree, words matter, but I disagree that using an idiom like “bring home the bacon,” is comparable to using language that would be considered racist, homophobic, or ableist. I’m sure this would likely have me tagged as a proponent of speciesism, which PETA insists is part of our daily conversations. Much like idioms are. Besides “bringing home the bacon” other examples noted by the PSA include “beating a dead horse,” “killing two birds with one stone,” and “taking the bull by the horns.” PETA, of course, provided alternatives for what we might say instead. For “bring home the bacon,” it suggests “bring home the bagels.” For “beat a dead horse,” “feed a fed horse.” For “take the bull by the horns,” “take the flowers by the thorns.”

I love the fact that things mean more than what they purport to mean. It’s why idioms fascinate me. More often than not, I incorporate them in my work. However, I deploy them in a literal sense, usually to emphasize the absurd, but also to find what new thing might show up. Consider, as an example, “beating a dead horse.” In a poem that is a meditation on Coltrane about joy, I wrote:

—born running from lord-knows-what… 

            No. Let allusion find no stable in this song.

No room for measurements, or compromise.

            It’s dead, I know, the horse is dead—

                                    but what to do with the music


trapped under its hide?

In an earlier draft of the poem, which invokes the idiom even more directly, I wrote: “Yes, I know the horse is dead and I want to stop beating it / like a percussion instrument, but what about the music / that’ll stay hidden under its hide if no one lets it out?” I hate to think about what would be lost if I were to follow PETA’s recommendation. The poem is, as I wrote earlier, a meditation on joy. To be more specific, it is about the reality of joy as something one must fight for, especially when there seems to be so much that seeks to rob one of it. By virtue of my name, which translated means joy fills the house, joy should be natural for me, to me, and in some ways, it is. However, it is a difficult thing to think about joy when the reality of death is always at the foreground, especially in this country where one isn’t able to escape the constancy of news about the killings of unarmed Black people. To be sure, the question of home is political. As is the body. And really, what in this country (or anywhere else for that matter) isn’t?

Last year, I couldn’t stop obsessing about death. About the reality that I could be next to have my name included in the long list of names — known and unknown — of people who have been victims of police brutality. It is a terrifying thing. I wrote feverishly. As if my death were near. I could not escape, as my mother pointed out, metaphors about being swallowed. Every poem was essentially about death or dying. As has been the case for me since I started writing, writing was a way for me to figure out all the questions I had. Why is this happening? What can I do to make sure I am not next? Is this even possible? And so, poem after poem after poem, I sought to explore what it means to live inside my body. With this constant fear of death. How exhausting it was. How exhausting it is. The poem above came at a period when I was indeed tired. I wanted to write about something other than death, but it almost seemed impossible.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to beat a dead horse is:

  1. to keep talking about a subject that has already been discussed or decided
  2. to waste time and effort trying to do something that is impossible

In a way, I became the horse. I couldn’t stop beating myself up for my inability to come up with a solution for systemic issues that are, essentially, the foundation and the building blocks of this country, if we are to think of it as a house. My poems didn’t mean shit. In another poem I ask: “What good is a poem? What good is a poem if it can’t stop a bullet?” In yet another, I ask, “What is a Black body if not an unending question?” I have no answers.

For this poem, I was curious what it means to literally beat a dead horse. It isn’t too far a leap to consider how once, at a point in history, Black people were subjected to burden in the way mules are. Still are. One only needs to consider, for instance, how mass incarceration is just a modern iteration of slavery. It turns out that we are nowhere past the reality of Du Bois’s treatise about  striving in The Souls of Black Folk. Even then, I was curious if there was music to be found in the beaten hide, something akin to joy. My name, as I mentioned above, means joy fills the house. And though a house is not exactly a home (that distinction matters), the body too is, in some ways, a house. Or a home. Can be at least. Whatever language we decide on, however, we can agree that not everyone feels at home in their body. I don’t always.

I don’t always feel at home in most places. Born in Nigeria, in Ilesa, Osun State, I have lived in the United States since I was seventeen. First, in Cypress, TX. Then, Houston, TX. Huntsville, TX. Kingwood, TX. Humble, TX. I have also travelled a bit across the United States. A few years ago, in 2016, I took my first and only trip thus far outside the U.S., to Costa Rica which reminded me so much of home — the gravel road, the hills and mountains on the way to Monteverde were reminiscent of the trips to Imesi-Ile, where my grandparents lived, where my dad was born.

In a recent interview, the question of home came up. “Tell me about home,” the interviewer says. In response, I say:


My relationship with home is kind of a complicated one. For the most part, I believe it is nowhere or rather, everywhere we make ours. I believe we find it, or sometimes, it finds us. In the geographical sense, Nigeria is home. I was born and lived there till I was 17. It was home then. In some ways, it still is though it doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. For the most part, I’ve lived in Houston since 2007. That means it’s been home for that long. In some ways, it too doesn’t feel like home anymore. I still live in Houston, or at least around its perimeters — I currently live in Humble. So, in some other ways, it still very much is home. Home for me isn’t really a fixed place. However, both places have equally been home in the way I understand home — anywhere you belong, where you’re known and always welcome and, where you can return to if you ever leave it.


In the scientific sense of the word, displacement is quite simply a change in position. In a sense, it can be argued that the word displaced is an accurate descriptor for everyone who leaves — either by choice, or otherwise – the place they’ve historically known as home. This, I think is what it means to be in diaspora. No matter how settled one might be in a new home, I think it’s impossible to escape the feeling of homelessness. Of restlessness, which is, for me, a default.

As with my poems, this essay was prompted by a question: Is there still no place like home? The straightforward answer to the question is either a yes or no, but I think it’s more complicated than that. It has something to do with the word ‘still’ which was, in 2018, my word for the year. I don’t remember when I first started deciding on a word for a new year, but the earliest documentation I have of this practice is 2012. The word for that year was “run.”.

I love that a word can have more than one meaning. Still. Still. Still. By definition, being without motion, the continuance of an action or condition, or a static photograph (specifically one obtained from a motion picture). In retrospect, I think the word ‘still’ was important to me in 2018 because the year before that, I was everywhere. I was hardly home. Even when I was home, I spent the majority of my time away from my apartment – a residence I really had so I could have somewhere to sleep when I returned. I almost didn’t do anything else there. In 2017, touring for a book took me to 11 cities outside Houston, across 3 states. Texas: College Station, Laredo, San Antonio, Austin, Galveston, Huntsville, San Marcos. Louisiana: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette. Missouri: Kansas City.

To return to the idiom, I found out that its origins trace back to a time in Europe, “before the 14th century when the institution of family started taking precedence over other factors. Society, environment and family life all came into being and also the realization that the person is truly at ease when at home” (theidioms.com). In so many ways, the family we grow up with (or without) shapes our understanding of home. The world outside isn’t always a safe place, and the family, home, in the most ideal circumstance, provides a sense of safety, a sense of refuge.

True as that may be, a question remains for some of us. How can one, how does one, feel at home in a country that wants one dead? I have no answers. Still.


Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of the New Delta Review‘s eighth annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry, his work has been anthologized and published widely.