PROSPER IFEANYI

SELF-PORTRAIT OF A BOY WITH JARRING IDENTITIES.

“We are our memory…that chimerical museum of shifting 
shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”
                                                                                   —Borges

---

the moment we refract ourselves
from the blinding spectrum of our 
past, we dissect a part of us that 
remembers just how well the portcullis
of Lekki was reopened in arcadia.
let’s poeticise about more serious
things, shall we? imagine a child born 
into a time of war, say WW1. & his first
experience becomes one of hunger,
hostility & hate. he becomes a portrait
of jarring identities with the animal 
instinct to survive. this too, is what I have
been telling anyone who cared to listen.
in that night of trepidation & noose
slaughter; i can still hear my mother’s
voice collide with the ambience of
frolicking bullets from the khaki-men 
wielding the Kalashnikov.
my father,
struggled hard to exhume the placenta
of his unborn, for that was the 
expressway between the land of the living
& unborn. & when he told us to run with 
passion, he warned that if we were asked if
this country belong to us, we were to say:
do not say this is our country.
& the moment our voices were 
ensembled to chant the #ending 
of things we couldn’t swallow, they 
made us pluck it from our tongues. 
this is just how well our broken past 
influences our unknown future.

Back to JUSTICE