The Dearth of Mourning - by Esther Omemu

Our city has silently become a bloodbath but we have become so used to seeing death that we no longer notice. We talk and laugh, carry our bags and go about our mundane lives as though our land is not on fire and as if the bodies on the streets are mere roadside decorations.‘If you had only one meat, who would you give? Your mother-in-law or your wife’ ‘Why are Yoruba men diluting pure blood by marrying Igbo women’ How ironic that it is this idiocy that we give life to, that in the face of a crumbling nation, people are dying and no one is counting. They flicker briefly across our screens and we bury them in memes, entertaining noises and the next trending story, until they fade into silence. This is what happens to a nation when loss becomes routine? Nigeria is bleeding but we have learned to walk through the blood. Entire communities slaughtered, villages erased and schools burned to ashes. The headlines come and go: “Dozens killed in Plateau,” “Attack in Benue,” “Mass burial in Kaduna.” The numbers rise, but outrage falls. Between electricity bills, traffic jams and the dilapidating economy, we scroll past the stories, whisper a prayer, and return to our routines. What is the death of my neighbour to me when I am just trying to survive? A hungry man cannot mourn. A poor woman has nothing to give to the bereaved. Our whispers of prayers are all we can give. Our apathy might be all we have left. What does it matter? The faces that no longer appear, the smiles we can no longer see? The places where there are no longer footsteps and the homes covered in cobwebs and silence. We wear meaningless laughter over their tears, dress the survivors in baseless advice, soften the horror in administrative language and repost a news article for 24 hrs to save our conscience. Mourning is an inconvenience, you know, and violence is just a part of the landscape as death is a part of life. The normalization of tragedy is chilling. We have grown so accustomed to counting the dead that the living have forgotten how to feel. The media struggles to name it; politicians avoid it. But silence, too, is a kind of weapon, I tell you. Each unspoken massacre is another permission slip for evil to continue. I remember, Last year, they walked through a sea of bodies, the same ones carved out of their bellies with painful cries and ululation. Their eyes sat steady on the pile beneath their feet, they could not tell whose head belonged to who, who owned that wandering finger? those legs, those arms, those eyes, those splintered ribs? Which one is yours? The weary officer asked, his eyes said nothing as he marched through blood and bones. In his note, they were just statistics 1, 2, 3,4, 58 unidentified numbers There was a sudden loud wail, a howl drenched in searing anguish, the officer frowned, unbothered, his eyes met those of a broken man, grief tearing at his throat holding a body without face screaming until his voice broke the heavens and lightning rained from the sky. The sorrow carried on and bodies fell to the ground, breathing, existing but dead but by morning, they roamed with vain laughter, stepping over ghosts they could no longer see. Whose legs did these belong to? Whose voice laughed in those lungs, before misery stumbled in the city drunk and wielding a blade? No one cared.

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