Writing workshop
I want to sing but I don’t know any songs
I carry tears in my eyes; goodbye Father, goodbye Father.
People have been trying to kill me since I was 14 years old.
The same people from the previous century, about my father and me.
I carry soil in small bags; may home never fade in my heart.
I carry names, stories, memories of my village – it’s called ‘Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation’.
I am an orphan of the wars forced upon me.
I am a refugee of the sea rising from industrial waste
and I carry my mother tongue –
Uwese, Uwese, Uwese.
...a word collage by a Cotton Tree asylum seeker.