I hadn’t known I was writing what would perhaps be a theoretical framework in interpreting what is now the (re)emergent and germane question of speculative consciousness and futurism in our poetry when I wrote my first Coming In From the Cold dispatch. I was, at the time, trying to make sense of what poets like Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Abu Bakr Sadiq were writing, given their widespread readership then in 2024, especially as Sadiq won the Sillerman, and also because of my intrigue with Njoku Nonso’s poem written in this same persuasion, with its long-ass title, “Surveillance from a High-Functioning Homo Proteus At Eagle Square, Circa Redacted.” This kind of poetry, I’d written:
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 . . . experimental.
My thoughts, which I still hold on to, were in recognising how the expression of futurism was an answer to what I describe as “[t]he question of what comes after in the postcolonial continuum,” past the disillusion phase into The Uncertain Landscape, and the post-postcolony, which Africanfuturist narratives try to tackle. But what I did not know at the time was Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu’s recent poetry collection, Kill the Poet, Save the World, expanding and enriching my epistemology on this subject or of the collection being a kind of seminal vocabulary of such poetry, confirming my observations in that erstwhile essay.
Sooner or later, the question we find ourselves asking, in a world where we witness destruction and dehumanisation on a handheld device, with no one held accountable, is: what the hell has gone wrong? What is wrong with us? And—what has become of us? The problem isn’t that we do not ask ourselves these questions, but that we seem to be paralysed by them and by the daily collapse of meaning in a postmodern world. These are universal problems, but for the African whose experience is of meaning constantly under threat, it is a unique problem. This is centrally what Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu’s (“Baba-Aminu” henceforth) collection confronts, but with an interest in futurism and the digital realities of our present existence. But then he wants something from us: that the poet be killed to save the world. A very Nietzschean solution, domestic on the one hand when he accuses poetry of its romantic helplessness to affect society—described as “Simulations of truth stitched from letters / by a well-meaning clown”—but which, on the other hand, is an apt indirect criticism of the failure of language today engineered by modern crisis.
To redeem ourselves, poetry is not enough. And language too, this failed iteration, is not enough. The poet’s words are a “diseased . . . intent / their tunes out-sing the pipes of Hamelin; / they feign life while death waits at the door.” And seeing his own hand in this scam, Baba-Aminu write of being “equal to those false prophets [poets], the fever climbs: / It tells me one thing, and one thing only, / that if you must save the world, / You have to kill the poet.” Reading these lines, we see that it is not strange that one of the things bedevilling the individual today is the contradiction of himself, because even his society contradicts him and every other thing, so that we live in a domino effect of contradictions. But the real problem is to kill the contradictions. And the even more pressing problem is that we are all the poets ought to be killed, which is also a contradiction, that Baba-Aminu cannot bring himself to fulfil: In the poem “The Past is Not a Place,” future Baba-Aminu has travelled to the past, 1973: “in the red dust of Yobe . . . before flame, / before sermons turn to siege. / The child is here. / Wrapped in rags and sun. / Sleeping. / Breathing. / They call him Abubakar. / But now, he is just / a softness . . .” This softness is “she-kau-kau-kau the poet” who will grow up to be Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram terror. It is the popular go-back-in-time-and-kill-Hitler scenario, but the time traveller—Baba-Aminu or the persona—“lay the knife down.” They do not see a killer, “but a child / who may have danced,” because “There is no evil yet. / Only the soil, where it may grow.” He leaves the knife “beside a mango seed. / I leave a book and a recording / in a mother tongue he never got to hear.” Because—“What if mercy is the bravest form of rebellion?”
Mercy as rebellion asides, there’s an interesting aspect of Baba-Aminu’s act toward Baby Shekau: why the hell did he leave poetry—book, recording, mother tongue—behind to save the world? Contradiction. Once again, language fails. And maybe it keeps failing, or will keep failing, and that we are not monitoring this failure enough. We live by language, we are humans because we have language, but we are in a crisis of it; language, which according to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is “central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.” The crisis of language failure today is not just in the failure but that in addition is the incursion of digital reality, with its own language of “code”—at the centre of everything now; through it, machine life has risen to meet us—defining us in relation to the natural world and indeed the universe, in which we carve future imaginaries, contemplate our existence, and weigh the value of our contemporary lives: enter the question of the homo digitalis.
Quite unexpectedly, however, is how Baba-Aminu adjusts his gaze from the human victim of this new world to that of robot life; something similar in Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” And it isn’t difficult to see Baba-Aminu’s point, after all; we write the code, we create artificial life and intelligence (which is a form of our predatory tendencies); therefore, we are custodians, the sentient ones to witness the contradiction, not the other way around. In “Wounded by Nnedinma,” we read:
Under twin suns an android weeps chrome
Its chest split by longing, the wound a glowing pulsing ache
Not rust, not damage
But heartbreak, mechanical and ancient
Love is incompatible with this OS, but still, it learned
Still, it felt . . .
The cause of this heartache is Nnedinma-9, an extra-terrestrial mythical mother “forged in the heat of a dying comet,” whom the android had loved or is connected to—Richard Ali describes her in his introduction to the work as “the scientific notion of Mitochondrial Eve . . . transfigured into a cosmic being”—but which it, the android, is severed from, in which she only “left behind an echo [of herself] in his firmware.” After a heartbreak, memory stays, and its victim lives with the punishment to seek what was lost; and when it can’t find it, it tries to take care of the hurt. This is the android’s situation, “its chest split by longing.” This idea of a machine longing or experiencing heartbreak, which Baba-Aminu interrogates, is not new in futurist and machine-learning discourses, with the anxiety of Artificial Intelligence gaining sentience. But to address this with his poetry, and in this poem in particular, he directs the question through traditional community, representative of values that seem to be eroded by the day. He writes, “The elders warned: ‘Even steel can fall in love.’ ” It is not a matter of whether machine can love; it will, as the elders conclude: this, therefore, becomes an indictment for man to be responsible for the world he wants to create. Because while a bandage is used to calm the android’s pain, the love it once nurtured “sealed inside. / Contained, encrypted never to stain spacetime . . . Holding the pulse of a broken machine,” it is how “the universe was protected / From love.”
The android is not alone; Baba-Aminu is with him, in another poem that seems to be in conversation with this. In “/pulse.exe II,” he describes his romantic fatality via computer language; his lover, a malware (the “pulse” of course):
> INITIATING…
system.log (“infection started at line one”;
she arrived, a glitch wrapped in syntax.
firewall.status = “breached”;
I let her run (), no antivirus, no regret.
vulnerability = zero_day();
heartbeat = flicker(); / / was that love?
packets blurred.
she spread:
directory to desire,
drive to dream.
Why is this poet describing affection like this? Why has the android fallen in love with Nnedinma-9? It cycles back to the concern raised above, of the new reality we have to face very soon, of what life would be like or already is for the homo digitalis and the fact of a new language evolution ultimately shaping everything we know, pointing to an existential rupture. This is the ache the android understands when it can no longer reconcile its contradiction, even as newcomer. And even Nnedinma-9 failing to recognise it as she drifts off, lost in cosmic dust—“Somewhere / Nnedinma-9 sings through old satellites / Her voice lingers like starlight on rusted armour.” We see the same with Baba-Aminu and his lover, the virus which has eaten into his own firmware: “somewhere in RAM, / her algorithm lingers… / compiling, always compiling.” There is an unfinishing happening in both scenarios here, underscoring the rupture of how things have fallen off and for which there’s perhaps no escape, but how to live with it. One senses the influence of the post-apocalyptic trope in Baba-Aminu’s vision, as is common with futuristic narratives. However, it is a rupture that now dictates our lives—this never-ceasing, unfinishable chauffeur, The Almighty Algorithm, somewhere in the RAM, lingering, compiling, always compiling.
We may be lonely, we may be cosmically fucked, we may be doomed. But we still turn to algorithm for help when we consult our devices, merging with its own reflexive disorientation with our desires which it constantly has to learn from. It has kept us under siege when we didn’t notice, defeating us, the so-far-known apex predator in the universe. A paradox, when you think of it: we created code, the Processing Unit, and exploited silicon to manufacture machine intelligence, which in turn has given us a reality akin to the Matrix, an all-consuming habitus exerting its reign over us. Before this, man had created the back-breaking machine that, more or less, was infantry to this: capitalism, which has shaped the world—especially for the underclass—into a nightmare of labour and tedium, inequality, deprivation, war, hunger, and exploitation, reducing many to only vicariously perceive their humanity. It is not strange, therefore, that in this dislocation where reality becomes fragmented that man is found still asking himself who the heck am I? in an abundance of more than enough information he needs. And everything might soon even be lost, as in the poem on this cosmic loneliness and vacuity, “The Last Butterfly I Saw,” registers: “…I who have never worshipped small, beheld the last butterfly / It did not flutter, but it glowed as if remembering sunlight / A verse misplaced in a dead machine’s dream”—
Wings folded like a Malam in prayer. It sighed.
Then it flew into the collapse, as if returning to its source.
That night, I did not hear the muezzin’s call.
That night, I did not dream.
I had already seen paradise leave.
Yet somehow in these lines, one cannot help but sense the poetry Baba-Aminu is after, as antidote to this dreariness that abounds, for which we cannot kill the poet. He opines very well in his author’s note: “progress divorced from spirituality is sterile, that technology without memory becomes tyranny.” Or even suicide, I submit. Nevertheless, it is this inability for poetry to work, to correct the language dystopia we are experiencing, that Baba-Aminu is concerned about; he asks, “what use is the poet in the age of dashboards?” For “[h]ow many times / has the crowd pressed its wound / against the paper tourniquet of a sonnet?” There is no escape anyhow—or is there? The dashboard is the new reality, as algorithm. To participate in the moving organism of civilisation therefore, now inextricably linked to computable data, is to become parallel to it. Baba-Aminu understands this, even if it is not present, and this is the point of his futurism; a good number of the poems in the collection hint at or acknowledge this conjugation of mitochondria and the digital:
In the loam of code and marrow, a green thought grew—from the poem “Photosynthesis.”
she spread: / directory to desire, / drive to dream—“/pulse.exe II”
No more than code with feathers was I / A flutter of light aflutter beneath the drones of Orion . . . she warmed her circuits / each time I perched on her shoulders—“The Bird Who Fell Toward Flame.”
I tried to map your laughter using neural net poetry, but / it kept folding into proverbs only my grandmother could understand—“Virulent”
Steel ribs cradle organs remembering breath, / carbon and marrow negotiating with death—“Farewell.”
The poem “Farewell” at the end of the collection, as its title implies, reads as a solemn note of capitulation to the new reality, in all its cosmic breadth, carrying the sentiments or emotions of not-here-not-thereness one feels listening to Enigma’s “Goodbye Milky Way,” a sort of Socratic reach for meaning that forever drifts farther from us as Nnedinma-9 into the expanding galaxy. In this poem, a machine appears to be slowly dying from ill health and bears the same worries that often trail a human going through the same ordeal, as its carbon-silicon body deteriorates, as it becomes even vulnerable. “Inside him, a tumour writes in virulent mode, / nibbling flesh where old heartbeats once glowed . . . Each night he unbolts to listen within, / to the rustle of cells practicing sin.” But a more poignant question in reading these lines is: does the body suffering pain matter? It could be machine, it could be man—as our lives are already becoming a fusion of the two, the so-called Singularity—the ailment stays the same. Because what Baba-Aminu does here is place humanity, or this homo digitalis, in an infirmary for a reflexive gaze: Come, and look at us, he seems to say, the last lines in the poem telling: “His last thought is silence, tender and warm, / a love without body, without form.” Machine has become man, has gained sentience, grown a heart, and inherited man’s fallibilities, or is it the other way round? It doesn’t matter: “The cancer, the virus, the pilgrim, the host, / fold into one softly corrupting ghost. In ruins of gigabytes and the ash of the cell . . .” Finality is the ultimate answer for whatever imitates sentience as a self-observable thing.
Remarkable as Baba-Aminu’s vision seems, this doesn’t save his language entirely from futurism echolalia in some poems, which “Farewell,” for instance, suffers; 73 lines written in rhyming couplets. It could be shorter. In “Quantum Eid,” for example, “Somewhere between orbit and omen, a door sighs open”—imagery for the sighting of a new moon—is a very strong opening line. But three stanzas later, we read, “Plasma raguna wander the event horizon.” Somewhere else, about extinction and last butterflies, we read lines like “It drifted through an ion storm, wings stitched from solar ash and myth.” Besides this echolalia—which every poet often relapses into—I wrote about the problems of comprehension in such futurist/speculative poetry in my earlier quoted essay, thus:
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 astrophysics, and space. It’s not obscurantist, but selective, and . . . 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 I would still like to ask is: who then is this poetry for? What, for instance, is an “event horizon” to the regular guy who has never heard of black holes? Or when Baba-Aminu writes a poem using the language of computer code? Without exposure to the syntax of an Operating System such as Windows, I wouldn’t easily decipher a poem like “pulse.exe (II)” quoted above. This brings up an even more urgent discourse, as already stated in the quote: for the reader, the poet, and the critic who reads and interprets such, this poetry remains a matter of class and access, if not even a bubble, suffering that accusation in academia on African epistemologies—that most of the time, discourses in postmodernity on the continent are simply a pantomime of realities which aren’t immediately ours, only visible or real to the individual whose lived experience approximates the simulacrum of global technoculture, down to the extent of dreaming in it, which is a small number. The dreams of the woman selling provisions in a kiosk are different dreams, where the future of homo digitalis doesn’t haunt her. As the father who makes a simple bank transfer to pay his children’s school fees. But what if that woman’s nephew or that father’s teenage daughter picks up this poetry to read and can’t make much sense of its digital currency, their incomprehension, the contradiction, this failure of this new language to interpret our reality, as many, many of us out here?
Here is where Baba-Aminu indeed lives up to the biggest question of his own collection with such a doomsday title: poetry cannot save the world, poets cannot save the world, so we ought to kill the poet, who, after all, in Baba-Aminu’s words, “mistake anaesthesia for healing, rhyme for revolution.” Or what even can lines such as “In vain your bangles cast / Charmed circles at my feet” do for anyone? Didn’t W.H. Auden proclaim, “poetry makes nothing happen”? (Actually, it does.) Yet, we need poetry still. But maybe in a different way, in a way that’s less overly romantic? This poetry we need is the revival of language. But is this possible or rational to ask? It goes against the trajectory of civilisation; new modes of thinking replace known forms. But the reality for our time has never been this disruptive. There’s the possibility, I believe even—it’s already happening—that our hyphenation with silicon will make us lose our ability to create and write poetry, the former as langue, and the latter as our ability for language. This is evident already in how algorithm has affected language so that we now communicate in the redacted forms of code (textspeak, emojis, memes), structuring our lives and meaning around apps, adopting algorithmic imagination, as Tolúlọpẹ́ Ọ̀kẹ́ comments, “As technology has continued to mediate and transform human narratives, from oral traditions to the print age, and now to the digital and algorithmic era, each shift has contestably brought humanity closer to its need for storytelling while also disrupting them.” (Emphasis mine.)
There is a portentous message here for us, as for poets. The world is transitioning, and a lot is conspiring against us. We do not need to kill the poet. The world is already killing the poet. Referencing the 2013 movie The Philosophers, which I already did in an erstwhile essay, suffices here once more. I borrow my own words too: It is “a speculative movie about a thought experiment to prepare humans for a nuclear fallout. There are bunkers all over the world to preserve the next humans who will continue our species. Candidates stand on a soapbox to explain why they should be let into the bunker. When it’s a poet’s turn, he’s shot in the forehead, stopped in the middle of his introduction, ‘I am a poe—’.” We have been killing poets and do not need to be reminded by Baba-Aminu. Every minute we destroy a portion of the world’s beauty, we kill the poet, making way for the technology gods to transform the world into a silicon dystopia.
All said, Baba-Aminu’s work in Kill the Poet, Save the World is not complete yet, for me at least. It caught the tinder but didn’t raise the flame my mind pursued. However, it answers a good number of questions and opens up discourse on the spectrum of futurist-speculative poetry and language today. And its language, fusing the imaginations of man and machine, agrees to Ọ̀kẹ́: “[a]s computational advancements continue to evolve and permeate various spheres of life, creative practices such as narrative creation need to also adapt to these transformations.” It is a work that helps us understand much more. And because this world described in Baba-Aminu’s work doesn’t seem very far into some future but tends to reveal contemporary realities via meta-witnessing, it is a little incorrect to call it speculative, futuristic or Africanfuturistic poetry. This is poetry reckoning with algorithmic imaginaries; therefore, a more apt consideration would be simulation poetry, for it attempts to invade the simulacra of our already cyber-distorted lives and to imagine what meaning remains for us in it, what humanity remains, as we continually sink into algorithmic reality.♦
Subscribe to Afapinen to read more essays like this.
Dear reader, You have read this post published on Day 35 of our 100days funding campaign, led by our founding editor to improve our work at the magazine. We will appreciate a little donation to this funding campaign in support of writing. Kindly use this link or make a direct bank transfer to the account: 6740744975 / Afapinen Media Enterprise / Moniepoint MFB. Thank you.
Carl Terver has an arts degree from BSU Makurdi, and was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024. He is the author of the photobook Glory to the Sky. He has been published in The Republic, Goethe-Institut Nigeria, LEAN, The Stockholm Review, and Konya Shamsrumi, among others, and is the founding editor of Afapinen.