To start, I give thanks for things beyond.
Ancestors, Spirits and Otherwise. Those far reaching things we both cannot and will not explain. Unoma Azuah, I start with thanks to you.
For you have become an ancestor.
You are an ancestor.

“What causes madness?” was one of the questions you asked your mother after you witnessed a particular violent incident early into the book. Chai, when violence saturates a life… The Black experience is just plain crazy. Longing for the normalcy of a life. That where your destiny could have been highlighted as divine… it morphed into something misidentified as sealed. As though the prospect of no future is not an embrace of the now, an embrace of coming to terms with your own life and how you must live it. How you must live beyond an illusion of legacy, beyond the illusion of continuity. Survival is not reproduction. And reproduction is not the beyond of survival. To live well within your life is to carve out the path of what has already existed. You have already existed within this world, Unoma. You just have to live within it, as you have been. What I felt within your world were pockets of you daring to be you, pockets of you exercising your life in ways that caused friction with the given. For there is no other way to be anyone but you. All roads lead to us, leads to you. The freedom you have been enacting lives beyond the imaginations and logic of the supremacy. I praise the river goddess that led you towards otherwise, or rather held you within it, declared your very other as divine. Divine from the beyond. I praise you for surviving. I praise you for holding onto you. I praise you for telling your story. Even then, you embraced what could have cost you… I once asked my sistahs, what does self sacrifice mean to you? What does self sacrifice mean in a love of pleasure and in a quest of freedom towards true honesty to self? What does it mean when the otherwise of your erotic already feels like death?. Unoma, my ancestor, your pen is telling me that death cannot really be a cost to a life that chooses to live. Chooses to live within the truth of what the body responds to. What the senses yearn for. The erotic.
Unoma, my life flashed through within the poetry of yours. And our eyes, like the sun, must see darkness in order to maintain its light. Our eyes have shined o. Nne, they have shined. We must look onto all this darkness in ways that transform the spectacle into light. Into light. To read your world with this knowingness is what is allowing me to grow glow past the violence we continuously encounter. Painful pleasure, pleasurable pain. The entanglement of our freedom with pain is one that lies in the very conditions of how this freedom we know has come to exist. As seen in the formulation of your very existence, a product of a union conditioned by war, painful yet pleasurable consent materializes in the form of your very DNA. You materialize beyond the base of your very foundation. To say you have already existed only proves that light continues to remain. It remains especially in conditions of darkness. We must remain inconditions of darkness because we have always been. And we shall always continue to be. I know it because I heard me in you. Your story remembered my own life. It sang in par with my own chorus. Chai, it sang, it sings, it has been singing.
We have been living, me through you and you through me. My sisters are living for one another in a space far beyond any conceptions of a future, we’re living for those that have tried and have departed. We’re living because many a-times we could’ve departed. But the beautyful hope that shines my eyes, that transforms the violence of departure into light is that of truth, self truth, to live within the world ending union of loving what you love….
My ancestor, Unoma, may we live so life can continue to live.

Bio: Chimira Natanna Obiefule is a Nigerian artist and a graduate student  based in Amsterdam. Prioritizing her voice towards Black female liberation, Chimira has done multiple spoken word performances in Amsterdam, going on to self-publish a collection of poetry and art entitled ‘Heavy in the Chest’ in 2020. In 2021, Chimira got short-listed for ‘Manifesting Systemic Change through Creative Waves’ founded by The Black Archives, Amsterdam. Here, she was commissioned for an art piece and essay centering practices of refusal and imaginary possibilities in relation to the Black woman as an everyday practitioner of freedom. The main themes she currently explores within her work and studies currently include rituals of refusal, spectacle, otherwise worlds, imaginary possibilities, self-liberation and the mapping of her roots in regards to spirituality and the female body.