Go Home.

Go Home.

Not long after this book went to print, I lost a dear friend in a motorcycle accident. It was the kind of loss that did not arrive with warning.

His name was Kola Orowale—popularly known as Kola Onifoto.

We had shared poetry before, shared many ideas that lingered. And in the quiet that followed his passing, I found myself returning to the title of this book: Go Home, and it sat differently in my chest, the fact that he had indeed gone home. 

Young ancestor, but when he was here, we traveled together to the Oshun-Oshogbo Festival, to document and witness, being present in something older than both of us. That experience stayed with me, and found its way into my Digi City lore.

The first part of it, this volume of poems, took shape over countless hours of reflection on what “home” really means in a time where immigrants, indigenes, and citizens are all caught in an ongoing negotiation with place, identity, and belonging. And grief has a way of sharpening that question. Of making it less theoretical, and more immediate.

What does it mean to go home when someone you care about is no longer here? Where is home when memory becomes the only place you can return to? This thing now carries more than I intended. It carries him too. Rest well, Kola.

\

\

I also spent time exploring the idea of migration and its intersection with xenophobia.

When you live abroad, someone will inevitably tell you to "go back to where you came from". When you return home, someone else will still tell you to go back to where you came from.

Because your accent is wrong. Your education is inconvenient. Your belonging is negotiable. And why are you having an opinion when you're not from this state? (You ARE from this state, you're just light-skinned!)

So I began to ask myself whether the world we inherited is simply the result of unfinished spiritual business. Perhaps the Orisha must return to correct certain errors: the complacency that filled the slave ships, the arrogance of 1884 when foreigners gathered in distant rooms to decide the fate of the entire Africa, the abandonment of the masses to the mercy of mercenaries and mercantile manipulators masquerading as messiahs....

In this book, the Orisha do return and they face stiff opposition.

For the future is just the past re-entered through another gate. 

P.S: The book is available on Amazon for readers outside Nigeria.

For those within, I’ll be doing pop-ups—because for the first few copies, I want to meet you, talk, touch grass, and sign your books properly. Bookstores after.

Dates and States will be announced soon, starting with Lagos.

Here's a poem that did not make it to the final MS, but I like:

in that dream, i rent a room inside another dream, and the puppeteer speaks in coins only. he says the price of staying is memory. i pay in fragments: my wrist full of multicoloured rubber bands, chaotic laughter after losing a milk tooth to an orange, the smell of rain on the roof of a new house, the first time i learned that “home” could be taken and renamed. the walls expand and contract, somewhere above me, the origami of destiny is folded to

boom:::

a man in a polkadot suit offers me a better version of myself, if i am willing to forget where i come from. i almost agree.

in the rings, you learn a different kind of survival, building horizontally, digging into time, duck, parry, punch || and love blooms here, smuggling tenderness…