Thinking About Bakassi
The morning breaks in Bakassi with moist painted skies. Rains with heavy hands of a forgotten history—a forgetful mother. Children here gather at the mouth of the sea, seeking what is left of themselves; and some watching: here, a quest; and there, a ritual that hungers to be performed, to heal the land from its history. God! Whatever it is, this land is not adjacent with history, as its mother never remembers it—since they were given out to bury the history of a people, a dot on the map that they forgot; it forms the significant part of the map. Bakassi, your waters remember not its beginning again, but it wanders into a land that thinks less of it—a booty gained in forgetfulness. Bakassi, your children wander, thinking home is not a place of lucent dream—enough, but wait. In your wandering feet, in your hands of waters, your names are retained, floating home the will of the people to live again. Bakassi, your sons are rising, seeking home in the breast of their once-mother, who is now ashamed of taking the blame for selling her own child—when it should have asked for its equal rights.
A Night at Chokocho Bridge
On that owl ridden eve,
Our river was broken off its silence
Nine times. I mean, nine times
By the hands of unlawful men.
Atrocious, with no trace of human,
In the manner of rob and run away—
That same old way of unholy raid,
This time with the act of cutting open
the bellies of my mother’s children,
floating like fishes out of air,
on the seabed. The river rejects their bodies.
Nine times, not for baptism—a way to say,
Now, we’re saved from being members
Of a political party or perhaps
A community, but our iniquities here, there.
Not for the remission of their sin.
The night was not for their judgments either,
But it was for the greedy monsters
pillaging my father’s land, Etche
taking from my mother’s laps
her sons, walking them through the sea,
again, not in Jesus of Lubeke into the new world
but with their naked bodies cut open.
A free passage of water, not life.
Their bodies serving as boats ferrying them
into the shadowy land of no return.
The people gathered their remnants,
my father’s household gathered—seeking
dead bodies like fishermen seek for fish.
So great was the catch, on the 9th of December,
whence, the seat of power remained silent;
I mean, silent till their kingdom comes to an end.
Tales Not Told
On the night our kinsmen tied our wrists with the same rope they use to pray,
at the river bank, before the voyage,
even the reeds bend toward us like they’re listening to a wound.
The stories of a door that opened only to close on our necks,
across seas that rose from the salt of our throats—
and there, our kinsmen counted us into barrels
like yams that had forgotten how to root.
With the same voices that blessed our births, we climbed
to board the ships that had already learned the weight of our kind.W
here they peeled our names from our backs like wet bark,
our skins became a ledger of every rope that found us,
our souls lived next door to a sound like teeth breaking stone.
Who would have weighed us and found us lighter than a promise?
We whose grandfathers wore leopard teeth now wear nothing but the rope’s memory,
if not at the table where brothers sold brothers and called it feast.
Are we not the many, and they the few who counted us with thumbs?
Those who anchored with scales in one hand and a Bible in the other,
buying men with beads and selling silence with guns.
We also held the rope before it held us.
Are these not our fingers on the trigger’s other side?
John Chinaka Onyeche is a Nigerian writer and historian from Etche in Rivers State, based in Port Harcourt. His work appears in York Literary Review, McNeese Review, Pier Review, Tilted House Journal, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, he writes at the intersection of personal grief and collective memory—exploring family, broken home, survival, and the weight of history. Connect on X/Twitter: @Apostlejohnchin
Feature Image: Paulo Beckman on Unsplash