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Felix Grace
Student, Artist and Writer @ Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria
The Day We Forgot Ourselves”
<p><br></p><p>There was a time when we remembered who we were.</p><p><br></p><p>Our names carried the weight of generations.</p><p>Our stories lived in the breath of the elders, passed down in firelight.</p><p>Our dances spoke to the ground, and the ground answered.</p><p>We wore the sky in our beads, the rivers in our songs, and the sun in our skin.</p><p><br></p><p>But then... the ships came.</p><p><br></p><p>Not just with guns and flags — but with mirrors.</p><p>They held them up and told us to look.</p><p>But the faces staring back weren’t ours — they were strange, wrong, ashamed.</p><p><br></p><p>They told us our tongues were noise.</p><p>Our ideas were childish.</p><p>Our knowledge, irrelevant.</p><p>Our ways of life — backward, broken, unworthy.</p><p><br></p><p>So we folded our languages and hid them in silence.</p><p>We wrapped their names around our children and called it progress.</p><p>We traded the pride of our heritage for the praise of imitation.</p><p>We dressed in suits to feel civilized,</p><p>and undressed our souls in the process.</p><p><br></p><p>We forgot the rhythm of our ancestors,</p><p>and began to copy the echo of our colonizers.</p><p><br></p><p>Now we wear the clothes, speak the language, chase the dreams —</p><p>but feel hollow.</p><p>We build cities that don't fit us,</p><p>run governments that don't reflect us,</p><p>and measure success by how far we’ve drifted from who we used to be.</p><p><br></p><p>And when we look in the mirror today,</p><p>we still don’t see ourselves.</p><p><br></p><p>We see a memory that was stolen.</p><p>A reflection rewritten.</p><p>A people still trying to remember who they were</p><p>before they were told who they should be.</p><p><br></p>
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78
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