Excerpt: For the Love of Country and Memory by Michael Imossan

Even Hurricanes Have Names and For That, I Name my Tragedies Sunset

About 40 people were killed when the gunmen stormed the church on June 5, opened fire on
the congregation, and also detonated explosives as the worshippers scampered for safety.
[Channels TV. August 9, 2022.]

I

my father, before he died, said: if you name a
thing after beauty, perhaps it will outlive its suffering.
i called his sorrow rainbow and watched day by day as
the song in his eyes, fluid as water, fizzled away.

II

even hurricanes have names and for that,
i name my tragedies sunset.

III

i do not belong here. In a semantics class, my lecturer
speaks of prototype meaning; how we assign properties
to words based on our first encounter with them. i must
confess, when i first heard owo, it was +church + gun
+blood – safe. so that when my friend told me he
was from owo, all i could see were children swaddled
in blood and their dead mothers tugging at god’s ears.
there’s something hiding in the church,
if you lift the pews, you’ll find dead bodies.
the pastor’s mouth is filled with blood. his words are
muffled by them. praise the lord; we can no longer hide
in amens [sad emoji]

IV

i swear, here, we cannot tell the difference between
dreams and nightmares. in a dream, a petal pushes
out of my eyes. in the morning, it becomes a dead
flamingo.

V

rumour has it, my mother built our house close to the river,
she thought if she stayed close to water, she could learn
the philosophy of fishes; how they survive drowning.
in my language, the word for survive is ubóhó
and the word for escape is ubóhó

VI

at night, when i dare to dream, i find myself swimming
across the atlantic. a green passport in my hands.
confused whether to say: i have survived
or i have escaped    this sunset of a country.

***

What is it About Healing That the Dead Cannot Learn?

i collected your body from the mortuary today,
it smelled like decayed salmon.
the morgue attendant, a lady with breath like rust, said,
we tried our best to preserve him, but you should know,
we can never truly heal a dead body.
M, look how they’re talking about you
as though you were a dead thing. as though you
were that spoilt chicken we bought from
the grocery store the other time. and what did
it smell like? what does death smell like?
the scent of formalin on cold skin? the stench of an
overripe mango festering at the hem of its tree?
speaking of which, the season is ripe with mangoes
and i cannot help but walk through the hallway
of memories, where we are seated at its tip,
melting mango juice into the heat of our mouths
like gold. you should know the dogs are still barking,
one of them ran through night and lost its eye.
i named the wound after you.
there is a thing about naming a wound after another
wound that keeps it alive.
i swear, i saw you in my dream holding two slices
of mornings, inside your palm i saw a
seascape—the sun, half dipped in ethereal blue and you,
rippling into vast nothingness. sometimes, to have
is to call loss by its middle name. the second time
such dream broke into my eyes, i cut off its limbs.
the following night, it grew four more.
what walks out of pain as miracle? tell me, M,
what is it about healing that the dead cannot learn?

***