Sometimes we think of archives as pertaining only to the past, but I often find that they speak just as profoundly to our current moment. This is all the more true with Black archives, which can remain elusive today—a lost recipe, an erased neighborhood, a forgotten name. We need the jazz of the archives, speaking to life’s improvisations and otherwise lost moments—not to mention the archives’ blues, taking pain and transforming it, if not into pleasure then into a song of suffering in order to inch beyond it. Like such rich music, archives evoke the ever-present.
The poems of the British-Nigerian poet and editor Gboyega Odubanjo offer an archive of loss and, unfortunately, echo his own. Odubanjo’s work came to my attention only after his untimely death, in August, 2023—when he disappeared from a cultural festival that he was to perform at and was found dead several days later. He was twenty-seven. Almost a year after this tragedy that no words can repair, Faber & Faber is bringing out Odubanjo’s début full-length collection, “Adam,” which, like his three prior chapbooks (or pamphlets, as they are typically called in the U.K.), draws on a fount of stories and soundscapes to create a unique, indelible idiom. His friend and fellow-poet Raymond Antrobus—who first alerted me that there was work yet unpublished—wrote, after Odubanjo’s death, “So many of us loved you & knew your brilliance, we were waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.”
The excerpts from “Adam” that follow evince the vibrancy of Odubanjo’s poetry, his generational gravitas. As the author’s prefatory note indicates, the book centers on the discovery, in 2001, of an unidentified Black boy’s remains in the River Thames. The poems are remarkable for their weaving together Genesis, Yoruba culture, newscasts, “The Waste Land,” Black Britishisms, and apocalyptic weather in lyric tension and testimony. Writing of this child’s “death by water,” Odubanjo conjures past and present horrors facing the young, the Black, the vulnerable in our midst. Yet he also pays tribute to the perseverance—even amid a hostile or indifferent world—of community, ritual, and the creative spirit.
“What comes next cannot without a story of water and offering. The sun shines and we gather because the river allows it.” Odubanjo’s extraordinary words shine on, their incantations reaching for the divine.
On 21 September 2001, the torso of a black boy was discovered in the River Thames, near Tower Bridge in central London, clothed only in an orange pair of girls’ shorts. Given the name “Adam” by police officers, the unidentified boy was between four and eight years old. What comes next cannot without a story of water and offering. The sun shines and we gather because the river allows it. Na from clap dem dey enter dance. We enter with, and as, Adam.
Genesis
then god said let me make man in my image
man in my likeness man like me
man like light and man like dark
let man nyam and chop whatever be good
god said give man arm to skank leg to shake
tongue and chest to speak with
give man cash to spray put man’s face on it
said give man sea and sky and trees
and zones one to six on the oyster so man can see it
now man said rah swear down
man said show me
A Potted History of East
in the beginning.
it was a gush of us and we came from all over.
life was a bottle of nuts. one room and it was decent.
kept the cardamom in the cupboard above the bagels.
sixpence i’d make on an alright day. then independence came.
then war. then war. took me and my brothers.
the women built an estate for our ghosts. we manufactured fords
and drove them to the city gates demanding to be let in.
back then it was simple. sure we weren’t squeaky clean
but we were easy. always punch up we said. no point
nicking some bloke’s ped when the factory owner’s balling
in his four-door. but then a sweet one makes you settle down a bit.
landlord gets the hump so you find another room.
store the polenta next to the cassava flour. get the jobs
where you can. someone’s left their lamb leg in the pub again.
is this where eden is. where the sun rises.
developers calling it barcelona on thames now. council say
dagenham leo is alive and well. it’s cold as chips
but the ice cream van is still going off and we’re laughing.
we never unpacked.
so far east it’s west to another man. no bells here.
still we move. almost back where we left now.
Rewilding
it was the rainy season so it rained. the old man snored. these times the river like a boy was either missing or was everywhere you looked. in the east it was everywhere because they had convinced themselves it didn’t exist. newbuilds and roundabouts existed. the river was just a story they thought. so they planned their journeys to the minute not knowing where they had come from. but it rained so there was rain and because the people had forgotten the river had to retell its story. it said before anything there was water and there was water. on one side you. on the other side you. the people mistook this for a riddle. each claiming a side for themselves. the river welcoming the people in their entirety. taking in them the clothes on their backs all that they clung to.