In My World
By Emma Onekekou. Illustration by Rosie Olang
In my world, we wonder, what about yours?
In my world we dream, what about yours?
In my world, time has stopped, what about yours? Will it ever?
If not, I hope so.
It will give you time to reshape it, to reinvent it.
You’ll be able to shape it as you wish
To paint it any colors you want
To write it differently
To think it differently
Let your words give it the meaning or direction you want.
Let no one stop you.
I was listening to a podcast. It was a beautiful day. The sun was wearing its finest beams. Around me, Nature was inviting herself into the spaces that we could no longer occupy. From my balcony, I could see Nature without humans. Flourishing. Beautiful. Animals free to roam. Birds of all kinds nesting wherever they wanted. I was in this paused world, trying to re-imagine it, to imagine an Africa after COVID-19.
I thought of the Ziniaré park where those malnourished animals lived; where lions had become so frail that they could have been mistaken for domestic cats. I thought of those trees, natural habitats of other living beings, that were cut down without remorse; to a part of humanity that was rejected, humiliated and discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation, a group of people that yet offered us the most beautiful of all flags, the rainbow.
It was painful to stay locked up, to walk around in circles all day, to be deprived of sun, of fresh air, of the beauty of spaces. The desire to see an exhibition, a show, a concert, to buy books in a bookstore, was present, but impossible to realize.
Nature, for which we, humans, were none but elements, had decided to let another part of herself live and had put us on pause. We were for the first time forced to stop, to reflect, to rethink the world, our life, our place in the chain of life.
It was painful to stay locked up, to walk around in circles all day, to be deprived of sun, of fresh air, of the beauty of spaces.
In my world, we wonder, what about yours?
In my world we dream, what about yours?
In my world, time has stopped, what about yours? Will it ever?
If not, I hope so.
It will give you time to reshape it, to reinvent it.
You’ll be able to shape it as you wish
To paint it any colors you want
To write it differently
To think it differently
Let your words give it the meaning or direction you want.
Let no one stop you.
Nature was breathing, showing herself to us without pollution, taking a much-deserved bath. The world had not stopped. In this chain, it’s us, humans, who had to stop to rethink the treatment we inflicted on Nature, ourselves and each other. Nature had shown us that we were not indispensable.
After all this, I will let my cat free. I will commit myself to ecology. I will be more respectful of Nature and of life. I will invite love into my life. And yes, on this continent where nothing seemed to go right, we, lesbians managed to love each other. I loved a woman to whom I had never revealed my feelings. My Soyata. As soon as this ends… Before I commit myself to saving animals, the planet, global warming, and raising awareness about the respect of differences, I will love you first. I will merge with you. I will draw from you my strength and the energy necessary to rewrite this world.
I took a deep breath of fresh air. I couldn’t remember what I was listening to. I just knew that Nature needed to sustain other living beings in the chain of life. She was pushing us to think.
