Whispers — Feyisayo Aluko

The floods are rising

Like dust in the back of your throat

Bodies of those who died before you

Laid out on Ozumba

Dripping with water from the Lagoon

Will you answer when they ask,

“Who is trying to kill you?”

Out of your belly flows rivers

Of living water–

Sweat and wet sewage

Car horns and clogged drainage

But she who is born of water shall never drown.

To Whom The Water Whispers is a collection of poems performed live in Lagos, Nigeria, in December 2024.

This project was first conceptualized in 2023, when Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, and Peter Obi were campaigning for the presidential election. At the time, I was drawn to the theme of water, and more specifically the Lagos Lagoon—how, depending on the time of day and where you stand, it almost glitters in the sunlight, as if it were whispering.

Two years later, these poems came to position water as both medium and messenger, the force through which memory, history, and identity are carried.

Across the collection, water takes on different identities, weaving between witness and spectator, invitation and warning, punishment and punisher, mirroring the instability of the environments and identities it reflects.

Using water as an entry point, these poems ask what it means to exist as a Nigerian woman across geographies, languages, and inheritances. Audiences are invited to sit at the shore and listen as the water itself whispers.