I don’t know much about what happened in Nigerian poetry this year because I didn’t pay attention, I’d admit. It occurs to me that since Su’eddie Vershima Agema declared 2022 the Nigerian Year of Poetry (which was the NLNG year for poetry, too) no similar documentation—as painstaking as his curation of that year’s achievement—followed the next year 2023, or this year either. I wouldn’t ask much: nobody can keep up with Nigerian poetry, not even a devoted critic of it. Even the aesthete, Ancci, published only a few poetry reviews; I’ve not written a poetry review since I considered Oko Owi Ocho’s We Will Sing Water, except maybe my recent introduction to Ismail Bala’s Ivory Night counts.
Michael Imossan won the Sillerman Prize, the third Nigerian in a row after Abu Bakr Sadiq in 2023, and Tares Oburumu in 2022. Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi enjoyed homegrown celebration with her speculative poems in Cadaver of Red Roses; featuring at KABAFEST, KAPFEST, SOBAFEST, and Aké. Masobe published poetry collections this year, including Girls and the Silhouette of Form by Star Zahra, Kola Túbọ̀sún’s Èșù at the Library, and Romeo Oriogun’s The Mystic of Small Dreams. Narrative Landscape announced its acquisition of the brilliant poet Jide Salawu’s Contraband Bodies,to be published next year. Konya Shamsrumi, from a hiatus of book-length publication, published Nasiba Babale’s Pickled Moments, and Ismail Bala, already mentioned. There is also Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies. The collective Nasara Creative launched Abuja International Poetry Festival which debuted from November 14 to 16, 2024, choosing as its theme “Afrofuturism and Digital Culture,” on the awareness of the incursion of the digital age and AI to poetry. And Poetic Wednesdays, led by Salim Yunusa and Nasiba Babale, gave us Kano Poetry Festival, KAPFEST, also in its first year.
There are many curious things to talk about Nigerian poetry now than ever, but it seems the recent inflation conspired and hit critics hard, pushing them into silence. The spate of debates and essays last year—see “The Debates of Fourth Generation Nigeria Poetry” here collated by Afapinen—was a quite interesting episode. Eniolá Abdulroqeeb Arówólò wrote a late entry to the debate this year in The Republic, in a short essay titled “How Should One Read A Poem.” To answer him, I read a very impressive poem this year by none other than enfant terrible, Ernest Ogunyemi. For all his criticisms of Nigerian poetry, he is hardly on my radar of poets I look forward to read. A mistake I corrected in the last quarter of this year (see “Ode To Loss,” for example); although I’d been put off by his “Little Inhabitants” poem in Efiko at an earlier time—a poem which goes on-and-on on a masturbation of itself for too long, without mercy to its reader, ultimately dissuading one from reading the last two poems after it. He recently published three poems out of which “Notes on Ambition” stood out for me. And I was introduced to it by Eniolá Abdulroqeeb Arówólò’s response poem, “Quest,” although almost ruined by its many adjectives. (Isaiah Adepoju wrote a comparative analysis of both poems; although his language is theoretically heavy, it is a nonetheless brilliant essay.)
Ogunyemi’s “Notes On Ambition” embraces a more modernist style than his Efiko poems. This is visible in “Quest” from the recent three poems, and even, as of late, a poem like “Brass Lip. Bariga, 2016.” “Notes On Ambition” has been a best-read poem of the year for many readers, and has had me thinking, perhaps, that its style—though an already established tradition—and the poem itself will resurrect a consciousness about the originality of voice and the attention to language, which has been lacking in the expression of the New School; of which I also recall Njoku Nonso’s poem “Surveillance from a High-Functioning Homo Proteus At Eagle Square, Circa Redacted,” although, which I feel Njoku goes overboard with his usage of hyperbolic epithets, both poems are works of amazing talent. Njoku’s poem is a near twin of Wole Soyinka’s “Death in the Dawn” in its stylistic execution, up to its last lines. It won the New Writers Poetry Competition 2024 in the UK.
A poet I like to look out for is Chiwenite Onyekwelu, who won me over in 2020 with his poem “Hydrology” which won the poetry category of the Kreative Diadem Creative Writing Contest. He was on last year’s shortlist of the revived Writivism Prize, although with a weak poem symptomatic of the influence of the present monotonous voice, whereas “Hydrology,” which traces his early craft, shone with distinct voice and originality. The Writivism poetry shortlist itself was not very strong, and by way of prizes introducing new voices, it was a let-down that seemed as if the judges had no better options from entries. We find already familiar names; needless to say four out of the five poets are Nigerians. Chiwenite Onyekwelu, already mentioned, attempted an inversion of “The Journey of the Magi” with his poem “Dear Virgin Mary,” but it easily segues into a forced trauma trope that lends it artificial. A similar case plagues Chinua Ohaeto’s “A History That Once Was and Still Is,” further risked by his less harmonious infusion of Pidgin English in the poem (which I shall address—this Pidgin fusion—in a sequel to this dispatch). However, both poems are saved, unlike the others, whose opening lines throw up the sing-song imagination of the monotonous metaphorisation of the New School, with the winning poem, Damilola Omotoyinbo’s “The Evening News” favouring trite imagery. This December, however, it was nice to learn that Onyekwelu won an After the End Poetry Competition, organised by the University of Exeter, for poems “On Memory and Forgetting” and “Time/Our Time,” which I am expectant to read.
In one of the places I may not have looked, if not for chance, I had the pleasure of experiencing Abduljalal Musa Aliyu’s poetry, which has a touch of Sufist influence. I’d listened to him read a poem at Kano Poetry Festival in July. And four months later, in October, someone shared on WhatsApp a photograph of two pages from his chapbook, Encyclopedia of Dolour. It was a poem with a long title, which I refuse to name here, but its first five stanzas are below:
I walked to Allah, & He came to me
running. How perfect, a servant
getting drunk on the wine of his
Master’s attention. I kissed my
lover & left the first stanza of the
poem I was writing on the nib
of her tongue. Rumi said: what you seek
is seeking you. In this poem,
everything I am in quest of picks a
flambeau & goes in search of me—
This is a lighter poem on the subject of grief which is his chapbook’s primarily prevailing theme. There’s much more mournfulness in other poems to the point of overload. But it is from a pain I understand so well, as in when I wrote the poems “Coming for your head,” and “This Blood,” for example, in attempt to process the trauma of the wanton killings of Benue citizens by the infamous “herdsmen” during the late 2010s, which we still hear news of deaths and raids now and then. For Abduljalal, it is for the calamity of the Boko Haram plague that nearly turned Nigeria’s northeast into a fiefdom of deaths, when he writes, “There are several governments / ruling this country . . .” in “Truism of a Country Rippling Into Itself.”
Abduljalal writes or adopts the style of the free-verse couplet, a prominent stylistic of the day, which a poet like Samuel A. Adeyemi has successfully minted to trademark, like Asake hacking Amapiano. Talking about Adeyemi, Abduljalal’s poetry, in its temperament, also mirrors Adeyemi’s, whom I’d written about as being “perennially in confrontation with the universe.” This aptly represents Abduljalal’s anguish, who weaves religion and country—to quote myself again—into a “synecdoche of oppression,” wherefore he targets his agitations at them. While he has a voice, perhaps to approach a Darwish level of poesy, Abduljalal is indisciplined when it comes to his language, not taking time to contemplate it, allowing his words flow like a faulty faucet. We find this ruination in his poem “Delineation of a Woman’s First Child as Her True Religion,” priorly published in the Chestnut Review, which could have been an otherwise better poem with a little more editing. This poet had name-checked me at KABAFEST in May, saying I asked our poets to leave grief alone; little did I know he was planning to drop a grief-bomb chapbook the next month. [LOL]
I am thinking next year might probably be a slow year of poetry because of the NLNG Prize, which focus is fiction. But also because I feel we are at a downward curve. Maybe not. Nonetheless, we wait to discover even newer poets, and maybe finer poetry. The African Poetry Book Fund will give us more chapbooks. Maybe there will be more poetry reviews. While we are at it, there has been an emergence, or (re)emergence, of what has been considered Africanfuturist poetry and/or speculative poetry, which it currently seems Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi is at the forefront, including 2022 Sillerman winner Abu Bakr Sadiq (Leaked Footages). Martins Deep has also explored the subgenre. In 2021, I wrote a review of Hannu Afere’s Digital Ṣìgìdì, considering it then as an Afrofuturist text, rather than Africanfuturist (the difference being the Afro- and African- prefixes, the former representing more of African American and diasporan experience; the latter representing indigenous African experience minus the shadow of the West). I’d later realise too, while I hadn’t thought of it in this light at the time, that my poem, “Telex from the Past,” published in For Girl at Rubicon (2020), bore Africanfuturist elements, too.
In this poetry is the discourse of the postmodernist reality of Africa juxtaposed with black identity, technology, dystopia and utopia, late capitalism, AI, The Singularity question, the invocation of African myths and gods, borne-ing back sometimes into the past to understand the present, and more—in defining the individual and collective existence of Africa in personhood, place, and time. Some of the poems are experimental, so-to-speak. But its most simplistic rendition has been the usage of mathematical equations as a stylistic, as in what we see in Writivism shortlistee Obasiota Ibe’s “Scientific Inquiry of I,” and in Iliyasu Bobi’s “Set Operation of a Country in the Belly of Wa(te)r.” Sometimes the equations don’t really work according to the laws which actual scientific equations are derived, but one of its most successful examples for me is Kayinsola Olorunnisola’s “Mathematical Equation for the Myth of Lakunle Alara.”
The poetics of Africanfuturist or speculative poetry is very interesting, mostly in the discourse of comprehensibility, as poetry is already charged with or falls victim to the error of being difficult to understand. In its case, a reader needs actual or specific kinds of intelligence than reliance on intuitive power, which all poetry should be appreciated. For example, a little algebra, knowledge of technoculture, computers, and perhaps physics, and space. It’s not obscurantist, but selective, and reveals a very important question which is already being discussed in several spaces, about Africa’s position in the globalisation narrative. Or to be more confrontationally stated, it reveals not just Africa’s perilous pace in keeping up with techno-speed, bedevilled by bad leadership, when the rest of the world is thinking genome editing, geo-engineering, and nanotechnology, but also reveals questions of class among Africans, for to understand this poetry, you don’t need to be just an intellectual elite, but to have climbed a step further in that ladder, which summed up, means better education, again, class. The question of what comes after in the continuum of postcolonialism discourse has been at the back of my mind. We have passed the disillusion phase, its last phase I imagine—which a novel like Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel was about—and seem to have entered The Uncertain Landscape, the post-postcolony, which I believe the Africanfuturist narrative is trying to tackle, successfully exemplified in TJ Benson’s We Won’t Fade Into Darkness, especially in the short story “Alarinka”—
I shall continue my thoughts in my next coming in from the cold essay.♦
Editor’s note: this essay has been updated to include an omission about the poetry collections published by Masobe Books in 2024.
Carl Terver is the founding editor of Afapinen.