A Poem Recitation at the 2024 commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism
When I went to Lagos last year, the bolt driver asked me “Ah, you’re coming from Abuja, how are you coping with the bombing on that side?” It was a big question mark in the middle of my forehead as I wrinkled my brows and asked “What bombings?” and I zoned out, then I fell into the Abuja-Kaduna train. A loud bang derails us off the track and onto the cold stones. There is turbulence and I can’t remember when I lost my soul to survival instincts.
When the darkness engulfed us that night, I died.
I had never heard anything louder than the sound of my own fear, palpitations bursting through my chest and the 360 degrees of the bullets flying, and voices, and bullets and voices. We fell to the floor as though in prayer, folded into whispers of lord have mercy, digging into memory for reason: a wife at home, a child to nestle, a family to tend to. Bullets, voices, bullets, inched closer and closer; loud like judgment day, but we stayed silent like a graveyard, with death merely a footstep away. Passengers were removed like pawns from a chessboard, and I held myself together, clung to the board, cleaved unto words of faith like a shield. I awaited the redemption song, the let my people go.
This is the one where we become a cautionary tale, this is no tale by moonlight, there are no children in a circle beaming with light; this is real life where passengers are now hostages, encircled in danger, some missing, begging, praying. In my country, we’re all little red riding hoods and the big bad wolves are sheathed somewhere in plain sight;
Even when we cry, it is drowned in all the bullets, voices, bullets, voices.
I am a child in Kaduna, mommy is a worker at school and we always arrive earlier than class begins, so I like to play outside with my friend who sells sweets. Creating imaginary worlds and toy guns, pew pew pewing at each other until mommy’s voice draws me inside, they teach us of loving thy neighbor as thyself and how to fold ourselves into prayers, because eight-year olds are God’s favorite love letters in human form, and so I make myself a prayer. Today, there are some new men beside us. I don’t notice the bags lying on the floor, I am playing with my friend, Ahmed, who sells sweets because mommy said “don’t talk to strangers.”
I chase a running ball down the street and run back to the gate, Ahmed is a river of red on the floor, there are bullets, voices, bullets. I hide in a corner, squat into a prayer, how did toy guns become real ones, play turns to explosions, a school a warzone? We were never even taught how to spell abduction or funeral, how do I make sense of this? Mommy is splattered at the doorway, a statistic, a sour story. Love thy neighbor as thyself, they said. I froze as though I was subject to a reprogramming;
As though losing color, as though losing life.
I am at the UN house, in the depths of the rubble after the bombing, the collapse, the devastation. 23 counted, their souls are heavy in my throat. I wonder, how many times will I make a casket of this body? Holding wake keeps and reciting elegies for every story that made a home in my bones? How many times will memory be a burying ground for dreams, for lives? How many times will I make a garden of my mouth, giving life to the what ifs and hopes that this never happened?
Trauma lives in the body like a dominant gene, the thing about conflict is that it finds its way to the science of you, call it DNA. My friends no longer take the train, I still hear the voices calling out. They follow me like a birthmark, like an unappeased spirit. Each day I die, and I am reincarnated into a new fear, a new way of being, a new reality, a new prayer;
Voices, bullets, voices.
I fold myself into a prayer, a letter to God, a coping mechanism. I remember, none of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.
So for you, I will always grow flowers.
For you, we will always remember.
For you, I pray we will be better.
There are so many things you will never learn if you don’t go outside, there are even more things you won't learn if you don’t let the light in.
People really do metamorphose with time, you are one of them.
You are what it means to leak light, there will always be flowers that grow from you. Even in survivor’s guilt, Ubuntu, I am because we are;
An acquired taste for life, for light, for change,
In your hands, you gather the stories and
In your voice, you create the change,
And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.
The driver drops me off, and I carry the bag of memory with me.