Ode to a Silenced Scholar
By Tom Somah - The Sherbro Islander
Oh, silent scholar,
they fear the mind that sees clearly.
They have always feared it.
So they come with their small authority
and their large resentment,
with the weapons of the mediocre:
exclusion, erasure, the slow starvation
of everything that grows too tall
for their comfort.
And you grew tall.
You grew tall in the way of those
who read the world honestly,
who name what others prefer unnamed,
whose sentences come like lanterns
in rooms that power has kept deliberately dark.
We have heard your voice
across water and time,
settle into the minds of the distant,
disturb the comfortable,
companion the lonely thinker
who had begun to believe
they were thinking alone.
That is not a small thing.
That is not easily silenced.
They can close the door.
They cannot close what the door has already let through.
Your work lives in the places
they cannot reach,
in the margin notes of those you never met,
in the questions you planted
still growing in minds
you will never know you touched.
Brilliance does not ask permission
to endure.
It simply endures.
And when the season turns,
as seasons do,
your voice will not need to be recovered.
It never left.
The Sherbro Islander writes on African politics, history, and resistance.
www.echosinwords.com