The Girls of Chibok

The partition of Africa

My first thought is that I know what is happening to those girls.  I, too, was taken from my school and raped by many men.  But it wasn’t with guns and bombs, I wasn’t taken from my family, and I wasn’t sold into slavery in another country.  It wasn’t in the name of religious law.  The men who took me were in it for greed and power, and didn’t care if I studied.  Still, my body aches with the physical memory.

The second thought is how heavily imperialism grinds down onto the bodies of girls, how the news is written in layers, so that these teenagers being forced into the backs of trucks are superimposed onto a map of the partition of Africa into national portions of profit for gluttonous European elites, slashing national borders across, through, around the names people call themselves.  

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