Written piece
Airdance
Chisom Nsiegbunam
Nigeria
About this piece
In less than 600 words we see air move, come alive and burdened. Across all our countries, our lives and communities we breathe air and the quality of this air determines the quality of our life and that of our children. This piece was birthed from a need to say something.
In Ozomagala junction there is an evaporation of bustling sweats that spread suffocating smells of desperate survival. There is the aroma of grinding Cameroon pepper, roasting fish, fermented akamu, irritating dust and the fumes hasty automobiles leave behind, and that lingering pungence of a miasma of black water, dump and breeding wings.
You move through them all, entraining all they offer.
You are remade by sunlight and greens, sustained through natural cycles, by every living thing that breathes. You carry the breath of forests and the cold exhale of mountains, salt-licked by oceans. You move through the lungs of the old and the young, male and female. Without you, life ceases, every threat on you is a threat to life.
But like many junctions and cities, Ozomagala is vitiating you.
The generators queuing the front of stores running since NEPA took light offers you silent killers and you hold. Helpless you carry them into every lungs as you move. Waves of smoke and dust meet you. The Anambra government has been tearing down plazas, shops of hungry people, constructing and reconstructing, increasing hunger pangs and suffocating you with dust and particulates. The hungry people are dying from many things, especially strokes. One man, two women. But who counts the death of the hungry? The open gutters breathe upwards and you swallow. Methane, hydrogen sulphide, all the scent of rot.
You cannot remain yourself, you have fought these too long to remember who you are.
It is the children that you find first. In the classrooms at the other end of the junction. They are low to the ground where you are heaviest, settling all that you carry. You watch their chests rise and fall pulling you in. There’s the little girl in a loose pink gown close to the open gutter, sitting on caked soil that is itching her naked bum, mixing sand and flowing grey water from their rusting gate with a stick in a tin. You worry she is way too close to the rot. Her little nostrils draw you in with all the filth, and you comply. You wonder what her name is; you wish you could at least know her name.
The trees used to unburden you of some filth, but they have been replaced by more unplanned stores, industries and residential homes, the only mango tree left in the whole area looks blackened, lonely and dehydrated.
The little girl has been coughing since January. You have watched her mother force Loratadine and Procold molded in garri or dissolved in pap down her throat. Then bottles of cough syrups. The chemist added malaria drugs too at some point, then typhoid drugs twice. Nothing has worked. Her chest still contracts with each cough. You listen to the chemist say her immune system is too weak and write a list of supplements she needs. A list that rests on their altar because they cannot afford the drugs, because they need to pray. You feel the waning in her lungs as they learn smallness, her little brain forgetting how to develop.
But you are a moving, compliant element. You pass through her again. You cannot help it. You cannot stop.