It Is Not A Crime Poem by Oluwagbemisola O. Lawal

Why do your eyes narrow when my tongue slips my name?
Nigerian—three syllables that fall like stones
into the quiet pool of your suspicion.
You see one thief in a crowded market
and suddenly the whole nation is on trial,
our passports branded with the sins of strangers.
I have screamed it until my throat bleeds:
We are not the same.
One man's shadow does not eclipse the sun
that warms a hundred million backs.

We are the largest heartbeat on this continent,
the widest river in the black race's vein
and because we flow so loud, so many,
you mistake our roar for rage.
A boy in a distant city pockets what is not his;
the echo reaches you before the laughter of our mothers
teaching children how to share one plate of jollof.
A voice cracks over the phone in deceit;
you never hear the mechanic in Kano
who fixes a stranger's car for free
because "my brother, life is already hard."

But look
we are the hands that built the bridges you now cross,
the voices that sang "Nigeria, my Nigeria"
while bullets kissed the air.
We are the girl in Abuja who reads by generator light
and still scores distinctions,
the farmer in Enugu whose yams feed markets in Ghana,
the doctor in London whose steady fingers
remember the oaths sworn under our green-white-green.
Our faults are loud because our love is louder—
loud enough to carry the weight of a billion judgments
and still stand tall.

Stereotype is the lazy knife
you sharpen on the whetstone of fear.
It slices away the engineer who codes solutions
for countries that never learned his name.
It erases the dancer whose feet write poetry
on the soil of every festival.
It forgets the widow in Plateau who raises three sons
to be better than the men who took her husband.
We are not your cautionary tale.
We are the proof that one tree does not make a forest,
that one cracked pot does not poison the stream.

So judge me if you must
but know this:
my crime is only breathing the same air
that once filled the lungs of kings at Ile-Ife,
of women who carried empires on their heads,
of children who still dream in colors
the world has not yet named.
I carry no apology for my flag.
I carry only pride
fierce, stubborn, unapologetic pride
and the quiet truth that keeps me whole:

It is not a crime to be Nigerian.
It is a miracle.
And miracles, like us,
refuse to be reduced
to the smallest thing one of us has done.