I want to introduce you all to what should be highlighted as a success story in the making. I recently got in the mail the self titled book: Izou, by Izuo-Ere Digifa. I know her as Mimi whom I met while on a writ looking to grow academically as we all were. Though shy, and clearly out of her element, she maintained a keel approach to her reality. As a young Nigerian woman, she was riddled with many set backs that could have served to weaken and destroy all of her dreams and aspiration. Faced with imprisonment, isolation, betrayal, heartbreak, condemnation love and finally the threat of deportation, yet non served to destroy her.
Her book is a collection of poems that she wrote while confined pre-trial, where one can experience so much uncertainly and unanswered question while awaiting a fate that is scary to must. She gives such raw emotion in her poetry which surprised me because of her genteel mannerism. But it left me appreciating the strength of women that encounter the judicial system and its harsh reality. For Mimi, “some of [her] deepest thoughts come from the spaces of [her] incarceration”, and within these spaces were mirrors that gave off reflection of all that could go wrong in one’s life, but yet know hope, and hope she kept.
In one of her poems, she says:
“The place before the place that meets the mind, are the places we rebuild hope.”
In another she writes:
“I came to this country with nothing,
I am not leaving with nothing,
especially not in chains, cuffs, and shackles.
I will accomplish all the things I came here for and more,
then I will leave when I am ready,
As I came when I was ready.
I came here with doubts from people,
I am not leaving with those doubts fulfilled.”
Her strength is at the least stronger than I could imagine in anyone having to deal with all that she has had to deal with. Mimi is not different from any one of us. She was motivated by love, or what was defended to her as love, and fell in the process. Living in one of her most darkest moments, she was left alone having to deal with a system what was bent on bringing her to her knees, without being given the opportunity explain how her heart was mislead into a world she had no intentions on entering.
From what I know of Mimi, she is a woman living her Vision and Purpose (V.A.P). She has refused to be broken; refuses to yield to that misconception of her or women like her. She walks tall. Proud. Firm. And in every step, humble. As they work to break her, she rebuilds better.
Please help me support her in her walk. For as a people, as ONE people, as ONE link in the human family – putting aside the lies and inferior fears that are propagated of us being upper and lower class; black and white, straight or gay, we are each other’s crutch in the race to preserve the beauty of life.
Walk Tall,
Nonfiction
Her website can be found here: www.Izuo-ere.com
Midnight Sunrise 