FORGETTABLE BODIES

In his book what is in A Name? Farhang Zabeeth reminds us that “the Roman slaves originally were without names. Only after being sold did they take their master’s praenomen in the genitive case followed by the suffix — ’por’ (boy), e.g., ‘Marcipor,’ which indicates that some men, so long as they were regarded by others as cattle, did not need a name. However, as soon as they became servants some designation was called forth.” To this day, one of the forms of punishment meted out to wrongdoers who are imprisoned is to take away their names and to give them numbers. In an increasingly computerized age, people are becoming mere numbers — credit card numbers, insurance numbers, bank account numbers, student numbers, et cetera. Identification of human beings by numbers is a negation of their humanity and their existence.
To be unnamed is to be unknown, to have no identity. William Saroyan has observed that “the word nameless, especially in poetry and in much prose, signifies an alien, unknown, and almost unwelcome condition, as when, for instance, a writer speaks of ‘a nameless sorrow.’ “Human beings,” continues Saroyan, “are for the fact of being named at all, however meaninglessly, lifted out of an area of mystery, doubt, or undesirability into an area in which belonging to everybody else is taken for granted, so that one of the first questions asked by new people, two-year-olds even, whether they are speaking to other new people or to people who have been around for a great many years is, ‘What is your name?’
On November the 5th 2017, the bodies of 26 Nigerian girls, aged between 14 and 18, were brought to the southern Italian port of Salerno by the Spanish ship Cantabria. Autopsies on the bodies recovered from the Mediterranean confirmed that they drowned. One of the women suffered a “hemorrhagic shock” due to a liver wound, and two were pregnant. Two weeks later, in a display of measured empathy, the Italian government gave these women a state burial. The country from which they came, whose imbalance and lack of humanity they were running away from, did not have the decency to acknowledge their deaths. The indifference was astonishing. I am part of a society that demands my patriotism but in response, ignores my existence. The backlash from social media at the time, encouraged unenthusiastic efforts by the government to ‘speak on the issue’. This response explains itself: The Nigerian government does not care about the Nigeria people, it cares about the Nigerian state. The actual tragedy here, is been born a Nigerian. And that, is what these young women were running away from. They were fleeing from prebendalism, from a culture that sees them as domestic servants. They were running away from traditions and beliefs that demands subservience just for the hell of it, from been Married to ‘daddies’, from a religion that measures their strength by how much misfortune and Pain they can endure. You can argue that these things are properly underscored in all modern societies but the discomforting truth is that Nigeria, by its very nature, strips your Humanity away from you.
Out of the 26 coffins, 2 had Blue ribbons on them, signifying the two women that were pregnant. Some reports reveal that these women were buried with reference numbers. Did they also count the two kids? Or are they just fetuses? They say that in drowning, you watch the water drink the thirst of life out of you. And sadly, seas are not renowned for their ability to belch. Two years after and no one remembers these people, no one knows who they are, no one acknowledges their deaths. Joseph stalin was right; a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
These women will go down in history along the likes of the ALUU4 boys, the Chibok girls, the casualties of Boko haram. They will be remembered only by silence and a memory designed to forget. They are a momentary pause in a society constantly amusing itself to death from its infinite appetite for distractions. They are future Stella Adedavohs who realized early the vices of Patriotism, the imbecility of society and the tyranny of hope. They are realists who, faced with the choice of a broken life, sojourned to their deaths. They will probably be remembered in election time for the political capital their buried bodies can donate. By searching for a better life, they rendered themselves unknown, uncared for and forgettable. May their souls rest in peace.
