History

Bastion of FaithIWe belong to God in different waysJust as Odysseus belonged to the sirens and Penelope In different spindles of history. The sun arranges A box of light at the corridor of my being:This fibrous strands of belief, wovenAt the intersection of the sea. I, a boy, wade through the Niger-DeltaWhere the phytoplanktons and […]

On re-counting history 68-sh, 50-sh years later I It is easy to miss the moment when an intellectual tradition starts to wither: there is no bang, no funeral, no obituary. Nothing grand. It just disappears, and one day, you look around and realise that everything is gone, via a slow, suffocating erosion. Black Orpheus was […]

ASANTEKumasi, your name, a tree with millions of golden branches, a border of origin from which your mother was missing until she flickered on the ghostly lane, & again in the city under Oboase.Your children, named after historical wars of a stranger who intruded yourterritory. In their manhood might have met a man inscribed as […]

Barter Because it’s 1945 And the Allies put a war horse over a west African infantryman, A boy is traded for a horse. A boy is traded for a horse, The horse gallops giddy in a bottle, The buyer follows inside to fetch his horse. and drowns. A boy is traded for a horse his […]

history oft becomes second nature. a history of subservience is inferiority. history is sediment of time, sturdy like diamond to undo history, we ask time to become cannibal, which is to say we ask time to chew on its own fangs, chew itself back to the beginning, down to its innocent gums a history of […]

  Words, words, words You failed me when I needed you the most You vagabond!   I (For them at the Murambi genocide memorial site in Rwanda)   Ploughed from the mass graves of History Exhibits on the pyre of empty testaments Equestrians of Trauma Signifiers of perpetual suffering Icons of silence, of the never-speech: […]