LitPub

While any legitimate criticisms of a decrepit system cannot be equated with an outright dismissal of it, there is something to be said to the Nigerian abroad whose narratives about colleagues at home are couched mainly in typecasting rhetoric. Neither a gesture at academic populism nor a hint of empty nationalism, this, here, is my […]

A Great Mourning I am learning to mourn All the parts that lay hidden In the whirlwind of my heart, Parts that were  Too sharp to leave Too alive for a dead world. I am leaving these parts  By the shores of seas And lands that remember my scent, I’m stretching until it feels  Like […]

Kofi was getting married in Warri and I had a morning flight to catch. The plane was scheduled to depart Lagos at 9.20 a.m. and arrive in Warri at 10.30 a.m.   The time was 8.30 a.m. The Domestic Wing of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport was rowdy. The queue at the counter was disorderly. A […]

What comes to mind when you talk of echo:   Are the abandoned buildings emptied by the noise of wars; Lofty buildings for the tourists and their guides in years to come.   Are boys searching for the voices of their missing parents, Under the heaps of dead bodies, hungry heads.   Are the girls […]

Translated by Cliff E. Landers          If you think this story is going to end unhappily for me, you’re badly mistaken. Fortunately, I’m the narrator.          Envy is shit. I think it was in Brazil that I first saw that phrase, written on the windshield of a car on one of my many visits there. […]

i ask that you return the dead, god, i ask that you turn the bullets toward the hands that shot into the crowd            in Fagba, a bullet tears open the stomach of a pregnant woman   i’d like to ask the drafting angel what it intends to do with the stillborn            […]

We asked some of our readers and authors what books made the most impact on them. These are books published at any time but in whose pages they found something to keep them going during this annus horribilis, a year that tested the world’s patience, resilience, health, and resolve. Here’s the result. Akin Adéṣọ̀kàn, Professor […]

An Exchange I “You didn’t send me your list yet?” I murmur a procrastination. Undecided whether to tell you How I burnt the list. Blowing the ashes into the night air On the breath of my own longing. In any case the gifts I want No money can buy. Not now. Not this year. Not […]

I’d always loved writing, and curating them, and interrogating those who produce them. It’s a life-affirming thing. We are made by stories, so listening to others tell theirs or showing us how they get to set them down, or doing so myself, is a delightful experience. Has always been. From 2009, I had a travel […]

  Words, words, words You failed me when I needed you the most You vagabond!   I (For them at the Murambi genocide memorial site in Rwanda)   Ploughed from the mass graves of History Exhibits on the pyre of empty testaments Equestrians of Trauma Signifiers of perpetual suffering Icons of silence, of the never-speech: […]