
Learning Ikwerre on Duolingo
By Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe
Uprooted from the ethnicity of a thousand ancestors, I have
found myself seeking the app again to learn my father’s first tongue.
Or perhaps is the app not the father?
Algorithms and codes where there was once flesh and blood.
And the tongue is still a tongue,
even from a mouth, even from the dark screen of a computer.
Say, I will call whoever teaches me my dialect father.
Because a Nigerian who cannot speak his own language is gone,
is nothing but a homeless bastard. Because this is what I felt
when the machine asked me to say ndà instead of nna,
to say rumu instead of umu, to behold the pink sun in my mouth
rise into a new horizon.
And perhaps I should not hate myself, or hate that I was reared
only on a white man’s tongue, or that whenever
the extended family gathers in a meeting, I am left hearing nothing.
Right now I am given a pictogram of a child. Out of the four options,
I pick the one that says nwom instead of nwam just as the owl hoots
and my face is doused in lucid green light and a chime.
Right now I am that child again, wading furiously
in the red of my veins,
starving to be a son.
BIO:
Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe is a budding poet from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He has been published in Arts Lounge NYC, Poetry Sango Ota amongst others. You can find him daydreaming, listening to his favorite singer Lana del Rey, or writing about limerence, melancholia and the mundanities of existing. He tweets @mesomaccius.