Numb
Numb was written to honor the missing Black girls in Nigeria who were kidnapped in 2014. On the night of 14–15 April 2014, 276 mostly Christian female students were kidnapped from the Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria. To date, there are still 112 of those girls missing.
It was secondly dedicated to the 34 missing Black girls in DC in 2017. 14 girls were claimed missing in under 24 hours. There were no amber alerts. No news headlines. No tracking the progress. There was no rush to aid in the safety of these girls. Life didn’t stop like it would for one missing white child.
I was sick when I heard the news. Numbness rushed over my body as I wondered who was looking for them? Why aren’t we looking for them? Even today, I still google search just to see the progress in those two specific cases, especially when I see new missing posts of Black girls surfacing everyday.
Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, is an example. May she rest in peace. When she went missing during a revolution and pandemic, the world did not stop but it was beautiful to see social media, or at least the accounts I follow, searching endlessly and providing reports.
However, it demonstrates that the question is still: Who will protect Black women? Who will riot for us? Who will burn down cities for us?
WHERE ARE OUR SEARCH PARTIES?
The answer: we have to be our own brigade. June Jordan wrote a poem to South African women and shared it in 1978. The last line read “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” This is still true today.
