In the beginning was the rafting, too, before the empty ships made of conquest arrived at
the shore where Pepple was the king, where the world was one world, as soft as silk
moving the air. We, the sea-dwellers
were capable of love in the way the waters flow endlessly on their own axis. We
often look at the palaces that light the opposite beach, with sea-white eyes, the
abundance of literate fishermen, the scent in living the present, the African sail
smelling
of good history. We know history not read
in classrooms that fall asleep in the dim lights & are forgotten. Jaja didn’t forget
this.
He was born in a boat to row the island he was given as a piece of gold. He played
politics with
joysticks & hollies, a flight of the actuality of dreams.
He stepped on the oceanfront to meet the Royal Niger Company. Neither handshake nor did
he look
in the faces of those who came with chains to lift his place of birth into a cargo.
Where he stood was where the Old Harbor was built, where he fought, valiantly,
against the things we were not taught
in school. How he sold as captives the sons of the man who raised him on the bay he
was captured. How he suffered the waters which surrounded his obduracy, his
love for the Englishmen seen when he looked at the post-colonial image of
himself in a mirror.
Tares Oburumu
Tares Oburumu is a Nigerian poet and essayist from Warri, Delta State. A graduate of the University of Benin, he won the 2022 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for Origins of the Syma Species (University of Nebraska Press). He has been shortlisted for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature for his collection, Flora's Love Colony, published by Fairchild Media Publishing, an imprint of Fairchild & Brave LTD. The collection re-examines Nigeria's colonial history, drawing inspiration from Flora Shaw. Oburumu is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has published seven chapbooks, with works appearing in literary journals across Nigeria and internationally.
