WHAT THE MEDIA MEAN WHEN THEY SAY ‘TELL ME YOUR STORY’
- Jul 28, 2023
- 2 min read
by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
it only takes the opening of the street to walk into my people’s cry.
between the space of life and death, i’m swimming backwards in the river i will later discover to be the tears i gather every night of each day that loosens into a janazah.
just after bidding the corpse farewell with an offering of peace assalamu alaikum, we said, a reporter asks if we know every dead we cry, & pray for. we show him our foreheads where our birthmarks are questions feigning to be answered. isn’t this what a question is, a comma forced to answer the name of a period?
the next day, the night still young to rollout, the muazim calls for prayer & a janazah pushes another dead through the barrier.
after zuhr, with our cheeks still yawning for dryness, another reporter ask a little boy if he knows how childhood feels, there is no ageing here,
just the screeching movement of maturity.
at dusk, when we sit to watch the news, our griefs replaying in the news with the bloody faces of our lost ones suffocating in every word the news headline carries, “a minor crisis occurred with few deaths.”
with a pool beneath our eyes, we stare at the emptiness beside us. few few?
tomorrow, we will pour our hopes into a paper boat & pray more janazah.
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is an undergraduate student of Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, the winner of the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature, Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee with works in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, CutBank Literary Journal, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, The Deadlands, Agbowó, and elsewhere. Tweet @ZainabBobi.
