When We Were in Primary School

We were made to pay a fine
When we spoke our mother tongue
They called it vernacular
And speaking it within the walls of school was a sin
It was high treason
It was so grievous we were made to feel the pain
In the sadness that engulfed us when we parted with our Naira notes
So, when we reached the school's gate
We leaped out of the skin of our native tongue
And wore that of English
But English was slippery and didn’t fit our skins well
And because our mother tongue was strong
It came at the English language
Held it by the neck and engraved Its marks on it
And so they laughed at us when we spoke,
At the traces of vernacular that echoed behind our English
So we tried our best, we bit our tongue
Whenever we felt our accent trying to come to its surface
We learned to be ashamed of our own language
To deny it, to speak it less
The better we spoke English, the higher our intelligence
In their eyes we were as smart as the
Distance we put between us and our own language
We kneaded English into ourselves
But our tongues were too coarse to make a dough
So we became crumbs instead
Too coarse for the English language
And too spongy for our mother tongue.

Nasiba Babale is a medical laboratory scientist and the Secretary of Poetic Wednesdays Initiative. She served as the moderator for Glass door Initiative's Poetically Written Prose contest from 2019 to 2021 and was the second runner up for the 2018 edition of the same contest. She was a Co-organizer of TEDxAminuKanoWay in 2019. She was one of the judges of the 2020 edition of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize organized by Poets in Nigeria, and a fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency 2022.