LitPub

It is midnight in 2025. On my study desk are books strewn over: Binyanvanga Wainaina’s How To Write About Africa; Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; Richard Powers’ Overstory; Damon Galgut’s The Promise. My lamp pours its incandescent yellow over these books, over my pencil holder stuffed with […]

Opobo, Notebook IslandIn the beginning was the rafting, too, before the empty ships made of conquest arrived at the shore where Pepple was the king, where the world was one world, as soft as silk moving the air. We, the sea-dwellerswere capable of love in the way the waters flow endlessly on their own axis. […]

Somewhere in BornoIit lingers, the sorrow, like a mist as men sit on benches with tumblers of ginin hands, smoke from bummed cigars drifting aboutthe atmosphere—the only mechanismmy countrymen have invented to disembody ache.IIa foreigner once asked why the children herewear old faces: i told him to wear his caution perfectly well. the bullets don’t […]

1.I have climbed all the mountains in the world. I have climbed the tallest trees to their apical leaves. I have cruised the endless waters to the points where the earth kisses the sky, or back to my starting point in Lagos on the occasion when I kept westfor four hundred years for refusing to […]

Mummy Tobe sat in the spacious living room of her one-bedroom apartment, her jaw set firmly on her hand and her hand set firmly on her leg. Her expression was one of deep thought. Her eyes fixed on the linoleum floor and peered into the unknown. Her friend Agnes was sitting on the same sofa […]

The daughter who works closest to home/the teacher/the one with a lot of time on her hands & long holidays/is the one all siblings send/Mpesa contributions for home projects/is the one who must study fundi’s face for honesty/evaluate sketched designs of sewer systems/measure circumferences of manholes/hire pickups to carry pvc pipes from mitra hardware/bargain with […]

O heavens, hear me now…Hear me on the edge of this wilderness, Ripping off my heart to you, calling out,A traveller at crossroads, in this thicket.Haven’t you heard me cry out to you?Haven’t you heard my voice of lament?Sometimes the day feels dry, Like rotten oranges decaying in my mouth.Sometimes the night comes too often,With […]

after Nikki Giovanni’s “resignation” (for you, you, & you)i love you because our mothers say nothing is more worse than eating alone so we eat iyán & ègúsí from the same bowl brotherman you who would wrestle a blue whale for my sake i love you because of all the steep mountains & the hills […]

–For Oby, Albert, Quadri, and everyone who left us too early Does the body ever get familiar with grief?This sinking, this drowningGoing underwater and unable to find an anchor Does one ever get used to sorrow?The smile on the face of a strangerThe singsong laughter of a passer-byA look that reminds of exactlyHow much you loved life Is there […]

Everytime I arrive here,The leaves are in bloom, their wrinkled skins blown south, then east,Until it lands bare. I find it strange,How my heart races with this placeGoosebumps crawl over me,My mind falls with the brown rain of a tree Ending itself. I cannot find home. Every arrival is a gongKnocked hard. Every fondness of […]