An interview with a survivor of the Zamfara bomb blast

Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi

“The Zamfara state police command said the terror group, Lakurawa, was responsible for the recent explosions that rocked two villages in Dansadau district, Maru Local Government Area (LGA) of the state”. –Daily Trust (Wed, 4 Dec 2024 ) what does survival feels like for you? i have seen what it looks like to carry the grave as a hollowed heartbeat. outside my window, bullets are flying around; blood is swallowing the city whole. yesterday, the parents of the girl who had my mother’s eyes visited our house, to take a photograph of my mother; to help identify their daughter’s corpse from a hundred others piling the market square like bags of millet. i muttered prayers, wondering if God heard them. somehow, i believe God still hears though our cries never made it to his ears. won’t you run out of the city for your safety? iya wajen da gudu ya kaimu shine kabari, the distance between us and escape is a bullet away. everywhere is an unopened tab in the website of doom. the Lakurawa people threaten to kill any farmer who visits their field. schools are closed, markets shut down. the only moving thing roaming the city is hunger, and a silence that sings back to itself. what have you witnessed in the body of the smoke when the bomb strikes? na gan jini, kogin jini. flood of blood. of children wallowing in the helplessness of fate. children feeding on the innocence of tears. their fucked breaths causing traffic in the oesophagus of bliss. children leaping like frogs. confluence of silence. women menstruating in fire. women pregnant with the cosmos of rust. prayers. wingless prayers. prayers damned by the holy hands of gravity. i saw regret in the eyes of an almajiri boy who lay two limbs incomplete, blaming faith or fate or perhaps, both; for his misfortune. what does escape taste like? it tastes the mesmerizing voices of ghosts. it tastes like silence. it tastes the sacrificial egg in the calabash of djinns. it tastes like a mother bathing her son’s corpse with tears. it tastes the voice of a three year-old boy shouting to his father’s remains baba ka tashi, ka tashi muje gida baba before the bullet silenced him into a slow fade.

About Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi

THE PLOB, MAAR II, TPC V, whose works have appeared in Lolwe, Strange Horizons, CHESTNUT REVIEW, A Long House, Rough Cut Press, The temz review, and other places, is a poet from Borgu, Nigeria. He is a pioneer Fellow of Muktar Aliyu Art Residency, Minna, Niger state, Nigeria.