Notes on Movement – Michigan Quarterly Review

Notes on Movement

Published in Spring 2024 Online Folio

once, i knelt before a man and asked to be loved. knelt so long i didn’t know how best to distinguish the floor from my knees—the way i savor exile yet cannot tell of freedom.

——

an uncle, a refugee in the ivory coast, could not tell of what became of his mother or his war-ridden land. what exile offered him was hope.

——

when my father tells his story, i imagine my uncle saying to hope, stay with me awhile until I know again the cruelty of borders.

——

i’ve learned that movement is survival too, & that time can be fangs, & we’re its lonely victims.

——

at the airport, an aging mother and her child, who’s a doctor, part. she holds her prescription & leans on the wall, wondering if this will be the last time they see each other.

——

like the mother, i too am broken. i sit at a train station in america & listen to my father over the phone talk about love—what freedom affords him now.

——

the beauty of queerness still lies in movement—how paces define survival. but for a father, the beauty of queerness could also lie in movement—how best to bend shame into a language of pride other than to give it away to someone or a country.

——

but movement is relative, & so is survival; i am their worst bet, the way a mother battered by war chooses to escape in a lorry filled with barrels of fuel. the only belonging she chose to save was her child’s head, hidden in a wrapper.

——

i carry my queerness the way the woman carries her child’s head, away from the eyes of those who might pry into it & ask why.

——

i choose the safety of my delicate skin over my desires.

——

a friend hints at how fragile my masculinity must be.

——

multiple times, i have introduced a man as my cousin to friends. i also desire to know how far language can stretch, and in order to hide my shame, i keep going.


This piece is from our Spring 2024 African Writing Online Folio, an online-exclusive extension of our special issue, “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations,” guest edited by Chris Abani. You can read more from our Spring 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.

Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is the author of the poetry collection In Gorgeous Display (Fordham University Press, 2023). A 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow and an alumnus of Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop, he has work published in Poetry magazine and elsewhere.

lsa logoum logoU-M Privacy StatementAccessibility at U-M