Poetry

Yorùbá Masquerade Dancers Sing Oríkì and Dance Bàtá

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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 […]

The Flute – African Urban Echoes

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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 […]

Afterlife of Poems

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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 […]

february flower is not for love

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– Ọ̀dọ́jà The horticulturist says February is for flower Not for love, so I go into the field In search of plant I once dreamt of Until I find it, and touch and burn and soften under the fire pump of its flamy fingers, And not a metal can hold The frame of this body […]

Heat

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i damage you─ beautifully. late evening nurse. i come with a bloodless adze, glucose meter & a satchel full of thermometers & ice packs. i put my fingers in your mouth & record your temperature. i detect everything; the hot breath of roof pressing heavily against your knee & quiet volcano in the compression of […]

mettle

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today, i am the little crow that gloom has nothing against. lightning bugs find a home under my nails. i choose life, untethered from the clasp of time & existence. the art of living is not so hard to learn. there is beauty in the ephemeral. re-see these familiar elements. embrace the inalienable order of […]

Cloudburst in Jakande

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stormy eid. rain washes the dua off our tongues. old central mosque brimming with bodies the brown of archipelago barks. i witness a crippled boy bum-walk a blind man to the front row of the saf’. & my guilt puckers beneath my skin. cracks in the rusted zinc-roof which used to pour sunlight into the […]

Ní Ayé Mìíràn

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Ní ayé mìíràn mo fẹ́ jẹ́ bàbá láì fojú sunkún àwọn ọmọ mi, láì ní ìrírí ètùtù wíwo àwọn ọmọ mi padà sílé bíi ara tí wọ́n kákò bíi ẹní-ìkírun, láì lo awọn alẹ́ mi pẹ̀lú wọn láti máa sọ ìtàn ìlú tí onílé ti ń di àjòjì tí wọ́n ń wá ibùgbé. Mo fẹ́ […]

The Nigeria Prize 2022: Garlands for New Blood

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If it wasn’t obvious enough that the leading poetic voices on the continent now belong to a new generation of writers bred in the jungles of the internet and raised in the angst of 21st-century dilemmas and preoccupations, the new NLNG prize shortlist has made it clearer. The three writers currently on the shortlist — […]

Saddiq Dzukogi’s Poetics of Grief

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Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art describes language as “home of being.” He also describes poetry as a form with powers to disclose “being.” Saddiq Dzukogi’s collection of poems, Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which is occasioned by the death of his daughter, Baha, wades through a […]