BUALA

Memories of the Poisoned River

The river remembers the arrival of extractivism. One day many years ago, she feels the wake of huge ships against her current and became uneasy. Over time, she comes to share shivers with felled forests, to balk at the blanched palette of monocrop agriculture, to recoil at the sharp poisonous taste of chemical waste, and to deeply mourn the disappearance of her people: people sold into slavery, killed by disease, worked to death in mines, and severed from her nurturing flows by the breaking of their cultures. Oh, what she has seen. Oh, what she has endured.

Mukanda

24.12.2023 | by Imani Jacqueline Brown