Orpheuses (1): For Erinola Daranijo, Poetry is More Than Grief’s Chariot

Columnist’s Note: Ibadan is Nigeria’s spiritual home of the arts. By extension, the University of Ibadan serves as the cradle; homestead birthing literary Orpheuses (Black Orpheus, iykyk) who charm their way into the underworld, breathe life, and sometimes take souls away. That remains the status quo, even with the decline in arts appreciation in the city. 

Ironically, our vantage point at UI makes it easy to be blind to the reality; that art is alive, breathing in the minds of several of us within and outside the campus walls. Who these are, we’ll explore in the UIMSA Press’ new column; Orpheuses. We’ll profile some of the University of Ibadan’s brightest literary talents in each instalment, bringing you closer to their art, how they create, and why. I’m John Eriomala, your Jason on this modern Argo. Enjoy the voyages!

Where Erinola the Poet Began

In the final seconds of our half-hour sit-down, Erinola Daranijo responds to my inquiry about his preferred Ibadan location to centre a piece of place poetry. “UCH, because I hate that place so much. UCH gives me bad memories and I want to sit down one day and put that into words. Or maybe it will be an essay. Poetry will not give it enough voice”, he says. In the first moments, he responds to my assessment of him as one of the best UI writers I’d read. “No! You should explore more. Have you ever been to one of the Poetry Club gatherings?”. In both exchanges, one briefly glimpses the sort of writer he is. At his person. Not much in theory, but just enough to keep you seated, listening, or reading as the case might be. 

A statement pearl neckpiece and beaded wrists are the only inkling that this second-year Agriculture and Environmental Engineering student is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Akéwì Literary and Arts Magazine, author of two chapbooks, and an award-winning poet. He’s serially published too and is an emerging voice in Nigeria’s poetry scene. But were you to encounter Erinola at the Students Union Building bus stand, jostling for a keke napep to Indy Hall, you wouldn’t think ‘Literati’. You’d think ‘tired student’; an assumption he states to be fact. 

Erinola’s entry into poetry – serious poetry – is rooted in familial grief. His father passed in 2022. In searching for connections to him, he stumbled on heart-stirring information. “I didn’t know he was a poet when he was alive. It was when he passed away that I was going through his books and discovered that he was actually a journalist at OAU. He was a poet. He was this, he was that. He left many poetry books behind and so, going into those and reading those, made me want to write now”. He had been writing before then; Wattpad and Facebook. We share a laugh when he mentions this. Those familiar with the Wattpad wave of the late 2010s understand that the subject matter of those writings was mostly risque. “I come from that generation where it was either you posted your poems on Facebook or you wrote edgy stories on Wattpad. I couldn’t decide between the two, so I did both”. 

However, the shift to ‘serious’ poetry came with the books his dad left behind. He particularly remembers his dad’s copies of the Best American Poetry collection – an annual collection that shows poems from the best American poets. Rifling through the full collection (from 2006 to 2012), he found poets whose styles he wanted to imitate. Now, he’s at the stage where he dislikes American poetry, re-affirming his Nigerianness. 

On ‘how’ he writes, he first explains, why beyond his father’s influence, he opts for poetry over prose. Prose is too long. Each poem he writes takes a lot of time, from conception to the final draft, and following the same process for prose is tasking. He can give you the best paragraph to start an essay, quite all right. But beyond that, he’s blank. The brisk nature of poetry works just right for the 20-year-old writer. He mentions that he has written nothing since coming into UI almost a year ago but quickly clarifies that it’s ‘by himself or just for himself’. As part of the Poetry Club, he has written about three poems. “With the UI schedule, being a writer and an editor is too much”, he emphasizes. Our interview had to be delayed slightly due to an extended three-hour lecture.

“I wait for inspiration but not just by sitting down. I write poetry about mundane things so what I like to do is walk around, experience things and all of that. I want to see what people think. I’ll go to parties, conferences, and just anything to experience people and broaden my horizons. Also, reading, as well. Reading from different people makes me know what I want to write”, Erinola explains. 

When I disagree that his subjects are mundane, citing the complexity of the themes of religious worship, behavioural contrasts, and tradition, in his Okay Donkey-published poem, ‘this because dog is god spelled backwards’, he smiles but doesn’t budge from the mundaneness stance.  “That poem came about from seeing how people view religion in Nigeria and how people hold on extremely tight compared to other countries. It [the poem] came after reading an American poet who basically called her dog her lover. Although, if you look deeply into her poem, it shows a mother under 20. It’s to show how people value things differently in different parts of the world. How in Nigeria, we see religion as this thing we can’t go against”. 

Expectedly, he faced backlash for the poem. Church members interrogated him on WhatsApp about his lack of reverence for God. Statements like “First of all, you put god in small letters” and “Oh, you’re calling God a dog?” abounded. But he insists that’s why he writes; to shake the world. To produce literature that makes people want to ask questions of the author.

He’s a little stumped by the question of the most recurrent theme in his works. “Honestly, I’ll say it’s LGBTQ+ issues. But for what I personally write that doesn’t get published, I’ll say grief.” Erinola asks me to decide which fits more and I point out that a lot of contemporary Nigerian literature deals with grief. His proceding anecdote considers a study done a while back on contemporary Nigerian poetry. Supposedly, words like ‘father’, ‘death’, ‘country’, and ‘grief’ were at the fore. He believes that writers can’t be blamed, what with rising inflation, fuel crises, and the like. He recently wrote a poem titled, ‘Fuck Nigeria’, talking about the evils of the nation, but also the good done. That’s what he thinks could be improved on; not an elimination of grief altogether, but more balanced with lighter themes. 

Erinola’s favourite poem, so far, was also the toughest to write – ‘If A Nigerian Can Not Speak His Language’ published in the current issue of The Shore Poetry. The poem, a masterful take on the musicality in the similarity of Yoruba words and the power of meaning, took 6 months to write. It was born out of his lack of understanding of a Yoruba word his Grandma uttered. 

“I write like 20 poems. Scrap most of them. Take the best ones and the best lines from those and put them together. Then I have a rough structure. I’ll go back, leave it for a week, and then come back with freshers. Leaving your work to rest for a while – to marinate – gives you a new perspective. You come back to those old poems, edit again, and keep doing that until you can decide on what flow is the best”, he explains. There’s no shying away from the gruesomeness of rejections. The first three versions of ‘If A Nigerian Can Not Speak His Language’ were rejected until he arrived at this version.

On Growth and Nigerian Poetry

Erinola believes improvement in his use of language as the major difference between his two chapbooks “An Epiphany of Roses” (Konya Shamsrumi Press, 2023) and “Every Path Leads to the Sea” (Ghost City Press, 2024). The first of his Isele Prize-winning Three Poems, Epiphany of Roses, is from the first chapbook. Per his admission, the difference between both chapbooks is an improvement in his use of language. There are fewer metaphors but used to great effect. 

This growth contributes to his mixed feelings about winning the 2024 Isele Poetry Prize. “When I saw my name on the shortlist – even on the longlist – I was insanely happy. If you look at other shortlisted writers of the past like Adedayo Agarau, and other big names in poetry, you’ll understand even more”  He would go on to reference Agarau, a few more times, inspired by his work. “But then, winning it didn’t feel that great. Why? I don’t really think my poems deserved it. Writers advance exponentially, and so I don’t really think I’m the same writer I was a year ago. I feel they gave it to me because of my themes”. Isele is a magazine that champions writing that addresses pressing issues and his poems were about the #EndSARS protest.  

He’s happy he won, still. I express my admiration for the third of the ‘Three Poems’, ‘My Brother Falls, But I Refuse to Follow’, a haunting telling of the death of his – fictional – brother during the #EndSARS protest, the police’s complicity, and a mother’s grief. It’s a riveting read. Less technical than the metaphorical ‘Epiphany of Roses’. In his defence, it [Epiphany] is a product of experimentation with styles and form. 

Erinola’s feats in just three years of ‘serious writing’, are incredible! In October 2023, he was on the shortlist for the 2nd African Teen Writers’ Award for Poetry for ‘Home is where blood meets water’. In 2024, he was shortlisted for the Unserious Collective Poetry Fellowship – co-chaired by Agarau – and longlisted for the SEVHAGE Short Fiction Prize for his story, ‘The Mountains That Birthed Us’. The same story – reworked – earned him a place on the longlist for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The story was formerly an unpublished poem about a father who had dementia. 

He has also been published in Brittle Paper, Cordite Poetry Review, Rising Phoenix Review, One Art Poetry, Palette Poetry, ANMLY, The B’K, Kalahari Review, Fiery Scribe Review, Rabble Review, Paper Lanterns, and The Hooghly Review. 

An overwhelming majority of Erinola’s poems are published in journals and magazines outside Nigeria. He asks the age-old question, “Does Nigerian writing exist?” and answers “Probably not”. According to him, most people write to get published in foreign literary magazines. He cites UI alumnus, Logan February, who he’s corresponded with, and who writes a lot about ‘bi-ness’ because they get published well, in America. ‘LGBTQ+ poems sell very well”. Writing about those kinds of things gets published well. He also doesn’t believe that this dilutes the quality of his work, although it strays away from what a Nigerian poem is. He admits to trying his hands on writing more Nigerian. Like his ‘[sand sultan]’ place poem about Lagos, published in an American literary magazine. 

Towards the end of the interview, I mention Kayinsola Olorunnisola’s Open Country Mag essay, ‘Our Literature Has Died Again: Nigerian Writing in the Era of the Nomadists” – a personal favourite. That’s weighed against another poet, Ernest Ogunyemi’s assertions that contemporary Nigerian poetry is weak (He has clashed with Agarau a few times), and the Culture Critic, Oris’ Aigbokhaevbolo’s essay, ‘The Death of Nigerian Literature’, that spurred the whole convo, to begin with. Ever the bundle of ‘chill’, he goes, “First of all, I feel like all these people writing essays should relax and chill. That’s my first school of thought. But going on to Kanyinsola’s essay, yes, there is a Nigerian writer and a writer from Nigeria. A writer from Nigeria would be someone like Itiola Jones. She’s a Nigerian-American writer but she grew up in America and schooled in America. You can not expect her to write poems about nylon bags or Gala and Fanta. You have people like Adedayo Agarau, the version of the japa Nigerian, who grew up in Nigeria, but now lives abroad. I feel people can write what they want to write.” He writes what he wants to write and considers it Nigerian and that’s enough for him. 

“With Akewi, I Wanted to Make an African Literary Magazine for Young African Writers to Get Published

After almost 20 minutes of conversation, we arrive at Akéwì. Akéwì is Erinola’s solution to the problem of many young African writers going unpublished. He relays that the chances of publication for young writers are slim and that founding Akéwì is his way to bridge that gap.“Another thing is that so many of these writers began in Ibadan, but now they’ve gone out”, he adds.  He inquires about my knowledge of Agbowo Magazine. My response is affirmative. He continues, animatedly, “It started from UI and now, they don’t even care about UItes anymore, or about Ibadan.” Agbowo began in 2017 as an offshoot of UItes Write, the brainchild of Habeeb Kolade, and WeTalkSound founder, Dolapo Amusat. 

“I wanted to make something that still had strong foundations to its roots. Most of my editors are young writers in Nigeria, and even in Ibadan and UI, although not all. From the first issue, it was for only Africans. Then I felt, fine, let’s do Black people in general to celebrate African heritage. From that, I decided to even expand to people of colour”, he explains. There have been three issues of the magazine so far, extending to include writers from other continents. 

Marvelous Mmesomachi Igwe’s ‘O Cicade’ bubbles up as I try to relate to his angle about the relevance of our poetry, and Erinola’s visage brightens up further. “That’s the stuff!”, he tells me, extending his hand for a fist bump. He considers O Cicade the best poem a Nigerian published last year, and how finding works like that is his goal for Akéwì Magazine. “If people like Poetry Sango-Ota did not publish his poem, no one else would have. If he sends that to The New Yorker or Paris Review, it will not get to the editors. A reader would see it and wonder what’s Pittakwa? What’s Borno? If you send it to an American, that poem would likely die”, he reiterates. 

Running Akéwì is costly both financially and in terms of manpower. He currently uses a free website. He recalls once paying for a custom domain, and having to ‘run’ after three months due to the charge; about 60,000 Naira, a month. He says it smiling, but the exasperation in his tone is telling. Concerning editing, all of Akéwì’s editors are volunteers. There’s an understanding of the Magazine’s current level, as currently, only visual art acceptances are paid for; $10 per published piece. “I wish we could pay everyone”, he adds, wistfully. 

Then, there’s the time constraint. “We get about 200 submissions every period we are open. Before, I used to read everything by myself, but now we have readers for everything. We have fiction and non-fiction readers. We have poetry readers”. The readers survey, pass on to editors, and by the time it gets to him, there are about 50, from which he picks the 20 pieces that make the final issue. Ultimately, his goal is to build Akéwì into a giant for the arts, and as a bastion of youth excellence. 

“The Literary Scene [in UI] is Terrible But There’s Hope”

“The literary scene [in UI] is terrible”, he offers. His decision to come to UI had been shaped by literary stalwarts who attended previously – Teju Cole, Remi Raji, Prof. Niyi Osundare, and Prof. Femi Osofisan. But what he’s seen so far isn’t so encouraging, except for a few holdouts like the Poetry Club and JP Clark Reading Club. For the last time in our convo, Agbowo pops up again. 

He also laments the quietness of the ‘Literary’ aspect of Literary and Debating Societies in UI, having joined the Great Independence Hall Literary and Debating Society, like Kanyinsola before him. (He’d later mention that he planned to join IndyPress, also like Kanyinsola who ended up as Editor-in-Chief from 2016 to 2017). He’s optimistic about the Ibadan Literary Festival, a recently revived initiative of The Literary and Debating Society, University of Ibadan. Initiatives like the now defunct Ibadan Book and Arts Festival and Black Orpheus Journal surface, as well as Ibadan’s staying power – attracting Romeo Orogun, whose story not-so-famously involves the question “Do you want to be a poet from Nigeria or do you want to be a Nigerian poet?” after his first ever poetry reading, at the now defunct Artmosphere, in Ibadan. 

His optimism for the general scene coincides with his optimism in his writing. “I was too distracted in my 100-level days. This session, I want to give more to writing. I’m focusing on The Literary and Debating Society (he’s a member of the Literary Team, led by another poetry star, Agboola Tariq), the UCJ, and Indy Press. Hopefully, it’s better this session. We’ll see how it goes”. 

You can contact Erinola via Email: daranijoajibolaerinola@gmail.com and Twitter/X: @Layworks. Read his works here