Poetry
On Lineage and Voice
On a humid afternoon, after a few years back from Germany, in our house in Nigeria, where my childhood had its formative years, I found a book lying on our dining table. Its cover showed a pair of drumming hands, brown against the dim yellow and blue of the jacket, and just beneath them, my […]
child of my mother
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 […]
Does the Body Ever Get Familiar with Grief?
–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 […]
Outside Borders
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 […]
Agema and The Writer as a Repository of Memory
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 […]
A Psychosocial Reading of Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla
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 […]
Forging Memories of Moments and Places
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, […]
Two Poems
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 […]
The Early Oeuvre of Romanus Nnagbo Egudu
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 […]
How Much Humour Is Enough
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 […]