Desperate hands that finger you
may look for further things
other than your holiness.
Razor tongue that tears you open
at the terminal, also says to be wounded
is to be privileged and by that,
you know the weight
of your luggage.
Leaving is a blemish,
and in this final boarding call
old things have not passed away.
Naira is the terminal tax
paid by itinerants with eyes over the ocean.
I pray for you today, travellers,
may exile be kind to you.
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 Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash