Asma'u Shaheedah's Blog, page 4

Immigrant Diaries (1): At Sea

Salt water up to your chest
your mother
cries a house
cries dry land
cries a family
cries love.

Salt water up to your throat
your mother
cries peace
cries a home
cries a god
cries survival

Salt water up to your chin
your mother
cries anger
cries rage
cries war
cries revenge

Salt water up to your eyes
your mother
cries forgiveness
cries a country
cries defeat
cries surrender

...Your Father

Your father pushes his cart
every night to the street opposite 5
stands by the corner and stirs white rice
he says he makes the best chickpeas
and with shredded chicken
it is the best
your fathers teeth is blackened with tea
you tease him about it
he says it is wisdom
your mother says it is poverty
rich peoples teeth don't blacken with tea

Your father pushes his cart every night
sells rice by the corner
he comes home smelling like spices
and to you
it is the best fragrance in the world

Your father died 5 years ago
you boil the rice just right,
simmer the chickpeas and
shredded chicken the right way
you tell your kids it is the best
some nights,
you sprinkle spices in his room
and lie in his bed,
it still smells like perfection to you.

You now drive a nice car
and have a house
you tell your kids to drink their tea with milk
you remember,
poverty blackens the teeth.

Homecoming As A Woman

I came to Nigeria a week ago hoping with all the hope that i could muster up in my heart that home would feel like home. That i would walk into the house where i barely grew up in and feel a sense of belonging...it was all in my head, the moment i came home, i realised i had made a big mistake.
The thing with living abroad is this, it changes you, completely, especially if you have lived in a place with a lot of different people from different places whom hold different ideas. Over the course of my time abroad, i am very proud with the collection of friends i have kept close to my heart, i befriended people i never knew i could befriend, had life changing conversations and all of that eventually makes up who you are.  The horrible thing about that is this, you go home expecting home to have evolved as you have evolved but home stays the same, home smells the same, home looks the same but home does not feel like home anymore, home feels like a transit, not a destination. Back home, everyone assumes you are the same person as the person whom left. I came home "re-birthed".
I found something peculiar to people i spoke to back home, i could not have a conversation with anyone, as a writer, i love to talk, i love to hear peoples opinion and most especially, i love to be listened to, to voice my opinions and have them challenged. On coming "home" i found out that nobody wanted to listen to me, everyone just wanted to tell me what they think i should think and say, i found myself blocked, i could not have a conversation with one person, not even my parents. It is one of the things that breaks my heart the most, i thought coming home would make me feel good, make me forget all my troubles but i found no solace. I dread waking up knowing there is not one person that i could have an honest conversation with, someone i didn't have to pretend with.
Another thing that eats away at my toes is something i had known my entire life, something i was made to resent. I grew up the least girly girl around, i resented being a woman, for me, it felt like being a woman was stifling and i wanted to be free, i knew my society did not let women to be free so i chose to resent myself (i have since learned to love and appreciate myself tho) and change myself. I met an old friend today whom came to visit my friend at home, after sitting for a while he asked "It must be very boring being a girl, what do you girls do apart from sitting at home?". He was right, being a girl in Northern Nigeria is a curse on a girl like me who wants to have conversations like existentialism and travel the world, it was painfully boring, it is okay for a male child to go out and come home at late hours but for a girl, it is and outrageous calamity. Nobody wants a child whom questions these things, everyone thinks a girl like that is nothing but trouble.
Everyone wants to take care of a girl, nobody assumes a girl can handle herself. My father told me that as long as i am an unmarried single woman, i will answer to him and even when i get married, i will answer to my husband. In my mind i wondered whom my brother would have to answer to, all i heard was "you would never be your own person here, you would never be a full person here, always second class, always below someone" all of my dreams just came crashing down on me, i knew i had made a mistake coming home. I would never be the person i want to be.
Maybe homecoming after living abroad where freedom was abundant and a person did not need to answer to anyone would be different if i were a boy, coming home to a father asking him "what do you want to do now that you are back son?" not an anxious mother saying "Now that you are done with school, it's time for you to find a husband." would probably be exciting but then...i wouldn't know that, maybe then, home would feel like home, home would not be a scary concept that reeks of tears and pain. For me home is supposed to be a place where i would go to bed knowing that i would wake up in the morning with people around me whom want me to do what i want to do as long as i am happy, this is how i would define home, a place where i could be myself, where my opinion is valid, where i am not surrounded by people whom think they know me but don't really know me and they do not make an effort to know me.
Being a woman is hard in a place where nobody respects women, a place where everyone wants to tell a woman what she should do and reply her "whys?" with disdain and cold "because i said so." This is just my homecoming tho, i am just one woman.
I would like to know more about peoples homecoming after living abroad, how did you find home? was home the same as the idea of home you had built in your mind? was home a place with a foreseeable future for you? I  would really like to know.

Whispers At Night

Image Source At night you have dreams
of kneeling in prayer
to a God whom
you
have closed your heart to
like old friends
whom occasionally
remember
what was,
your lips whisper
holy names
you
don't open your eyes
but
behind your eyelids
there is an image
of a holy place
a holy heart
you don't say her name
but she
is on your
tongue.

Blackness (1):The subtlety of the Race Issue

Image Source: 101 Hd wallpapers
To be honest, i never saw myself as black until i moved away from Africa. I had grown up in a predominantly black society in that the issue of my skin color was never even an issue at all.
I first knew what it meant to be black when i walked into a lecture hall and the entire row i had sat in was empty. None of the white kids in my class sat next to me for the entire semester. On having a conversation with my mother about school, i told her what had happened to me all semester and i had not made a single friend. My very african mother said "you are there to study anyway, you don't need friends. More time for you to study." we laughed it off both of us knowing very well that what she had said was only a feeble attempt to boost my morale.
One day, my father and older sister came to visit and as we walked down Eminonu, a lady looked at us, yelled "negro" and spat on the ground. I was stunned. My father laughed it off and told me she did not know what she was doing. We Africans tend to laugh off racism towards us at first because we do not know how to respond to it, we are not African-American, we do not wear the scars of slavery on our skin. Racism to us was such a foreign concept, we had no notion of it, we did not assume it could affect us, coming from where we were coming from and we were never thought how to respond to it.
A few years later i fell in love with a non-black/non-african boy whom only held my hand when we were alone. He never introduced me to his friends as the girl he was seeing and he made sure we were not seen together in public locations. I once asked him if my skin color was an issue and he resulted to being upset at the fact that i would say something like that (of course he had black friends), he told me "he was just not a fan of pda". I found pictures of him holding his new white girlfriends hand on instagram (the most public location) and hanging out with his friends. I am not saying he was racist, i am just saying that race was always a subtle issue for us, like the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to acknowledge.
Race is never an issue until we realise that it is because it always is. Even when we choose to not talk about it, even when we pretend that the store owner is not following just i and my very white friend at the store, even when we pretend that people don't stare and wonder if i am a hooker when i meet my white male friends for breakfast. The issue of race in a society that is afraid to mention race is the biggest issue of all.
Race will always be an issue as long as we keep pretending that it is not an issue, the sooner we face up to it and accept that slavery should not have happened at all and racism is dumb, the sooner we begin to fix what is broken.


Sayonara
xoxo

Skin

Two lovers
Hungry for touch
Desperate for that
Skin on skin intimacy
The merging of wet lips
They traced the lines
On each others body
Like unclaimed territories
Deciphering the map
That led to passion.
See, two lovers
Numbed by the pain
Craved for that
Skin on skin connection
Each one blinded
By pleasure points
Tracing kisses
In a cold winter night.

Two lovers
Tongues heavy with words
Untold stories
Held on to hearts
That beat against skin.

Book Review: Corridors Of My Mind

This is for my Poetry lovers.

It is a scary thing to feel a writers emotions so deeply. Reading Corridors Of My mind was a roller coaster of emotions for me. It is an elegant collection of passionate love,pain, joy, calm, healing.It is almost a progression from pain to relief. I am glad i read this book. This breathtaking collection will have you clenching your fist against your heart out of raw emotions. Beautifully written. There is a poem for everyone, whatever you are going through, Angel has expressed it for you. I guarantee there is relief in her words. A stunning read. One of my favourites are Chapter 57: The Apocalypse, Chapter 115: He Calls.

Have a good read
Sayonara
xoxo

Update

So i haven't written here in a while...mainly because i have had too much going on with me. To be honest, i just have not being feeling very up to writing. I am super stressed with my masters thesis but hopefully in a couple weeks, i would have graduated and i will have more time to post on here.
Another reason why i haven't written here in also because i am one of the writers at Ezibota (click here to check it out). I am writing on there with a team of really cool writers. I am thinking of coming up with a post schedule, at least once a week? i don't know....i have being quite indecisive and just plain confused/lost lately. Anyway, whatever happens in the next few weeks, i will post about it.

PS: I am kind of thinking of making this blog solely about the poetry and maybe other things i find interesting once in a while? Again, indecisive...we will see what happens in the next few weeks.

xoxo
Sayonara

Resistance

The song of resistance rose from the throats of men
Whose hands are breaking the chains
Of suppression of rights
The sound of the wisdom of the old
And the roar of the energy of the young
Filled the sky
Rising and falling
To the beat of the hearts of men
Anchored like chains hands locked in
Men marched across the bridge of oppression
Stomping feet to break free of bonds of segregation
The song of resistance has being song
The rib of oppression has been broken
Men have walked the road to liberation
There is no barricade
On the road to freedom.

Book Review(3): Norwegian Wood-Haruki Murakami

First of all, i felt like i held my breath all through reading this book. I sort of binge read it all in a day and when i was through i had to sit a bit to catch my breath. It literally left me breathless, i am still wriling from the after effects.

Norwegian wood was such a journey for me, it was a severaly depressing book i have to say but i think that is the most attractive thing about it (apart from the fact that it is set in my favorite country in the world. TOKYO-JAPAN). It found a way to creep under my skin and make my eyes widen in amazement with each twist. Thing is, i am not a big fan of translated books because i stringly believe the writers words get lost in translation but this book, it was so good that to be honest, i can't imagine it any better in any other language. It used language and words that chilled the reader. You can't help but get emotionally involved with the characters, it's like Murakami is calling out to the reader and the characters are screaming "see me, feel me" and feel/see i did.
It is a bit of a sad love story and there is so much to learn from this book, i picked up so new interests from it and learned several things about classical music. Haruki Murakami is amazing, this is his first book that i have read and i am goin to read After the Quake next which i think is a collection of short stories. I expect to be blown away just as Norwegian Wood rocked my boat.

Yes to sappy love stories.

xoxo
Sayonara