Death

In the evening of 12 September 2023, social media was awash with what was thought to be a wild rumor. Afrobeats star, Ilerioluwa Promise Aloba was claimed to have died. Within hours, it went quickly from rumor to fact: Mohbad was dead. Before his demise at 27, he was most popular for his  smash hit, […]

This September, in obeisance to the sharp drop in temperature that announced the end of summer in Toronto, I curled up on the lone couch in my apartment at York village and re-read Ṣóyínká’s Death and the King’s Horseman. Earlier in the month, in a packed cinema hall at the Toronto International Film Festival, surrounded […]

The stars lament his passing From Soweto’s seething streets to Bora Bora Kings, Queens, and Presidents flood the sky With tributes and purple garlands There goes a man In whose middling physical frame Throbbed a giant heart. Prophet who divined One complex rainbow in a land Ripped a-p-a-r-t by the colour creed He saw the […]

The searing reality of grief began to creep into my life the year I lost my friend to death. It was on a cold-ridden morning in Benue, when a phone call from a friend from home broke the news to me. Stunned by the gloominess that pervaded the voice that delivered the news to me […]

i will leave the dead in your body some room to dance. i will sit beneath the baobab tree with drums of tulips by self-acclaimed craftsmen. i will call forth boneless children & make  seats from udala trees for them. we’ll sit, we’ll eat, & drink too. we’ll be the motivators the eyes of the […]

for ek. today i will visit your grave after three years, I am eager to know what has become of your black stained chest. & at your burial, your dissected limbs that were placed side by side makes me think  of the doll’s limbs my little sister is spending  her childhood dissecting from its torso. […]

you have cheated death so much the first time, you weren’t even alive. the angels are less fortunate than you are sometimes, i wonder how that makes them feel but you can’t tell someone how to deal with their misfortune you took too long to form that is what happens when God calls you Lazarus […]

for H & to H.   death seethed into a home & did not pass through the door nor the window; did not knock, greet or smile no one knew how it got in, but when it left you went missing. mother tried to remember a passage through in your sickness or a path in […]