@alhanislam: Perhaps impact is not always something you can count. Sometimes, it stands before you in the form of a little girl, not yet ten, holding a microphone and reciting words you once wrote. At the opening of my pre-book launch in Abuja, Zara performed Be Gentle With Your Parents, a poem from A Poet’s Attempt to Freeze Time. As I watched her, I found myself thinking about the thirteen-year-old girl I once was: writing, dreaming and finding her voice because her mother believed that what she had to say was worth listening to. Years later, I am watching another young girl begin even earlier supported not only by her mother, but by both her parents, who are making room for her gift to grow. For me, this is deeply significant, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where many young girls possess extraordinary voices but do not always encounter the environments that allow those voices to be heard. Zara’s presence on that stage represented more than a performance. It represented a quiet cultural shift: parents seeing art not as a distraction from a child’s future, but as one of the ways that future can be built. Perhaps this is how impact travels. A mother nurtures a thirteen-year-old girl. That girl grows and creates work of her own. Years later, an even younger girl finds herself inside those words and is given the confidence to stand before a room and make them hers. Watching Zara reminded me that our responsibility is not simply to become visible. It is to make possibility more visible to those coming behind us. And sometimes, the most meaningful evidence that your work has travelled is hearing your words return to you in the voice of a new generation.

Alhan Islam

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Region: NG

Saturday 25 July 2026 16:15:28 GMT