Life

Life. That is the sentence. A judge in Abuja this morning, all seven counts, terrorism, and then the word, and then the photographs of the man in the dock, and then the whole south-east on every phone in the diaspora at once, and me at the table by the window watching a country I left five weeks ago put its most famous prisoner away for the rest of his days.

For a radio station. For broadcasts, for a flag, for a demand that a question be asked with a pencil. Taken from Kenya, tried by the people who took him, and now this. I have written my whole argument in the book and I am not going to write it again tonight. Tonight I am only going to write what it looks like from here, which is exactly what it looked like from the room by the stadium: a state that cannot hear the word without reaching for a cage.

The Mondays will not stop now. The boys at the roundabouts will not stop. And nobody in Abuja will ask why a region that has never bombed a market is the one they are most afraid of.

Mama sent a message. One line. She took the flag out of the wardrobe, she said, and she has put it on the wall of the parlour, where the relatives can see it, and Papa has not taken it down. I read it three times. Then I opened the manuscript of Owerri to London and pressed the button on that one too, because it was the only thing I could do from here, and because silence protects only the guilty, and I am done with silence.