“I Saw You” by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is an undergraduate student of Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, winner of the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart and Best of The Net Nominee with works in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, CutBank Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Trampset, The Deadlands, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, and elsewhere.
A Word from the Author
I wrote "I Saw You" as a tribute to the women that are suffering, mostly, from the ruined hands of cultural norms. In this poem, I showed how powerful women can be independently, but immediately they are under the canopy of someone else, they will shrink into the shell they never knew they had. Here, the writer after learning about other women's striving, discovered that her fate was also heading the same path.
The roads to happiness are broken.
The first step I made, I sprawled on the bodies of girls
whose voices have been singed by a flameless fire.
The Physiologist said, 60% of the body is water.
Let’s say, a day of burning is equivalent to a litre.
How long until a woman exhausts her tears?
In my dream, I see the woman I am yet to become tossing
her body into the water. But when the fire comes, her voice
shrink into an echo whistling against the emptiness,
against the blooming void. What did you see before your voice
clutched onto silence? I asked. I saw water begging to be exiled
from the mouth of fire. I saw a woman holding ruin in her palms,
each line, pouring into a hologram of burnt memories. I saw another woman
learning the language of love from a lover with the smoothness of a mirage.
I saw a girl travelling through adulthood with purple skin.
What else did you see as the water hardened into a mirror? I asked.
I saw you.
Saw you.
You
