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The Archive of Unnamed Joy

by Bella Chacha

On the day my best friend forgot how to laugh, the sky over Lagos turned a dusty gold, like the gods were sifting garri over the sun.

Kambili had always been the one to pull joy out of thin air: snapping her fingers into a rhythm that made our feet twitch, making jokes out of government warnings, drawing flying cats with glowing eyes on the back of her school reports. But that morning, she just sat there at assembly, eyes vacant, lips sealed tight, her laughter gone like it had been folded up and hidden inside someone else’s pocket.

“Mood correction successful,” the hall monitor announced in that soulless mechanical tone, tapping her brass baton twice on the concrete. Around us, the students kept silent, unmoving. Stillness was virtue. Stillness was law. Stillness meant safety.

I looked at Kambili again – Kambili, not Ministry ID K-452, the number they’d branded her with at registration.

She blinked slowly. Her left hand twitched like she was trying to draw something in the air, but it fell back to her lap.

I wanted to scream.

Instead, I swallowed it whole. In our world, screaming wasn’t just useless: it was dangerous.

---

It had been seven years since the Ministry of Stillness took over emotional regulation in Nigeria. “Peace through pause,” their billboards said. “Safety through serenity”. They outlawed all unregistered stories, poems, music, folktales, even certain colors that “evoked unruly feeling.” We didn’t call it a war, but something inside me knew it was.

They said it was for our own good. Too much feeling, they claimed, had led to chaos: elections erupting into riots, religion boiling into fire, children too loud with questions. So, they silenced the instruments and the tongues. Then the books. Then the memories.

My mother called it The Great Unremembering.

She used to tell me stories in secret when I was small – about Mami Wata and tortoise tricks and markets that talked back. But now, her voice trembled even when she called me “child”, no longer daring to use my name even in private.

We’d stopped celebrating birthdays. Stopped dancing. Stopped remembering how to feel.

Except… I hadn’t forgotten, not completely.

Not since the night I heard the humming.

It was barely audible, just a breath of sound that floated through the cracked bottom of the calabash on Grandmama’s shrine. She’d been gone five years, but I never touched her things. That night though, I was cleaning behind the water jars, and something pulled me toward it, like a memory tapping softly on the back of my neck.

I leaned in.

And there it was. A hum. Soft. Ancient. Like the lullaby of someone who missed me before I was born.

I didn’t know what it meant then. But I knew what I felt.

Joy.

Pure and reckless. Like splashing in gutters after rain. Like hot puff-puff from the roadside and sharing it with the kid next to you, even if they had nothing to give back. Like stories that made your chest ache in a good way.

I closed the calabash, heart racing.

The next morning, I found a folded scrap tucked behind Grandmama’s framed portrait. It was paper, real paper, the kind we weren’t supposed to have. The writing was strange: ancient Edo script, mixed with Nsibidi, with a faint fingerprint pressed in red earth.

One line was clear, etched in shaky ink:

“The joy they erase is the one they fear most.”

I hid it in the seam of my mattress. That night, I returned to the shrine and laid my ear against the base of the calabash. The humming had changed, slightly faster now, like it was waiting.

Something inside me cracked open. Something the Ministry hadn’t managed to seal.

That’s when I started looking for the rest of Grandmama’s secrets.

---

After school, I snuck into the derelict part of our housing unit – a burned-out old community library that nobody went near since its “cleansing” after someone tried to host a story-sharing circle.  Most believed the place was cursed.  I believed it was unfinished.

The windows were boarded, the shelves empty, but beneath the rot-smelling floorboards, I found a trapdoor. It wasn’t locked. Just waiting.

The ladder led down into a tunnel with red earth walls and dim solar bulbs embedded in the ceiling like artificial fireflies. At the end of the passage gleamed a round metal door, untouched by dust or time.

I touched the surface. Warm.

As my fingers lingered, a voice whispered to me through the metal, not in words, but in memory. The feeling of laughter. Of call-and-response. Of a hand clasping yours and saying, You’re safe here. Speak freely.

I stepped back, heart hammering.

I didn’t yet know what I’d found, except that I needed to find a way inside.

---

The door had no handle or keyhole and I couldn’t figure out how to make it open.  I stood there like a fool, my fingers trembling over the warm metal, waiting for some password or prayer or ancestral code to unlock it. But there was only silence.

Then, I recalled how I had felt it speak to me, and whispered the only thing that felt true.

“I miss the sound of my name in someone’s mouth.”

Click.

The door shifted. Not open, not quite – but enough for air to slip through. Air that didn’t smell like the bleach of regulation or the stale stillness of obedience. This air carried scent. Rain on wood. Candle wax. Mangoes. A page just turned.

I pushed the door.

Inside was a room that should not have existed. Books, real books, lined the walls in spirals, curling up to the ceiling like vines made of memory. Some were leather-bound, others wrapped in Ankara cloth or tied with palm twine. Some floated, I swear,           hovering in mid-air like they hadn’t yet decided whether to stay or fly away.

But it wasn’t the sight that stunned me: it was the sound.

A low, humming chorus like wind chimes made from old voices. Not noise. Not chaos. Just… song. Soft, and layered, and kind. Some voices were deep and rusted, like elders humming as they peeled cassava. Others were young, sharp, laughing, whistling, some even arguing. It didn’t clash. It harmonized.

The library was singing.

Not a song I knew. Not a song I could repeat. But I felt it in my bones like a heartbeat I had forgotten belonged to me.

The humming wrapped around me as I stepped in. My fear began to drip away, slow and warm like melted wax.

In the center of the room stood a carved wooden stool. On it, a box the size of a bread pan, glowing faintly blue, pulsing in time with the hum.

I reached out.

The box opened itself.

Inside, there were twelve slips of paper, each with a name. Real names. Not code-names or Ministry IDs. I recognized one instantly: Kambili.

Then I saw my own.

Ziora.

I hadn’t heard my full name spoken aloud in over two years. In school, I was Z-471. At home, Mama called me “child” or “you.” In public, I was invisible.

I picked up my name and the moment I touched the paper, the library changed.

Books flapped open. Pages rustled. Candles lit. The hum grew deeper, vibrating through the floor into my feet.

And then, from a far wall, a book floated toward me.

I reached out and took it.

The cover was soft as skin. The title, embossed in golden Nsibidi, read: The First Joy.

Inside, I found the story of a girl like me, named Zioraya. She lived in a time before the Ministry, when stories were not only free but sacred. Her laughter once healed a dying tree. Her anger boiled the water in a chief’s cup. Her tears called back her sister from the brink of death. She was a Librant: a vessel of living memory. A protector of joy.

The book ended on a half-page. Torn.

Below the rip was a symbol I recognized: the same red earth fingerprint as I’d found behind Grandmama’s portrait.

I turned the book over and saw new words forming on the back, etched fresh before my eyes:

Find the other Librants. Before Stillness silences us all.

I stood there breathing heavily, heart punching my ribs. It was no longer just about Kambili. This was bigger. This was a war of stories. And I…I was part of it.

A distant echo startled me: footsteps, getting closer.

No. Not now, I thought to myself.

I slid the book under my shirt, folded the name slips into my pocket, and darted back through the tunnel. I closed the trapdoor and replaced the floorboards just in time.

“Z-471!” a sharp voice barked. “Why is this section not sealed? Who gave clearance to enter the burned wing?”

I froze. It was an Authority Scout. Female. Young. Maybe two or three years older than me.

“Got lost,” I lied. “Looking for the toilet. Sorry.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Section C has no working toilets. Or had you forgotten?”

I swallowed hard. “I’ll report myself.”

She tilted her head. “You smell like paper.”

I said nothing.

She stepped closer. Her eyes flickered. For a moment, I thought she’d strike me.

Instead, she whispered, “Run, Ziora.”

“What?”

“Now.”

I didn’t wait.

I bolted past her down the corridor. She didn’t chase me.

Didn’t report me.

I didn’t understand then. But I would. Soon.

---

That night, I returned home to find Mama staring at the flickering candle in our room, her face wet. She held an old cassette player in her lap.

I had never seen it before.

She looked up at me, her voice cracked like old vinyl. “Your Grandmama recorded something before they came for her.”

She pressed play, and from the little box came a voice I hadn’t heard in five years. Soft. Laughing. Strong.

“Ziora, if you’re hearing this, it means they didn’t succeed in erasing you. Not fully. Good. You’re part of something now. A resistance older than war and deeper than silence. The Ministry fears what it cannot control – and joy, my darling, is the wildest thing of all.”

She paused. A breath.

“You must find the others. The names are hidden in the archive. Follow the singing. Trust only what moves your soul. And whatever happens, don’t let them make you forget.”

The tape stopped.

Mama looked at me, eyes full of something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Hope.

“Find them,” she said. “Before they silence this too.”

I nodded, and for the first time in years, I truly smiled.

---

That night, I dreamt of a white room. Not white like paint, but white like forgetting: a blinding, pulseless white. Floor to ceiling. End to end. And in the middle, a dozen children seated cross-legged on the ground, still as statues. Each held a book with blank pages. Their lips moved, but no sound came out.

One of them looked like Kambili.

I woke up gasping, the dream sticking to my skin like wet cloth. The cassette player still sat on the floor where Mama had left it, silent now, as if it too was holding its breath.

I didn’t tell Mama about the dream. Not because I didn’t trust her, but because I was starting to understand: some dreams are messages meant for action, not discussion.

I dressed quickly, wrapped the Librant’s book in old newspaper, and slipped out while the sun was still yawning over the rooftops. The air carried the scent of akara frying and smoke from early coal fires. Joy existed here, too – quiet and unremarked, but still defiant.

The school library had been locked since the fire, its windows boarded and the walls repainted in the dull gray of Ministry compliance. But I wasn’t heading there.

I took the long path to the edge of town, to the old printing house that the Ministry had converted into a “Centre for Documental Correction.” We all called it The White House, not because of politics, but because people entered with names and stories—and came out blank.

Inside were the Children of the Blank Page.

They were kids like us, once. Bright, loud, annoying. Kambili used to joke that the quietest boy in class would probably end up there because “stillness loves company.” We laughed then. But it wasn’t funny now.

No one was allowed near The White House. Not without a permit or an arrest warrant.

So I didn’t go to the front door.

I climbed the broken wall at the back, the one they never fixed, thinking no one would be foolish or desperate enough to use it. But I was both. I slipped through a gap in the concrete and landed in a patch of wild weeds.

The moment I stepped into the compound, I heard it.

Not the singing of the archive, but a hum, low and unsteady, like a broken song trying to remember itself.

I followed it.

Behind the building was a greenhouse, overgrown with dust. And inside it, sitting in neat rows, were children.

They stared blankly ahead, each one with a book in their lap, just like in my dream.

I crept closer, heart pounding. None of them moved. None spoke.

Then, I saw her.

Kambili.

Hair shaved. Skin pale. Hands folded like someone had taught her how to forget joy.

But her eyes. They flickered.

“Kambili,” I whispered.

Her eyes twitched. Just once. Then again.

She wasn’t gone.

Not fully.

I crouched beside her, pulling the Librant’s book from my wrap. I flipped to the torn page, the one where Zioraya wept tears that healed.

I held it out to her.

“This is yours,” I whispered.

Her fingers didn’t move, but a tear rolled down her cheek.

The hum deepened. Other children turned toward me,  one by one, and then something strange happened.

The books on their laps began to smoke.

Not with fire. With light.

I saw words emerging – curling from the pages like steam, forming letters, then sentences, then stories.      One girl’s book showed her climbing a mango tree to rescue a goat. A boy’s story spilled out as a rhythm, drumbeats and market noise and his mother’s voice yelling for him to come and bathe. Above each child a story hovered, warm and alive.

Kambili’s was last.

From her book, a melody emerged. It was the song we used to sing when we were six, skipping rope outside her house:

“My name is Joy, I live in the sun,

 If you tell a lie, my fire will run…”

Her lips moved. Just barely, but she was singing.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, surrounded by the humming books and the silent, awakening children. But I knew the Ministry would come. They always did when something bloomed without permission.

So, I placed the Librant’s book into Kambili’s lap. “You remember now,” I whispered. “You keep it alive.”

She blinked. Her fingers tightened around the book.

Then I ran. Back over the wall, through the city, through the noise, through the ache in my chest and the pounding in my head. By the time I got home, the sun was cruel and high, and Mama was standing at the door, arms crossed.

“You went there, didn’t you?”

I nodded. There was no point lying.

She let out a long sigh and stepped aside.

Behind her, on the floor, lay another tape. A new one.

She didn’t ask where it came from. Just pressed play.

It was Grandmama again.

“Ziora,” her voice crackled, “you’ve awakened your first of many. Joy is stubborn, it grows back even when buried. The Ministry fears it because it can’t be filed, indexed, or burned. You are not alone. Find the next name. Find Joy. Go where the drums used to play.”

Mama looked at me, eyes wide.

She whispered, “The Market of Voices…”

And I knew where I’d be going next.

---

They came first with chants and painted cheeks, girls from the tailoring shop, the boys from the roadside mechanics’ shed, the twins who hawked mangoes near the stadium.      Each clutched a page. Like some of the others, Anwuli wore an old Authority Scout uniform – rebellion stitched into the seams. She had inked her skin with forbidden lines, stories that once lived only in whispers.

They called it The Joy Rebellion.

It began not with fire or fists but with laughter – ripe, contagious, and dangerous. It was the kind of laughter that teachers frowned upon in assembly, that mothers feared would make daughters unruly. Anwuli watched from atop the tiled steps of the shuttered community library as small groups gathered. Their joy wasn’t frivolous. It was intentional, weaponized. Each voice was a protest. Each dance step a paragraph unwritten.

Ugo, one of the silent boys from the kiosk, now painted poems on people’s backs with a twig dipped in ink. His stammer disappeared when he read them aloud. Amina, from the mosque school, sang verses in Hausa from a banned book, weaving forbidden metaphors with praise songs. Even Mama Chika, who had once warned Anwuli not to speak “big English” in public, began composing verses in Igbo, calling it ụtọ nkwurịta okwu (the sweetness of speaking freely).

No one was in charge, yet everyone moved like they knew the steps. It wasn’t planned. It was inevitable.

Anwuli walked into the crowd, clutching the book that had started it all the day it split open and bled stories into the dirt.  It was no longer pristine. The cover had frayed, the pages puffed with rain and fingerprints. When she opened it, the ink shimmered with heat. Words rearranged themselves: Speak. Sing. Spill.

A group of elders arrived, those who had once burned storybooks behind the community hall. They came armed with megaphones and warnings. “You children are being misled!” one of them barked. “This is not our way!”

But the children did not stop. A boy no older than seventeen raised a page over his head and shouted, “Who decides our way?”

The elders fell quiet.

More children joined the square. They arrived on bicycles, okadas, even wheelbarrows. One girl recited a story in sign language. A boy drew his family’s lost migration tale in the dust. Ziora, the girl she’d found in the community library, stood barefoot in the center of the square. She held the forbidden book high above her head, its pages fluttering like wings. Kambili had returned it to her just that morning, as if passing a torch. Now, Ziora read aloud from its pages — her voice trembled at first, then found rhythm, found fire. Everywhere, joy bloomed, a deliberate act of resistance. The square pulsed like a living thing.

Anwuli stepped forward and read the first sentence of her book aloud.

“In the beginning, there was the Word. But the Word was not God—it was Us.”

The crowd roared. Someone began drumming on empty jerrycans. A pastor danced beside an imam. Uniformed students tore off their collars and started braiding one another’s hair in the open.

“We are not misled,” Anwuli said, voice trembling but firm. “We are rewriting what was silenced.”

That day, security forces came. Teargas filled the square. Sirens broke the rhythm. But they were too late. The rebellion had already written itself into the lungs of the people.

When the clouds cleared, pages fluttered like birds overhead. Someone had etched onto the side of the old community hall:

“Joy is our loudest refusal.”

And beneath it, in hurried, childlike handwriting:

“Our stories will never die quietly again.”

---

The next day, when the sun was still reluctant to rise, I returned to the library. I walked barefoot through the square, clutching a stitched-together book of dust and cloth – a book I’d made after hearing Anwuli speak, filled with stories gathered from the Market of Voices. I clutched it like a promise.

The streets felt different now.      Each shadow seemed to hum with the weight of unspoken things, and every stone beneath my feet seemed to carry a message. It was as though the city had been waiting for this moment, breathing in rhythm with the reborn whispers of the page.

I walked with purpose, the crackling air around me urging me forward. The voices of the library in my head had been quiet until I reached its doors. When I stepped inside,      they swirled around me again, but now they were louder. More certain. There was a clarity to them, a rhythm to their songs.

The library was alive. More so than it had ever been before.

I felt it before I saw it. The walls, once dusty but never truly silent, now pulsed with something louder, something alive, with the energy of a thousand stories waiting to be freed. I could hear the faint hum of pages being turned, of paper coming alive, of the library itself singing. The trapdoor that led to the hidden archive was already open. The scent of old parchment was sweeter now, rich with something ancient, something forgotten. I entered the archive. The weight of the world seemed to press down in that room, but it did not feel heavy. It felt… powerful. Sacred.

Anwuli stood near the far end of the library, in front of the shelves where the forbidden books had once been kept hidden. Her fingers ran over the edges of the leather-bound spines like a lover caressing a long-lost partner. And as she did so, the library stirred around me. The books weren’t just shifting, they were watching. Covers opened like mouths mid-sentence, pages twitching as if eager to be read. I couldn’t hear their words yet, but I felt them pressing closer, a rising tide of story waiting to break.

I approached her, drawn by an invisible force.

“You did it,” I said. “The rebellion… you’ve awakened them all.”

Anwuli turned to face me, her expression solemn but radiant, like someone who had glimpsed the truth of the universe. “We’ve all awakened them,” she replied softly. “The stories. The voices. They were never silent, not really. We just needed to listen.”

The shelves began to sing in full force now. It was a song without words, but its meaning was clear – a prayer, a plea, an invocation of power. Each book, every page, every letter that had ever been written in defiance, in silence, in protest, now resounded with the echo of voices long suppressed. It was as though the library had become a living thing, a being that had been waiting for its time.

The sounds grew louder. I felt the ground beneath my feet tremble. The library was breathing with us, and we with it.

“We need to take this out there,” Anwuli said, her voice tinged with urgency. “We’ve awakened them, but the city–no, the world–has yet to hear their stories. We’ve only started.”

Her words hit me like a lightning bolt.  The Joy Rebellion wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

The people in this city, this country, had lived in silence for too long. They had been fed the story that their voices didn’t matter, that their pain was unworthy of being heard. But now? Now, the stories wanted to be told. The voices wanted to be free.

“Where do we begin?” I asked, the enormity of it all hitting me in waves.

Anwuli’s gaze was piercing, as if she could see straight through me. “We make our own story,” she said, her voice a low hum of power. “We write ourselves back into history. We take back what was taken.”

For the first time in my life, I understood the true meaning of rebellion. We would take the stories, our stories–into the streets, into the hearts of the people. We would let the voices ring out, one by one, until the world could no longer ignore them. It wasn’t just about fighting for a cause or protesting injustice. It was about finding the words that had been stolen from you, and using them to carve a new path. It was about reclaiming your own story, because a person’s story was the most powerful weapon they could ever wield.

Anwuli held out a book with no title, its cover a deep, dark blue with a faint shimmer of silver running across the surface.  “This one,” she said. “This is where it begins.”

I took the book in my hands, feeling the weight of it–both physical and metaphorical. There was a fire inside me now. My role wasn’t to just witness this revolution, to merely be part of it. I was meant to shape it, to tell the story that had been denied us for so long.

I opened the book, and saw blank pages staring back at me, waiting to be filled.

And for the first time, I knew exactly what I had to do.

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Host Commentary

If ever a story summed up what Banned Books Week means to me, it might just be this one.  So, I’m not going to add very much here.  Everyone has a story. Everyone’s story matters. And there is so much joy to be found in living our stories and sharing them. 

Ziora’s grandmama reminds her that “Joy is stubborn, it grows back even when buried.”

That’s such a great reminder. Our stories cannot be silenced. Nor can our joy.