THE EMBERS OF MY MEMORY

My heart of stone quenches its thirst in the dirty hands of misery. The tears of my family tree run down the scarred faces of their history. The pain of my color screams in silence the secrets these racists choke. My dignity unravels in the cold sheets of indifference. I write prayers with the sufferings of my dehumanized ancestors. Colonial barbarity rocked me more tenderly than the arms of a banana republic. The darkness of my Africanness embraces me with the tenderness Marianne denies me. My nightmares slip through the bars of their contempt. I build castles of peace from the rubble of my rage. Humanity has left me, but poverty calls me by my name. I walk barefoot on the embers of a History they wish to erase. My memory bleeds beneath the spit of their falsified textbooks. The chains of my forebears still echo in the halls of their palaces. The scars on my skin speak centuries their museums keep silent. The winds of exile still blow through my sand-filled veins. I breathe the ashes of my ancestors burned into oblivion. The shadow of my truth roams through the filthy dungeons of their ignorance. They painted my penance as folklore to display it without ever hearing it. My ordeal crosses centuries but never breaches their borders. I was born of the grim whirlwind of ancestral fury. The flag of my homeland flies from my heart, but my roots have mourned for millennia. My mother tongue weeps in the darkness of the Republic’s atrocities. They offer me equality like one throws a bone to a starving dog. Their lights dazzle me but never warm me. My clenched fists still hold the dreams they hanged. The wrinkles of my grandmother bear the cartography of a perpetual revolt. I kneel on the ruins of my identity reduced to dust. My pride is a wound they refuse to heal. My surname suffocates in their colonized mouths.