This series is published monthly.
Profile
Name: Tarinabo Diete
Ethnicity/Nationality: Ijaw, Nigerian
Me in 3 words: Creative, passionate, driven.
Why I write: Asides storytelling, I write to communicate with myself and to people who may just feeling the same way I feel.
What I hope to show the world: That grand things can be done even from the smallest places.
Where I hope to be seen/heard: Every where, if that’s possible; everywhere, at least once.
Where to currently find my work: Medium
Poetry: Voices of my Women
What you carry is not hate.
It is anger.
The fire that burns in you is not just yours
It is your mother’s, our mothers’.
They swallowed their pride
and fed it to us in the womb.
We ate the hurt, the anger and silence
But now we see, now we know.
You have been called stubborn.
A stubborn woman.
This stubborn is not
because you are disobedient,
This stubborn is because
you refuse to conform, to ´norm’.
This stubborn is because you won’t
stay shut whence you should not.
We reject the food of swallowed pride
This food we cannot eat
because it is prison.
Prison that ties tongues and hands.
We are where our mothers planted their pain.
So tell me why we would not blossom into something horrifying?
Anger waters us.
Oppression is our sunlight.
This voice you call loud is not just ours
It is our mother’s and grandmother’s
And the mother that mothered her mother.
Generations of silent women
who pass their voices down.
Generation to generation.
Ours will be loud enough
Loud enough so you hear,
Loud enough so they hear and
Loud enough so our unborn daughters hear.
Beri e piri ye ikio (Tell me what you think—Ijaw, Nembe, Bayelsa State)
If you or someone you know would love to have their profile, poetry/prose featured on the Early African Writer Series, please email us your name and desired publication here with the title of this series as your headline. For February’s feature, we encourage non-Nigerian writers to reach out.