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HEIR TO AFRICA’S SCARS
Born a Christian in the fertile womb of a blessed land,
A paradisiacal genesis for a continent chained to imperialism.
Genocides cascading beneath the crumbling altar of human rights.
They crucified my humanity
With demonic chimeras.
I have dragged my zinc coffin since birth
Across the minefields of these greedy philanthropists.
I carry the age-old weight of curses
Of my zombified people since the slave trades.
They do not want me to sanctify my traumatized Africanness
With the blessings of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
I am guilty like Jesus Christ
And innocent like the soiled hands of a child soldier.
I have never enjoyed the riches of my partitioned continent.
These scavengers have spread hatred in my people’s hearts for centuries.
My tormented mind is the vault of horrors
That the West has perpetrated in the cradle of my ancestors.
These criminals want me to curse Lucifer
As if he were responsible for centuries of dehumanization
Of my forebears in the Americas.
The devil will never be my enemy,
I have never met him.
Human savagery has nothing metaphysical about it.
My indelible scars are not fictitious remnants.
He called me a filthy *****,
He discovered the face of my love.
He will no longer have the courage to insult my genetic code.
I scourged him with the laws of the Code Noir
Of the Republic of slaveholding Enlightenment.
I share the same skin color as Osiris,
The same beauty as those colored pharaohs.
The journey is scarred,
The traumas, too silent.
I fight in the death row corridor
To remain a man of integrity.
To write the darkness of my feelings,
A liberating outlet for my demons.
I chose integrity in the meanders of precarity.
In another life, I would wield guitars
To escape the whims of misery.
Serenity, my only solution in this dimension.
I think of the reaper every day,
Like a man condemned to death.
Copyright ©
Auguste Romain Nyecki
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