I sat through history class

in a new September 

‘Medicine through time’ 

was the topic to dismember.

We sat there, two-tongued or three,

and waited and waited for relatability.

We learned that my astronomy,

her anatomy and the matter

in between were the lightbulbs

that an array of John Smiths had foreseen.

Al-Kimiya’s Alchemy and Al-Jabr’s Algebra, 

the ones you wished didn’t exist, 

these were what Europe dismissed as ‘gibberish’.

You guffaw at our lack of Nobel prizes

on devices that store our algorithmic cores.

The ones you swore were made on American floors

So where were our awards? 

In religious studies we discussed

Arab women’s liberty

and they paired it with a picture

of the Statue of Liberty.

The one modeled off of an Egyptian

woman by the Frenchman Bartholdi in the 1860s.

The first university, history decided,

was to be founded by a Tunisian Fatima Al-Fihri.

Its timeline blinded Oxford and Cambridge

but her rights to be known were led to infringement

when her records caught fire in a London library. 

Conveniently.

In sociology, they taught us realities

of the system, we thought was real.

Those curriculums were ethnocentric.

That Uni allocations were inauthentic.

But then they said, ‘Write an essay about it.

The system won’t change.’

Whose errors made us pay the price 

by leaving our contributions detained?

Soon you realize, history became his story 

Tom, Dick, and Harry’s inventory.

A debt that was never paid to other worlds

seals wisdom-filled pearls in a dishonest resolve

to bury the voices that haven’t forgiven us.

But some don’t check the price of giving up.

Veracity rests on the shoulders of the youth,

History now looks to us to defend its truths.