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Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020: Chromosomes
by Oje Taiye
Growing up in Nigeria, I had to listen to the horrors/trauma that victims of domestic violence (especially women) had to live through. And in some unexplainable way, those horrific experiences have become a part of my own childhood memory. The poem is a persona narrative that I move through to beckon the history of violence against women in the Nigerian polity.
Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020: Chromosomes
these poems aren’t mine per se
they are my mother’s, my mother’s mother’s.
they are the battles of the woman who’s been told again and again, that her body is an empire of
pain & silence. they are the battles of the woman
who suffered at the hands of my father, (whom she adored & who somehow loses his temper &
moral sense).
they are the battles of the woman walking barefooted over cassava fields, with yam stems in her hand.
i wish i wasn’t tired of her sadness. a door flung open with weak tea in
the steam—synapses of pretty chimera. the truth is i live too close to the surface of my mother’s body: a ghost in a collared shirt. to see all the names a body can carry—my mother appears
in my dreams in a satin jacket.
she becomes a flood, swallows my father & calls it freedom.
Recording provided as part of Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020. Used by permission of the author.
A special thank you to our WordView 2020 poets.
Chair of the Judging Panel, Imtiaz Dharker, says: “The hundreds of entries we received blew in to the Archive like a breath of pure, unpolluted air from all over the world, revealing something of the time we are living in, some telling it straight, some slant. It was exciting to check in to the Poetry Archive’s Youtube channel every morning and come upon one unexpected voice after another."
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