African. Poetry. Press.
I think about this now, sitting beside her bed, listening to the difficult machinery of her breathing, and I find myself revisiting some of the memories I had filed away as childhood grievances. .. Age has a way of returning old memories to us with their labels removed.
I would go on to discover that the opportunity to read poems in Morocco liberated the silenced voice within me: the empathic pain I had carried in my body, shaped by the violence of the world, by barbarity that tears away people's dignity and lives.
Seen through the symbolic lens of alchemy, Babale’s self-fashioning as “Poet of Light” works out a transmutation of value: what history has rendered base or obscured—blackness, the self denied—is worked upon until it gleams with renewed worth. Like the alchemist who turns lead into gold, she converts silence into speech and stigma into power, not through softness but through a revelatory force that disturbs settled orders. Her illumination is thus a form of spiritual alchemy—witchcraft as transformation—where revelation does not merely disclose truth but remakes the terms by which beauty and being are known.
Being on a cloud, once in a while, is the poet’s strategy for finding inner peace in a world in a rush and stressed—a sensation visitors may experience through the installation's sensory experience.
Professor Tanure Ojaide will be a guest at this month's reading hosted by the Lagos State Chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors, holding today. His latest collection, Adult Love: In the Childhood Garden, published by Konya Shamsrumi, has been longlisted for the 2026 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature.
