Everything Here
While growing as a little girl, I found pleasure in looking at the sky.
Under the aegis of PIN ARTHUB, Nigeria's leading spoken word poet, Sage Hassan is set to lead a team of A-list performance/spoken word poets to the 26th edition of Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF). In the team are the foremost Comrade Poet and curator of Aj House of Poetry in Lagos, Dagga Tolar, award winning storyteller and poet Toby Abiodun, artist/performance poet, Evelyn D'Poet, winner of several performance and spoken word poetry contests, Kemi Bakare (aka Kemistree), Adigun Olushola (Solaspeaks) and renowned performance/spoken word poets, Bold Seth, Tirwister Tiwistar, Solutionist Clementina and Jacob Sukpa respectively.
Titled Ujana, the Swahili translation of the english word, Youth, the chapbook captures the zeitgeist of Nairobi and East Africa, with the poems in it presented as urgent and important portraits of what it feels like to be a young artist in the region at this current age.
In 2023, my primary motivation was to express my frustration built up from a conflict of self-identity. I was (and still am) navigating this crisis: as the eldest son, a male child, and, in my parents' eyes as of 2017, something of a disappointment due to my decision to abandon my initial ambition of becoming a Catholic priest. I remember in 2017, after deciding not to continue with the vocation, I didn't gain admission to my preferred university to study the course I was passionate about (fortunately, I am now in the clinical year of that program).
The Black Poets series, a weekly feature on Konya Shamsrumi's website, introduces poets of African origin to new audiences through original biographies and samples of their work. Usani follows in the footsteps of previous curators Richard Ali, author of "The Anguish and Vigilance of Things" (2019), and Star Zahra, known for "Dance of Dawn" (2018).
I read the entire compendium of Shakespeare’s sonnets in junior high school, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about in most of them, but loving the sounds and the mathematical arrangements of the words. Love Is Not Love (sonnet cxvi) is still a favourite. At the peak of my identity crises when I started to terribly fear that I did not belong and perhaps never would, I discovered Emily Dickinson. And there she was, speaking to my spirit. In the same way that the Psalms did which was a powerful crutch for me as I was estranged from religion at the time.
I remember always turning back in the car when we pass a particular sculpture and I remember the sculpture, "a woman with long breasts breastfeeding a child". That sculpture was intriguing to me as a child
This is a collection of poems from a poet that will grow if she persists. She is requesting that we journey with her.
