IN THE DARKNESS OF IMPERIALISM

I was born in a banana republic, Between the carnivorous chains of Françafrique, In an open-air dumpster, Where tyranny, barbarity, and savagery speak with arrogance. I am perfumed with all the nauseating scents of misery. I grew up under the honeyed speeches of necktied oppressors, Their swollen pockets vomiting development aid. They painted the walls of despair UN blue, While our starving bellies served as ballot boxes. My tongue is a battlefield It was cut, stitched back, trained to sing the masters’ symphonies. I speak French like a trauma articulated, With the pain of my color since the first slave trades. My struggle, a reminder of the invasion, an inheritance of batons from the Caribbean plantations. I saw dictators blessed by chancelleries, Oil traded for diplomatic silence, Mines bled dry by hands gloved in elegance, And mass graves hidden beneath bilateral agreements. I am what they call human resource, Exportable, exploitable, erasable at will. I was born where dignity is sold by the kilo, And where the future fits in a punctured boat at dawn on the Mediterranean. I was born where the future fits in a punctured boat at dawn on the Mediterranean. Where a passport is a burden, not a key. Where one sells their skin to organ merchants To buy a pixelated mirage of Europe. I saw my mother weep silently over deportation slips, My father break his back in open-pit mines of the cradle of humanity, I learned to read in the pamphlets of the defiant, To count on my fingers the promises unkept. School, a factory of stillborn dreams. Healthcare, a market where cancer is sold in tainted doses. Justice, a rumor, an insult whispered Between two power cuts and three police blunders. I am the child of fake independences, Of tailor-made constitutions stitched for insatiable gluttons. I was born without inheritance, save for This rage accumulating like sand under the skin. They called me delinquent, migrant, underdeveloped, But I am the living archive of their beautified crimes. I am the raw product of their refined markets, The shattered mirror they flee, for fear of seeing their own barbarity within.