I didn’t know I came from a culture until I left it

Until overseas named me a child again

Until departure became my first instructor

And taught me, that

Every alphabet begins with forgetting

All who knew me

Before I became anew

Must learn me over again 

This voice, a border crossing

This tongue, half-mother, half-foreign soldier

All that I knew

Before they became anew

I must learn over again

My people, scattered verbs rewritten by oceans

Their laughter translated into survival

Still searching for a subject to feel absolute

Some things are forever carried but not always remembered

So what do we remember when we forget?

The sound of us returning?

To what and to whose profit exactly?

My grandmother’s lips spilled prayers like wheat

Mba Joeingding, she is an ancestor now

Her rosary beads like teeth in the dark

Her voice still seducing the wind 

Still dangerous enough to be called holy

Her wisdom smuggled through time, sharp enough

To pass as a dangerous weapon 

Nna, Allah mang illa dua jabeellah 

Throughout my genealogy

I have remained distant

A passport of longing folded in my chest

A distance in my surname, eyeng mooilleh

We were born from hurt, still borderless

We were born from hurt, still blooming

We were born from hurt, so I ran

We were born from hurt, and 

I still dream of mattresses that remember

The scent of sleep and not our departure

Before anything else

I love us first with knowledge

With the quiet resistance of naming love aloud

I count myself among the absent fear

And among the fearful, present

For absence too is a country

And fear is how we inherit it

Black as I know it now

Is no longer the absence of colour

It is a field where languages return

kneeling at its own birth

It is an indelible sound we inherit

A banner stitched from every wound

It is the colour of history when it refuses to die quietly

There is something about this knowledge

There is everything about this knowledge

That would be forgotten tomorrow

And I, still running the distance between my name and its echo

And I, a small translation of my ancestors

And I, still writing their unfinished sentence

So that this world

May one day 

Pronounce us whole, again.