Auguste Romain Nyecki Poet Free verse

THE INNOCENCE OF THE DAMNED OF FRANCAFRIQUE

I am innocent.
I will never plead guilty
For all the crimes against humanity that France and its colonialist accomplices
Have committed in the cradle of my ancestors for centuries.

The color of my skin is neither a crime nor a tragedy.
I do not have to justify being a human being.

I am a Sub-Saharan African.
I am a Bantu from Equatorial Africa,
Like all those Pygmies exhibited in wooden cages by this Christian and supposedly humanistic West.

What have I done to inherit the nightmares of Françafrique?
What have I done to flee misery on a land so rich, chained to the voracity of Western predators?

I will never sing the symphonies of submission
Upon the altar of servitude
To sanctify my humanity.

I do not have to submit to the Negrophobia of these supremacist savages.
I was born free on a land devastated by Western imperialism.

I grew up in one of the colonial wastelands
Of a France that is still slave-minded.

I built myself amid the savagery of a banana republic,
Worshipping the tyranny of alienated natives of Françafrique.

I have never feared death.
I lived in a dilapidated cemetery, lined with the living dead.

The scourges of misery shaped the coldness of my lucid soul.

I am the product of the colonial massacres
Of the slave-trading France of the Enlightenment in Africa.

I am the proof that the Republic of Human Rights
Has never treated Sub-Saharan Africans as free human beings.

I bear the indelible scars left by the independence fighters of Cameroon.

I will never be ashamed of being an African with melanin-filled skin,
Even if Marianne’s Negrophobic children call me a parasite,
While French multinationals brutally plunder the wealth of my continent.

I am an ambitious migrant,
An honorable undocumented immigrant,
A humanist Pan-Africanist,
A preacher of the saving values of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

I do not believe that democracy is the paradigm
Of Africa’s colonial trading posts.

I did not cross the Mediterranean
To become a prostitute for the criminal capitalism of the West.

The fascists of the Republic mock the thousands of African women
Who end up swallowed
By the deadly waters of the Mediterranean.

♡Like0

Share Poem

---

Post Comments

Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poem. Negative comments will result your account being banned.

Please Login to post a comment