Everything Here
But what’s contended in contemporary African poetry is of a different kind, the poets writing now are about how the individual African demands to be received, both at home against conventional norms, and globally against what’s stereotypically African.
Spreading panic is a Nigerian pastime. Living in an environment of perpetual gloom, one can understand. But I don’t understand the motivation for the Nigerian behind a smartphone and bandwidths, who envisions the worst, whose Facebook post or tweet can cause his reader depression.
Africa is my mother and father. Africa is a complicated home and a language I lost my fluency in. Africa is my beginning and end.
To colour is to accept that there are limits and bounds, that freedom is the deep end of a shallow pond and drowning is not a choice. That our liberties are normative and must issue from the collective fiat of convention, the healthy custom of the many against the wily tempest of the one. Liberty then is a prison of accepted conduct, a glazed casket waiting for us to die.
(Africa) is my home, and also for a good chunk of my favorite people. And home, to me, is the most important place of all. It’s where you live, love, dream, and eventually if you’re lucky, die. Potentially, it’s just like the cliché goes, the future.
I’m a spirit. Captured in a bloody body. I can fly too. Celestial. And crash into this earth dusty. I cry, captured in this fleshy mess. Like again… I’m born. Yeah, sometimes I fly daytime skies and see how close I can get to the sun.
