Do You Know My Name?
By Tom Somah
I am older than your oldest wound.
Before the first flag trembled in alien wind,
before the first border was drawn through a people’s home,
I was already breathing in the dark.
I did not arrive with the colonisers.
I rode inside them.
And when they left, I stayed.
I am the havoc that wears a human face.
I move in the spaces between words,
in the pause before the leader speaks,
in the silence after the promise dissolves.
I do not knock.
I am already inside the walls.
You will find me where microphones glow warm,
where journalists trade their first fire for comfort,
where the camera learns to love a face
that has swallowed its conscience.
I walk beside them, unseen,
breathing into their ears
the grammar of surrender.
What begins as coverage ends as consent.
In that consent, I rewrite the morning.
I dine in the palaces of the decorated.
I stand in photographs beside the devout.
I have worn virtue's face
so long it fits like skin.
The public does not see me,
they see the borrowed light I wear.
I rename greed until it sounds like generosity.
I dress oppression in the language of protection.
I take failure and teach it to walk upright,
to shake hands at podiums,
to receive applause.
I have ground their suffering into music.
And they dance to every note.
I do not always move in daylight.
I travel through whispers, through surrogates,
through the scholar who drafts the glowing report,
through the loyalist who repeats the gospel in crowded rooms.
I remain behind the curtain.
I am the silence
that directs the noise.
In the season of floods, I do my darkest work.
In the time of famine, I feast.
In the hour of plague
I pass my heaviest laws,
wrapping them in the cloth of protection,
slipping them quietly
through the narrow eye of collective fear.
The exhausted do not resist.
They clap.
Even the dying sometimes clap.
I bleach the rot until it gleams like virtue.
I perfume the wound so you lean in to smell it.
I make the thief look like the healer,
the plunderer looks like the builder.
And you,
you weep with gratitude
for what has been taken from you.
Where I have reigned long enough,
the mansion rises beside the empty school,
beside the hospital that forgot how to heal.
The ministry becomes a family inheritance.
The thief stands at the pulpit
and preaches against stealing.
And the congregation says:
Amen.
If you wish to grow,
and I know some of you still wish this,
purge me from your airwaves.
Drive me from your pulpits.
Refuse the rehearsed promise.
I have given you beautiful words for too long.
I dress destruction as bold reform.
I clothe harm in the language of solution.
Every word I press into your mouth
is a wall I raise between you and the truth.
still,
you clap.
You clap.
You clap.
Until the day you cleanse your beloved lands of my ancient poison,
you will not rise.
You will not even stand still.
You will beg beside rivers that run with gold.
You will starve in fields that feed everyone but you.
You will drown in the accumulated silence
of your sleeping dead.
I have moved through your centuries like a quiet fire.
I have rewritten your silence into consent.
I have bent the tongues of your children
so that wrong enters their mouths
tasting right.
You have seen me.
You have walked through me
without knowing.
But you should know my name by now.
The elders know it.
The rivers know it.
The Islanders know it.
Even the dry season knows it.
My name is Corruption.
And I am not finished with you yet.