Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a […]
“I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was…”
One Sunday evening in 2010, I was at the dinner table, set up with my phone and earphones, indulging in my end-of-week ritual: listening to the classical music show on Capital FM from 9 to […]
i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.
In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting
season, when the rains have appeased the land.
everything I am
is wanting & needing/
every bone, every
hollow, this image/
is a god fashion-made for you/
But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds.
In the church of avian beings.
Small, colorful, and endangered.
While Otieno’s first oath was unintentional, the second time she stood naked in that dim room in Gaitumbi next to her fellow revolutionary dissidents, she meant it. The second time she committed her life and wealth to a struggle against empire and its collaborators—words which could render her a signatory to her own death if she betrayed them—was not a mistake.