A Brief Archaeology of the Throat

Paul Olayimika

open your mouth. shine a light down the corridor of old vowels. we are brushing the dust off buried syllables, sifting through the sediments of borrowed tongues, looking for the sound that belonged to us before somebody footnoted it, italicised it, filed it under "native dialect" in some office that has never tasted our sun. but the shovel hits my father's silence— that small, disciplined cough he rehearsed before offering his name to the man in the crisp uniform. as if one wrong consonant could cost him something tender. and isn't that our world? where "K-K-Kano" catches in the BBC broadcaster's throat because our cities never fit their grammar. where a border drawn in a fogged room far from the dust of our markets became a scar we now walk along barefoot. we are the names bent out of shape in the archive— "Bello" flattened into "Bellow", "Gbenga" declawed to "Benga". to speak of our ancestors now is to rinse the registrar's ink from the wounds of our tongues. and yes, we are contradictions— children raised in the blast radius who still argued this morning about whose jollof was definitive. (this, too, is a way to survive: to insist on flavour in a mouth full of ash). so who are we? the paint peeling like a prophecy off the secretariat wall, history flaking straight into our palms, the harmattan stripping the bricks clean, searching for the mud beneath the government gloss. we are not your fixed answer. we are the question stretching its limbs, the throat clearing itself after generations of dust, after centuries of being mispronounced.

About Paul Olayimika

Paul Olayimika is a poet, brand designer, and medical student at the University of Jos. His writing explores the intersections of the body and memory, often bringing an anatomical precision to themes of identity and culture. A growing voice in contemporary African poetry, Olayimika has been longlisted for the 2025 African Human Rights Poetry Competition (IHRAM) and the 2026 Joe Ushie Poetry Prize. His work is published in the December 2025 edition of the WSA Literary Magazine. When he is not studying the mechanics of the human body or crafting visual identities, he is immersed in the thrill of Formula 1. He hails from Ekiti State, Nigeria.