Detailing KIS’s Regenerative Strides in Nigeria’s Literary Scene
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By the end of 2009, Kukogho Iruesiri Samson, popularly known as KIS, completed his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year in Anambra State, and was scammed while looking for a job.
He had graduated at the top of his class from ABU, Zaria, with a degree in mass communication. Thereafter, in July 2008, he worked as a recharge card supplier in Zamfara for a telco company which printed and sold vouchers to retailers. With his bicycle he rode around the rural area—in “the now dangerous Zamfara” as he describes the place—where they nicknamed him “Celtel,” which was the most popular network the company he worked for promoted. He held this job until he was mobilised for the one-year NYSC service in Anambra.
In Anambra, KIS served as a teacher. A fond memory during his service was being the head of a drama club where he taught actors how to stage a play using just mime accompanied with music, leaving out any dialogue. They performed at the local government secretariat and at NYSC events. To him, the experience was so pleasant that he hopes to go back to it, sometime, describing his NYSC in Anambra as “a beautiful experience.”
After NYSC, he’d be scammed as he looked for a job. While he nursed his wounds, he decided to go into woodwork, an art form he had mastered in his younger years. During this time, he continued his job search for three more months, after which if he did not find one, he would continue with woodwork.
Six months later, he found a job with the media unit of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Few months in, he received an employment letter from Daily Trust which was then in the habit of employing the top three graduating students from mass communication in ABU, Zaria, at the time. And since then, KIS has charted a career in journalism from where he has pursued his longterm passion as a writer and laid blueprints which has contributed, and still contributes, to giving platform and voice to numerous writers and poets of a younger generation.
His time at Daily Trust provided an opportunity to write. The job took most of his day time, but he worked on his ideas at night. He soon began to work on a crime novel about a student who is bullied into joining a secret cult in the university and is forced into a situation where he becomes an object of revenge against the members of the cult. Not having a computer of his own, KIS stayed back at work writing his stories with the office computers. Unable to publish the novel after its completion, he decided to serialise it on Facebook. Each episode amassed readers, and with every episode, the readers grew in numbers and enthusiasm. This gave KIS a sizable followership on social media, some of whom turned out to be lifelong literary enthusiasts.
KIS did not just write prose, but wrote poetry too and soon began writing more poetry. The Nigerian poetry scene, currently dominated by a swarm of the young, was a far cry from what it is today. Whatever little infrastructure there was mainly catered to the older generation of poets. KIS only remembers War of Words, then curated by Olumide Holloway. KIS had just, at the time, begun to write poems out of the excitement of discovering he could create lyrics with words.
His poems were lyrical because they had rhymes and rhythms, making them musical. At the time, Facebook groups were the most effective way of establishing a writing community on the app and online. So he created the Facebook group “Words Rhymes & Rhythm” in 2012 (which popularly became WRR) and gradually built a poetry community where poets shared their works and received reactions, comments and feedback, and even made friends with each other. WRR contributed to the growth of a number of poets, including Madu Chisom, who discovered Adedayo Agarau in a 2go room and introduced him to WRR. The community grew as many poets in the group became mutual friends; likewise, sharing of poems became rampant on poets’ timeline as it was in groups.
At first, KIS wrote poetry with rhymes and rhythms, while trying to explore conscious themes. This style of writing became like a spine to the movement which would result from his endeavours. Many younger poets followed in his footsteps at the initial stages of their career. But KIS wrote his poems, not with the intention of gathering a body of work or a collection of poems, but to respond to particular events in society and to express his thoughts. It was his later collections, We Who Sow Hurt and Beaded Pains, inspired by a phase of depression, and Words of Eros, an erotic exploration, he wrote with the vision of compiling into a body of work.
This change in KIS’s vision in writing poetry coincided with the change in the landscape of poetry in Africa at the time. Before the 2010s, African poets were still very much inspired by the style and scope of the second and third generation who mostly wrote poems about politics, heritage, colonialism and topical, social issues of the day, and which for a decade or two remained stale. But with the rise of the digital age and new ideas, and the influx of many younger poets, the introduction of new ideas into the poetry scene was inevitable. Themes like love, depression, and trauma became more commonplace. With these, came changes in the way poets wrote. Expression, especially of the self, was the new spirit; poets began to take their personal experiences more seriously as fodder. Inspired by this change, and also by listening to Dike Chukwumerije’s spoken word, KIS began to write poems from personal experience.
His third collection, We Who Sow Hurt and Beaded Pain, sprung from a bout of depression. The work begins with how depression springs out of a medley of conflicted thoughts, with the first poem, “Metamorphosis.” The collection also explores the imageries of places associated with dealing with depression, like Third Mainland Bridge, which evokes visions of suicide. From the vantage of memory, it also explores the effect of lost childhood and how it creates a vacuous sense of self in adulthood.
We Who Sow Hurt and Beaded Pain was KIS’s way of portraying how beyond a mask of wellness, the heart could be enmeshed in dark thoughts and how life may not be so pleasant. But it really is also a work of resilience, stubbornly fighting to live even when living isn’t pleasant. It was his first work built around a uniform theme made into a collection.
KIS understood at the time that poetry was in its transition into the digital age, and that it was becoming trendy for writers to have their poems published in online literary magazines. Many poets and writers submitted their works to the earlier magazines and got rejected often. Many who suffered this fate alleged it was not because their work lacked quality, but that there wasn’t really any space for the younger generation of poets in the platforms. WRR would go on, from the early 2010s, and for the ensuing decade, to give a large number of poets of the new generation the first home for their works, including Aremu Adams Adebisi, Chika Chimezie, Madu Chisom, Chika Jones, Adedayo Agarau, Ayoola Goodness, and many others.
A notable number of chapbooks have been published under the WRR imprint: Adedayo Agarau’s For Boys Who Went (2017); Aremu Adams Adebisi’s Transcendence (2018); and Tukur Loba Ridwan’s A Boy’s Tears on Earth’s Tongue (2019). In 2015, WRR announced its Green Authors Prize Initiative which, in 2015 and 2016, gave four outstanding poets a contract to publish co-authored books. Since 2018, the initiative now publishes the works of writers as separate chapbooks. And in the lockdown year, 2020, the chapbook series published a box set of chapbooks including works by Martins Deep, Ehi Kowoicho, Chukwudalu Abugu, and more.
KIS also began Authorpedia under the WRR imprint to assist authors publish their works, and to raise money for running the digital wing of WRR. Because of the difficulty getting funding for literature, Authorpedia’s goal was that money made from it was used to prevent the situation of having to raise funds from individual pockets, which has led to the death of many literary enterprises on the continent. “The goal was so that Authorpedia would fund the digital publishing house, our festivals and every other thing,” KIS tells me. “And in the past five years, we have not had to spend anything from our personal pockets.”
KIS’s personal life is a sharp contrast to his online persona. “I am not a very sociable person. In real life I don’t have many friends,” he says, “and I don’t stay in a particular place for very long. I always move. I have become very used to the idea of moving that I look forward to endings.” For this reason, he has lived in places without becoming attached, so that he only sees the people within such spaces as temporary acquaintances. KIS has lived in Kaduna, Zamfara, Anambra, and Abuja. In these places, his life has mostly been defined by his work, artistic pursuits, and literary events he organises, attended by his friends, far and wide, mostly people he met on the Internet. In his way, his curatorial feats have borne witness to the great unifier that is the Internet.
KIS’s personality is deeply shaped by his childhood, which he describes as stressful, lonely and plagued by domestic imbalance. But his father was a booklover who, although was very strict with his personal belongings, did not deny his children access to his books. In his father’s catalogue, KIS read many issues of Readers’ Digest, Ikebe Super magazine, as well as many books of African and Western literature. “I did not have many friends,” KIS says, “and it was not like now when there is social media and you can easily connect with people online.” Going into the world of books became a consolation, and afterwards, writing was added as a way of expressing himself in the loneliness of his childhood.
By 1997, his love for books grew and he read Chinua Achebe, Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, Cyprian Ekwensi, Isidore Okpevwho, Festus Iyayi, and many others, often reading their whole books as his father had them in his library. He cites Isidore Okpevwho’s The Last Duty, Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Festus Iyayi’s Heroes, as works that greatly inspired him, including Charles Dickens’ Great Expectation, which he describes as beautiful yet damaging, because of its tragic end.
In 2011, KIS met the American catholic priest, Albert Jungers, online, who introduced a lot of specialisation into his writing. (Fr. Albert Jungers sadly passed away in 2013.) His interaction with Fr. Jungers and the French poet Brigitte Poirson and her husband, Patrick Poirson, did not just help foster the growth of his art, but also helped begin a monthly poetry prize titled Brigitte Poirson Poetry Prize, and the annual version of the prize titled Albert Jungers Poetry Prize, awarded to the best of the monthly winning poems.
With poets like Adedayo Agarau, Nome Patrick Emeka, Chika Jones, Chimezie Chika, Ayoola Goodness Olarenwaju scattered all over the world, doing important work, it is clear that the community of poets, which KIS was instrumental in building, has spread its tentacles. Adedayo Agarau currently holds the position of editor-in-chief of Agbówó; and also, alongside poets like Nome Patrick Emeka, Jeremiah O’Agbaakin, Kolawole Samuel Adebayo, and Ifeanyi Akuchie, they formed The Unserious Collective, a community which promotes poetry and offers fellowship to struggling poets in the country to work on their manuscripts.
KIS’s strides, which set the pace for many younger writers to follow, may have cemented his place in history. But it is his ability to adapt and catch up with new trends in the industry that has sustained his relevance. “At some point, everybody wanted to post their poems on Facebook and gain audience and we opened our group for them,” he recalls. “Then later, it was literary magazines that were in vogue and we began that too. We did the same for chapbooks and even when magazines that publish writers in issues began, we started CỌ́N-SCÌÒ too.”
The first interview for this profile was on Google Meet. KIS and I were speaking for the first time, and he told me of his friends who recently left the country, and the mass exodus of young Nigerian writers. “Why have you not left yet,” he asked. He was himself one of the few writers of his calibre still based in the country—as at the time of this interview; he has since left—despite many offers and opportunities to leave in the past. A choice he says, in retrospect, he isn’t very proud of.
“If you remain in Nigeria as the country is now,” he tells me, “you cannot grow past a certain level. There are not many good opportunities for a writer here. The best you can get is maybe a job as a big columnist in one of the top newspapers where you receive maybe N400,000 a month. I have earned that amount for a while, and I tell you before you have attended to some of your family responsibilities, the money is gone. So those of you who are young and intelligent and can write, should leave.”
He was a fierce critic of the last administration which he believes almost ran the country aground. “I hope that Peter Obi wins,” he says of the then forthcoming elections. “Of course, I am not expecting him to do any magic or transform the country, but at least he can help salvage things a bit. If he doesn’t win, I am one hundred percent in support of self-determination which groups like IPOB has been agitating for.” KIS, an Urhobo, grew up in the north, served (in NYSC) in the east, and is widely travelled across Nigeria’s south. He hinges his understanding of the Nigerian problem to his exposure to different sides, admitting that power cannot be the monopoly of only one part of the country, and how the last eight years almost made him give up on the country.
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KIS’s literary and publishing initiatives in the Nigerian literary scene has given so much to the creative industry and helped many poets find their feet. Poets he has mentored make up a part of the mass exodus of writers finding their way out of the country to save their creative endeavours. This is so much so that he now sees himself as a party to the exodus.
When he speaks about his journey to me, KIS is generous about his story, but self-effacing about his strides. He praises the efforts of poets like Eriata Oribhabor (Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize, Poets In Nigeria, Festival Poetry Calabar), Brigitte Poirson(Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest), Wale Okediran (Ebedi Residency), and Efe Paul Azino (Lagos International Poetry Festival, LIPFEST) and the likes, as people without whose contributions his efforts would not have been as successful. In his words, “It is easy to sometimes forget how some people contribute to the making of history, especially when it is not their face at the forefront.” Such documentation are important. Thus, last year I collaborated with WRR as guest editor in its pacesetters issue, and alongside other writers, we profiled Brigitte Poirson, Eriata Oribhabor, Wale Okediran, and Olumide Holloway.
In late February, KIS moved to Britain. He appears more invigorated in the wake of his relocation. Asked about his time so far in the UK, he responds, “The experiences are diverse. In summary, I’ll just say that my time here has shown me that Nigerians are suffering and the country is unfortunate to have the challenges it has, given its immense resources. The country has no right being as backward as it is.”
In Hatfield where he currently resides, he is yet to come across any trace of the arts. “I am considered with awe when I mention that I have published five books or that I run a publishing house. And this is because the average person here has no business with authorship.”
KIS has plans to rejig the Authorpedia machinery in the UK, to continue the work he began in Nigeria. Moving to the UK was a redirected trajectory on the course he hoped his career as a journalist, publisher, and arts curator would take, and the availability of basic necessities is helping him ease in. “The things which make life easy here,” he says, “are the little things we are cajoled with in Nigeria during elections, never to hear of again.” And even while currently searching for a professional job befitting his education and experience, he already makes enough to have constant electricity, water, gas, good transportation, and “…all the basic things which make life impossible in Nigeria.”♦
Correction: an earlier version stated Enigmatic Olumide as the curator of War of Words. But the name has been changed to reflect the original curator, who is Olumide Holloway. Also, the poet Rasaq Malik Gbolahan was mentioned as a beneficiary of WRR, but this was an error, which has been corrected.
Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera is an essayist and journalist. He is interested in art criticism and in oft-avoided topics among the Nigerian literati. His works have been published in Jalada Africa, The Republic, Brittle Paper, Olongo Africa, Afrocritik, Afapinen, African Writer, and elsewhere. He is @ChukwuderaEdozi on Twitter.
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