Poetry---Le Retour

Le Retour (The Return)

By Mohamed Boye Jallo Jamboria

Are you surprised that I am on pilgrimage? Or did I begin the act of pilgrimage?
That you call me immigrant when it was you that brought me to your land?
What did you expect? Were you not the first, with a Godlike arrogance,
To visit my holy lands, with a purported enlightenment, telling my forefathers,
That all their acts of worship and spirituality were heathen ways?

Did you not introduce me to your God; a god well disposed to matter than to mind?
Supporting you when your abused my hospitality and good will and I never complained
Or is it that your God is one of partiality, seeking only to protect you and yours?
Or have you forgotten the sun disc of Aten; how your forefather visited my sacred places,
In search of gold, slaves and knowledge? Plundering and leaving in waste all in sight?

Did you not proclaim your supremacy for the entire world
to hear, whilst you took away, my body and soul; leavin
me to waste in your haste, wasting me with your hate
Am I now a burden after you?ve burdened me all these years? With words and wars?
Imitating my icons of Faith and Worship; invented by Akhenaten, King of Khemet,
Coming at a later date, in a different fashion to tell me about myself and preaching
With soothing words and wars dominate and succumb my body and soul.

Have you forgotten that for over four millennia you have, like a passing dog raped me?
Leaving in your trail the Tablet, Cross, Crescent and Red Star? Slapping my brows with your holy water and rum; Singing the Alfathiyah, the Pater Nostra, and the International
All different words, different tunes of same meaning: mental dominion and confusion,
And me ,lost as I am ; in search of myself , embarks on a pilgrimage !

Have you forgotten how you deracialised and denationalized me introducing
Your God of the Dialectics, of Historical Materialism; telling me he is color blind
Yet proving otherwise; putting up a front of disagreement to fool me
Whilst you have your Club of and for the Greats; deciding my fate in camera
Setting my kinsmen against me, talking shop about my woes!

Have you forgotten how like beasts of burden, you used me to build
Your Temples of Worship to you God of Dialectics; with tortures and rape?
Making me believe this is way it should be; that with brains and bran
I am a god to stifle and to hold in ransom the weak as I choose
Killing my soul healing my body; drunk from holistic ungodliness? called progress!

Have you forgotten how you brainwashed me; and with shame now bleach my identity
Scraping it off with your unholy creams; like a man fleeing from his shadow and
Now panting for your theologies of existence; I must go on a pilgrimage
Into willing slavery; like a child caught stealing with a look of remorse asking for mercy,
I am on a pilgrimage to your unholy lands to rediscover myself from source;
To recover and regain my glory and my honor; asking for none but my dignity!

Tormented and confused, you do not want to see me, reminding you of your acts
You now talk shop; pretending you love me, but where is the love and how deep?
Or are material gifts and bribes your way of expressing love? Or are you barely
Rubbing peter to pay Paul? Hoping to rub me again at a later date?
I am on a pilgrimage to your lands to discover and to secure that, which you took away,
My body and my soul; and I, I, will go back reborn and revived to build a Temple
In appeasement to the spirits of my ancestors; the harbingers of civilization, of peace
And of humanity! So be it!
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!