Poetry

E. E. Sule, the renowned writer, critic, and scholar, in his instructive keynote address titled “BM Dzukogi as an Archive: Literature, Activism and Mentorship,” delivered at the national literary colloquium in honour of BM Dzukogi’s 60th birthday celebration in Minna, in January 2025, postulated that the “Nigerian writer must necessarily be an activist. Given the […]

John Pepper Clark, the renowned Africa poet, playwright and scholar, in his acclaimed poem “The Casualties” offered a profound postulation on the complexity of war and victimhood when he remarked that “The casualties are not only those who are dead…” as a response to the divisive rhetoric and counter accusations that trailed the Nigerian civil […]

 If his debut collection, Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, enacts place-centric imagination and diasporic consciousness, James Yeku’s latest work, A Phial of Passing Memories, articulates further “memoir-poetic” narratives in 60 poems coordinated in five sections that detail diverse encounters in moments and places. His poetry picks on well-ranged, everyday experiences: birth, parenting, death, […]

Bastion of FaithIWe belong to God in different waysJust as Odysseus belonged to the sirens and Penelope In different spindles of history. The sun arranges A box of light at the corridor of my being:This fibrous strands of belief, wovenAt the intersection of the sea. I, a boy, wade through the Niger-DeltaWhere the phytoplanktons and […]

By Tádé Ìpàdéọlá Poets who are also scholars of poetry occupy a peculiar niche in the ineffable enterprise of memorable music and words. They are not rare birds in the West (or the Orient), but here in Africa, the sighting of one such personage is something to cherish. If granted the further pleasure of not […]

One of the critical comments on humour I often return is Humour, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria of the foremost Nigerian critic, Ebenezer Obadare. Obadare showcases critically how the work of humor is central to the understanding of Nigerian society. He explores how humour by cartoonists, dramatists, and stand up figures power resistance through […]

ASANTEKumasi, your name, a tree with millions of golden branches, a border of origin from which your mother was missing until she flickered on the ghostly lane, & again in the city under Oboase.Your children, named after historical wars of a stranger who intruded yourterritory. In their manhood might have met a man inscribed as […]

The first frame is steady: smoke in the distance; a montage of bodies— singers and drummers, acrobats, names forfeited momentarily to their craft. Drumbeats for a cue, almost an epiphany, and you pan for signs in a portion of the square alien to gardening. It is a given: the bàtá rhythm heralding the masquerades now […]

In the words of Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimum, “A city is like a poem. You enter it and you enter into a world of concentrated time.” Odia’s observation makes us think of the city as malleable, changing from time to time, switching tempo from moment to moment. The African city, we guess, can be fast […]

In the cities, chit-chatting women with broken heels right their slipping sleeves with one hand and remove gums from their mouths with the other to paste the obituary of poems merely to do “justice” Posters hanging on for life to traumatized walls bearing the vague impression of poems tortured contortionists dissolving into amorphous ink Their […]