The World was Silent when We Died

I write this through my tears, tears whose depth of candor I cannot vouch for, because the horrors I have just read about have been told to me so many times in the past, but have never evoked in me the kind of mix of emotions that I feel now. It is way past 1AM this Monday morning, and I cannot find sleep. So I have had to find my laptop instead.

Because this feeling that I have, this need to do something, to write something, to do anything to change the horror that we call our shared history – this feeling is almost alien to me. I can neither relate to it nor detach myself from it.

I have to write something, although I know that with the breaking of dawn and the return of cold hard reason and logic, this will more closely resemble the gibberish that should have stayed in my head rather than appear on my wall.

But how can I possibly be immune to the accounts that I have read? How can I fail to be affected by the despair that pillaged the land that I call my own? How can I feel anything other than pain and betrayal and even guilt that I was not around to help and to die with all those men and women who were massacred in Kano, who died in Nsukka, who gave their lives in Umuahia, who were killed by kwashiorkor when the shrapnel of enemy soldiers failed to find them? How can I feel anything other than revulsion at being human when I have read stories of what humans did to other humans during that War from which we emerged, no victor no vanquished, just a group of people who successfully defended the unity of a country, and another group of people whose entire lives had been reduced to 20 pounds?

And to think that I have actually read lots of books and heard lots of stories about that War before this time. To think that today, for the first time, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was able to tell me what my father, a veteran of that War, was protecting me from: that in that War that defined our country, we all of us gave up our humanity, gave up our pride, gave up our Africanness, and took home instead 20 pounds. And those who gave us 20 pounds also in that moment gave up their humanity, gave up their right to being thought of as rational human beings, and became humanoids, just like we did.

And of course, the world watched when we died. The world watched when, in the Land of the Rising Sun, the withered rays of that half of a yellow sun shone down on the decaying aspirations of a fallen people.

I might regret this post at some point; but I want to remember the way I felt after reading Half Of A Yellow Sun. I want to remember how something died inside me today. I want to try and remember that the girls who are missing from Chibok are innocent, even if some of their fathers and grandfathers were responsible for the killings of the sixties. I want to remember this moment so that I can tell my children why we must never again go to a war; why the unity of this our democracy is non-negotiable; why the labours of our heroes past shall never be in vain.

I want to remember that the world was silent when we died, even if only for the next 30 seconds, through these tears.