Marhyilda Obasiota Ibe
Post-colonial Theory
Winner of the 2025 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, Judged by Carolina Ebeid
In the first republic, my grandfather was a ship boy.To immortalize him, my grandmother christened him a captain.
All truth is cavernous enough to hold tenderness.
In the eleventh month of the first republic, those who lived were beautiful –
the meeting of hawkers on Seventh Street was the throne of god.
The tight call of the muezzin was light be.
The birds, the oracular, every bush marigold
and touch-me-not was boundless like an eye.
Even the albino neighbor who spent
his whole life translating Paradise Lost into Efik.
Even the newspaper vendor who sold Benson cigarettes
and roasted pork using kerosene lamps.
Weaning mothers who whispered about politicians who were said
to pound babies in mortars for votes. Even them.
In the first republic, we learned the word freedom.
We unmounted the union jack.
Odiase composed the anthem.
In the evenings, a lost child returned home asleep like bones in the hands of a stranger.
We drank Ogogoro twice a day.
We split gravity.
Like the architecture of an empty page, we suggested omniscience.
The dead lived two streets away watching us roleplay being.
We loved the world. We were not Democrats.
One day, power played the role of freedom.
There was no script.
It was so beautiful we clawed our brothers to witness it.