THE MURMURES OF THE FIELD OF MARS
They were exhibited as strange curiosities,
They all had a face, a name, an identity on this land soiled by negrophobia.
They looked without seeing, their eyes lost in the ruins of their humanity violated for centuries.
In their iron cages, they dreamed of elsewhere, where the sky opened wide, without bars, without lures.
They spoke without words, with abrupt gestures.
Their voices, a dramatic memory of the atrocities suffered in the Caribbean.
They no longer remembered an unfettered life.
Their suffering chattered under the feet of colonial France.
They stood there, like specters from a bygone time.
Their stories engraved on their scarred bodies on the slave plantations.
Each scar was a dramatic story, a test, a penance to overcome.
Every blank stare, a question, a truce, a wall of victim wailing.
Prisoners of this paradise obscured by the slave lights of colonialism.
Each tear shed was a prophecy of the future horrors of Françafrique.
These men, women and children torn from the wilds of Africa flourished in the nightmares of an empire in decline.
Under the weight of Negrophobic oppression, these broken souls clung to every bit of their Africanness.
In each fight, a spark, a resistance, a flame, burst from their insides, to break the chains of servitude.
They were kings and queens from great African dynasties.
They have been reduced to shadows, contrasts and vulgar chattels to be slaved to without limits.
Their dreams were shattered by the code of indigenousness and the charter of imperialism.
Races in the plains were exchanged by the legitimization of colonial pacts.
They stood proudly, despite the weight of the chains, defying the Parisian grayness, the winter, the snow, the rain and the rats.
Their cries, songs of hope, hymns to life, calls for love, freedom, equality and fraternity.
They were irrefutable proof of a forgotten glory.
To recognize in them, not beasts, but human beings with universal aspirations.
They were the voice of the voiceless, defenseless, a mirror held up to our own existence.
A reminder that life, in all its splendor, was not limited to barriers, to the tyranny of fear.
They were, in spite of everything, silent spectators, of the lost greatness, of the wonderful world with the majestic pharaohs,
Where man and animal shared the same enclosure, the same soil, without domination, without combat,
Copyright ©
Auguste Romain Nyecki
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