in the back of a lecture room, I sat and listened
to a history professor, spill theories about endangered
languages in africa. imagined my mother
tongue, whose tender words ushered my voice into
the world, slipping off my lips. all the vocabularies
i’ve gathered in my dialect, vanishing into nothingness.
imagine me thinking about what else i could hold on to
if i wake up greeting my father good morning, pops, instead
of the usual ha igfye baba, in gbagyi. thinking about the apocalypse
of our languages, i worried about what will become
of the folk songs on my phone. all that lyrical wisdom,
reduced to a naked record of melodies. on a call, my sisters
and i burn hours talking about the need for younger
generations to know the traditions of our people. i wallow
in the intricacies of my name. what am i
even talking about? my name is now known as my name only
because my grandfather wore it as his own. what a shame,
the world has seen nothing of my people, who live and die
by the waterside. who till acres of farmlands with bare hands.
our women, who cook meals in clay pots over firewood
burning between stoves of stones. women who pound yam
in mortars placed on the stomachs of their men. my people
who pull themselves out of illnesses with cocktails of herbs.
who feasted on gourds of wine, poured into wooden bowls.
such abundance of heritage. even the broken lines orbiting
my neck, are a homage to the cowries they adorned
themselves in. my becoming a wall, taken over by shadows
is an attempt to preserve the words of my ancestors in my mouth.
with my tribe marked to be facing high risk of extinction,
it feels treacherous writing this poem in English.
Abu Bakr Sadiq is the author of Leaked Footages (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. He is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry, The Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry 2024, Margaret Gibson Poet Laureate Poetry Award 2023, and a finalist for the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, 2023. His work is nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award, Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and is published in Boston Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Fiddlehead, MIZNA, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere.