Who will write ?

 Who will write about the dusty plains of Maiduguri

where sand stretched for miles and miles;

the house parties and the maijalisas,  who sang alangoros to the wealthy as they passed.

Will the world know about the streets, still etched in the depth of my mind thirty years after, 

the albino waiter "Yellow" of Arewa Hotel, who I saw when I went back seventeen years later, the same place, the same face, frozen by time, 

Will they know of Bolori Market, West End, Federal Low-cost

Damaturu,

who will tell the world Tabitha lived, 

cocoa-skinned, long hair , long and fine like the Shuwa -Arabs,

the prettiest girl I  had ever seen,

who will tell the world of how she died, sucking men into her tangled web after her...and we had the tales of the deadly gift she gave them and they lay shriveled up.

Who will tell the world of GGSS Damaturu,

of coming to Abuja on a Borno Express bus, 

seated to the fair-skinned giant who knew all the words to Don Williams

that made me fall in love with his song Amanda

Who will know of Lutai House, Monrovia Streets, and the 419s in their nondescript cars ..

with dollars in their boots?

Will the world ever know of Victor Ella , my dad who lived and died,

Who will tell of the old Wuse market, where we spent the meager nairas  we got from begging relations

where are the tribes of scribes whose jobs are to document the mediocre lives of the mediocre souls who wander the death and no more, immortalising their existence upon the pages of paper,

who will tell the world that we lived and saw, and sighed and loved, despaired and cried and resigned to fate and time?