This country isn’t real

This country isn’t real.

Drive through the markets in the blazing sun and watch from a distance then you’ll comprehend this blockbuster cacophony of humours you call home.

Sit on a stool in the middle of a road busied with exhausted fumes and humes of bodies moving with pressured blood. Sit as a ghost.

watch. hear. observe. record

Watch with a stern look at the men shouting and crafting words “na mumu dey go boutique”, “my colour”, “hot sweet moi-moi”. This is poetry at its finest.

Hear and make strings of this words, let them meander through your minds and ring the miraculous metaphor, irony, onomatopoeia; and all the ways they invoke a certain amusement of a remarkable creativity. Endure the lies “Na Rihanna dey buy my market” this is fiction after all.

Observe the faces of this people, gritting their teeth and stuffing their chin, walking like the world is going to crumble before noon.

Watch the old market traders, skin blackened by sun rays, but bones hardened from years of hawking and trading from dawn to dusk, child draped accross her backs, dripping the blood of her sweat.

Watch the news and hear the words drawing from the lips of shrivelled leaves revitalized at fancy hospitals in India. Laugh at their attempt to live above their days ‘will-o-the-wisps’. Squeeze your face in disgust and listen to their voices sopranoed in deceit. Mount a hiss above mountains, let go off the rage boiling hot over the fired crackle of a death-bagging rifle in your heart.

Laugh as you sit as an innocent lamb getting lost in the fantasy of a new world where moving sketches are heroes and fancy fairies are heroines. Where all that lingered were colours and magic.

Ben 10. star wars. barbie. disney

Laugh again this time spitefully as NEPA cuts through your dreams leaving you wondering in darkness.

Laugh as you sit patiently, ear-accustomed to the notification of your phone, waiting for an alert to signify the currency for labour. Laugh and hiss aloud when it never comes. days. and days after.

blame it on your village people.

Laugh after years of labour and nights of terror at schools, at universities. Laugh as you parade the streets like a colony of soldier ants filing out of the woods in search of greener pastures.

But what happens when this grasses aren’t green, the sun shines no more and the streams are empty of water ?

We cry and pray for a messiah. God answers us. But the inner circle, a mafia room safe to say pondering and deliberating on new ways to take us backwards. We laugh helplessly—this smouldering disillusionment that the election we had dared to trust, was in the end a futile dream.

But, weep not child, be strong

even as gold is melted to dust,

blood stained on our soils,

national wealth siphoned off and on to a lengthy disappearance.

Here in this lands, the grounds are severed into a deep sea of our sunken dreams and giant whales swallow whatever remains.

Yet, sleep and hold on to your dreams overlooking the absurdity of the air that surrounds this hell-on-earth.

Dream of the heaven-on-earth.

Breathe through your nostrils into your frayed heart. Pray to Jesus, Chukwu, Osanobua, Allah, Abasi, Ogene…

Pray and hope!

Cause that as little is what feeds the human heart of this people living through the bullets and catacombs of the masters whose heart hardened like rocks, ears deaf as echoes, faces shaped like masquerades and lips savoured with lies.

In my country where nothing is real. We hold on to laughter, to a comedy of errors, we craft our woes into collective laughter.