Stories From Young African Poets: “From losing memories to writing poems, Abdulkareem lets us into his childhood.

The amnesia I grew up with stands out.

This is because this is a memory from my child I’ve forgotten permanently, due to happenings that came up years after the happening. My poetry was informed by loss—the regurgitation of constant emotions from the influence of this loss.

I wrote my first ever poem due to this. The moments when everything around feels blocked, and you think about how things could have been different if that didn’t happen. My father died when I was five going to six. I worked as a barman. I wrote my first poem.

So I don’t call it a memory. Although years after it happened, my mother talked about how I still remembered everything that happened when he died. I think this is the most earliest influence on my poetry.

Memories Drowned in the Atlantic of Bereavement By Abdulkareem 


the denouncement of memories at the threshold 
      of remembrance      its wool  submerged in the waters 
of agony altering every memories that   pictured father 
           as a body in motion        

six     my brain hoarded bright burning embers    on its landscape
       ten    burned coal of earliest memories still on its landscape 
present     filled with ashes     like a tissue drowned in the Atlantic 

a waterlogged oatmeal drowned in a gullet      also at six     my aunt said 
i filmed faces     like a recorder      holding onto a tiny bag of biscuits   
gazing towards mouths     that spoke      in different languages 
of bereavement       about          his death      with  faces      

that    brimmed the sea     from their eyes    also  in drops    
like in the tv      but my memories of childhood are  burnt    
say something ate deep into  its firewall    maybe there was no firewall      

maybe the grief that wrecked our home was an inferno    that razed down   
my memories &      altered my father's  motioning dreams       
& undid his spiraling turbans      & rosaries    & his assembled 

students of the madrasah        who motioned the qur'an        on the hill        
of their lips   & I was one too      though  sponged clean  
the hippocampus of their existence       off my memories 

that reminded me the gait my his body withheld    & his photographs 
were like monuments       on a screen    restoring the shadows of my forgetfulness 
on my becoming       God fine-tunes  my empty remembrance     of pa 

off its debris with the albums      of monochromatic photographs
     my friend whispered something into my ears      days ago  
 she questions me today             but I do not  remember 

 once again        reinstated with an ellipsis     in my brain
each times        she clamours of my     forgetfulness  
I have offered edicts  to the god of memory    
       in a dream after      i saw my father in the shadows waking into the void 
    
    & what is the outcome of loss.  & bereavement in the life of a little boy?     
to grow with silence      to live in silence        say I witnessed    how the volcano 
of my father's demise erupted          the happenstance of our home with ocean eyes

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Hannah Omokafe Dennis

Hannah Omokafe Dennis Is A 24-year-old Journalist, Voice-Over artist and UNFPA Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Rights Advocate Living In Nigeria. She Currently Serves As A Community Manager In Konya Shamsrumi AndHas Some Of Her Written Works Published On Writer's Space Africa and audio stories on Genti media. She Enjoys Using Words And Her Voice To Tell Stories. She Tweets @Omokafe_forite.

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