Saraba Magazine

Creating Unending Voices

Attention at the City Gate

By Jide Salawu

I was born, bathed, and expired of hope
in this metal wilderness
a sky, red rain, and
an underworld of gods with no glory.

There is no honour for the dead here,
but blood-stained flags and more
bodies to bless the company of ghosts.

I live in a country with no honour
to its name. My tongue
is layered with dead cells, too heavy
to call my land a home.

What do we name this land?
A country or a graveyard?

 

This poem is an excerpt from Contraband Bodies, published by Narrative Landscape Press (2025).

Contraband Bodies is a meditation debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of diaspora and a country lost to precarious politics. Mourning home, Salawu deploys gritty language, razor-edge imagery, decolonial poetics, and granular details to highlight the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa and beyond.

Salawu meditates on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal, confronting new forms of digital kinship. He creates a unique catalogue of images that map the migratory routes from the village to the city, within continental Africa, and across different diasporic landscapes. He builds on a solid canon of migration and mobility in African poetry and brings forward a powerful, new, diasporic poetic voice.

 

*Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

By Jide Salawu

Jide Salawu is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, Poetry Pause, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Transition. He was a Yosef Wosk Fellow and the recipient of the James Patrick Folinsbee Award for Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Salawu grew up in Shao, Nigeria, but currently lives in Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches as an assistant lecturer at the English and Film Studies programme of the University of Alberta. Salawu is also the managing editor of OlongoAfrica. His poetry collection, Contraband Bodies, is published by Narrative Landscape Press (2025).

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