Hussain Ahmed | curfew

an excerpt & interview
 

How to Tell War Stories

begin with how you don’t feel naked these days
even when you are stripped to the skin
how you think this nightmare about willets will continue,
imagine how a vulture knows when the horses are thirsty.
if you must tell stories of this war
you must have a scar of your own that only you
know to tell of the pains
the women did not flee Mosul because they became of wings
overnight. Mosul was evaded by stingers that do not vomit honey
it led the women through the black kitchen doors
to a snowfield, where they plough for a season.
because they do not flee in the same direction
they have turned wind; their lungs are a country.
the smell of ginger inside the tea, reminds them of
what name they had saved for centuries, just for a grandchild.
the people of Maiduguri did not flee their homes
each body, houses a pillar that made up each square meters
Maiduguri lives in the scalp of their hairs
locked with the clay from the river that flows only in August.
say nothing about the men and boys, they are either dead or
soon would be. do not flee because you know how to steer the wind vane,
every war has similar ending; many would be dead. the survivors will inherit
scars that never heals. the poets did not flee, but their voice boxes have become empty.
the children would rely on the wind to remind them of how it all started
one quiet morning

Originally published in Cosmonauts Avenue

 

 
 

How do the landscapes in which these poems take place play a role in the emotional grounding, or at times destabilization, of the speaker or characters in the poems?

The genesis of the poems that made up the chapbook began a year after I was born, it was when we started dating all our loss. I often asked my mother when I was younger how we survived, and she instead reminded me of how I almost got everyone killed, because I wouldn’t stop crying. At the beginning of the new millennium, there were series of religious violence that torn northern Nigeria apart, we spent weeks indoors, and years to rebuild. The memories of the restrictions shaped the voices with which the speakers in the poems communicated.

There are three poems titled "Wifi in..." How does the juxtaposition of the modern (wifi) with places we think of as static, historical and/or divine (mosque, cemetery, museum) carry beyond these poems to the chapbook overall?

I tried to find connections in places I may not have visited, to make a space so close to mine, without having to claim the event as my own. I wrote a series of ten poems with the aim of using modernity as a tool of my connections [but only the three make the cut in the chapbook]. Wi-Fi was my way of using poetry as the new way of seeing the world with the lens of newness that bound us to historical, static, or divine places.

Form plays a role in many of the poems in the collection. What comes first when you're writing: form or language?

As with any creation, language comes first, before the decision to make forms off it. In writing many of my poems, the voices in my head speaks to me in Yoruba, and when they grow violent, I pick my pen to write them down. The forms my poems take are the results of editing, which include reading them aloud, but the language dictates the forms.

These poems don't shy away from difficult narratives and yet there are brief moments of hope. For instance in the title poem, you write, "mother tells us to dance when we can / it could be the last time we hear her sing." What role, if any, does hope play in your poems?

The hope that one day, we all will get to live together with people bearing different faiths, political views and skin colors, to float the flag of humanity, are some of the reasons that keep me writing, even in the face of rejections. I write because I believe in a world free of smoke.

Time, particularly the past, seems to be its own character in this chapbook though there's a sense that time isn't linear. Can you speak to this quality of  destabilization in the poems?

The hope that one day, we all will get to live together with people bearing different faiths, political views and skin colors, to float the flag of humanity, are some of the reasons that keep me writing, even in the face of rejections. I write because I believe in a world free of smoke.

 

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Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian writer and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Nashville Review, Magma Poetry, Yemassee and elsewhere.