The country sent its people home
with a statement.

Home, it seemed,
was a word that could still be stamped
on paper.

At the border,
a man opened his passport
as though opening a small door
and found another country
inside it.

His name was Nigerian.
His skin was African.
His fear had no nationality.

Somewhere, men were saying
the foreigners must leave.

But the word foreigner
is a strange word
for a continent made from migrations—

for the blood that crossed deserts
before there were countries,
for the ancestors who carried gods
across rivers
and called the next shore
another beginning.

A map does not tell you
where the stranger begins.

It only draws a line
and waits for us to become cruel enough
to believe it.

So a parliament stopped travelling.

A country counted its dead.

A bishop died in his home.

Another man died
after interrogation.

And somewhere,
a mother folded a shirt
that would no longer be worn
in the country where her son
had made a life.

I keep thinking about the passport.

How little paper
is required
to prove that you belong.

How much blood
is required
to prove that you don’t.

Perhaps this is why
Africa has always looked
so beautiful from the sky:

the borders disappear.

No police checkpoint
can be seen.

No language is stopped
at immigration.

No mother is asked
to explain why her child
has the wrong country
inside his name.

From above,
we are one continent.

Come closer

and somebody is already
asking you to leave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Norberto Triaes on Unsplash