Poetry: Incomplete Return
By Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon
LOOK at our big-bellied Ministers on the television,
weeping with joy because a museum in Germany
has returned the bronze face of our great-grandmother.
They are holding her with white gloves for the cameras,
pouring libations and making long, beautiful speeches.
Me, I am sitting on my stool, peeling my ginger.
I cannot insult the bronze;
it is the blood of our fathers’ mothers.
She has broken out of her prison across the salt water,
and her spirit has finally walked back into our home.
But look at those ones standing in line to receive her!
The same who sold her shipping ports just a week ago,
the same who let foreign hands wave our drug inspectors away.
They want us to dance because our past has returned,
while they quietly auction off our children’s desks.
They treat the ancestor like a receipt for a debt that is settled,
as if a returned soul can erase a stolen economy.
The white men are laughing in Berlin;
they gave us back our mirror, but they kept the land it reflects.
Oh, a beautiful arrangement! I clap for them.
The steel stays in foreign hands, our leaders keep the cameras,
and the great-grandmother gets a beautiful glass case,
where she sits quietly in the air-conditioning,
watching her great-grandchildren pack their bags
to cross that same ocean on a rubber raft.
