Anatomy of a Skull
“Model of a head of a black man used for racial studies and exhibitions by Nazi Germany.”
Accession Number: 1990.47.3
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
A head
placed in a glass bowl
sang of Germany.
In the dark, he could speak
of days spent in Berlin
before he was called rhinebastard,
an aggression on a farmland,
sin of a woman
who saw a black man
and said those hands are the way.
A head never to be spoken of,
never to see the magazine smuggled
into a hostel in America,
where his body measured
and nailed on a wall, a trophy,
was spread across the center page.
In the night, a child, not yet seventeen,
placed his finger on the skull
at the back page of the magazine
and giggled as the boys
on the bed laughed at his trick.
He could be Samuel Morton
saying the African skull has the smallest cranial capacity,
therefore, they lack intelligence.
And this child could one day,
except he found a way out,
be the man with blond hair in Charlies
who will lift the glass of beer to his lips
before asking about the head
on the television, the one
found in South Sudan,
and when I will turn
to stare at him, he will ask,
why are you Africans still killing each other,
do you think it’s the skull thing?
* * * * * *
The Republic of Benin
On the 19th of September 1967,
my grandma in the village of her birth
became a citizen of a new country
that existed just for one day.
Years later in Enugu, a policeman will argue
about my people walking away from the war
& I will say the war was not my mother’s war
but she called it hers. I will
say the house I lived in as a boy
was once renamed after a Biafran soldier
in the morning & after a Nigerian at night.
No anger will erase my history,
will erase my grandma saying even our goddess
couldn’t stop Major ( Dr.) Albert Okonkwo
from using us a shield against the bridge
that led to Onitsha.
& when other men will ask me to shut up,
I will see my grandfather’s wicker chair,
the blood on the cushion, the bullet
lodged in his spine
& close my eyes to hear his voice,
the darkness inside his throat,
the stories at the fireside,
the trauma he couldn’t push into the morning,
the one that burns,
all he wanted was to know his home
but Biafra named it for him,
declared it a country
& prayed they took the first bullet.
When they shot him, Nigerian soldiers
took the land and renamed it,
only the people
knew the real name for their home —
a shadow, one not whole enough
to call itself a body.
[Note: The Republic of Benin was a short-lived, unrecognized secessionist state in West Africa which existed for one day. It was established on 19 September 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War as a puppet state of Biafra. Nigerian federal forces reoccupied the territory the following day.]