I first met Adedayo Agarau in 2015 at a spoken word event in Ibadan, the southwestern Nigerian city we both grew up in. I remember watching his poetry, technically excellent on the page, come alive through the magic of his masterful oration. People snapped their fingers, some got out of their seats, some whistled. Others, like me, watched in quiet admiration. Here was a poet who had something to say, and who would do everything to make sure the world listened.
It’s 2025 now, and he’s still making the world listen. In the ten years since then, Agarau has released three chapbooks, and received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Now, his debut full-length collection, The Years of Blood, is to be released this September through Fordham University Press. The book centers on a series of kidnappings and ritual killings that continue to terrorize the streets of Ibadan. These killings are motivated by economic desperation, religious psychosis, and general societal dysfunction. They have led to countless stories birthed from blood. The blood is smeared all over the pages of this book.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Your book, in many ways, is steeped in trauma, would you agree? There is, of course, the brutality of ritual killings that you capture so viscerally. But there are also accounts of your own near-death experiences. It is a very difficult read for anyone with a heart; one is almost compelled to look away at times. This makes me wonder how you approached this work in the first place. What does it mean to create in the midst of so much grief, especially a kind of grief that is both personal and collective?
Adedayo Agarau
Yes, I agree The Years of Blood has its footing in trauma that is collective and personal. In many poems, the poet is standing as the consciousness of the collective. Even the poet looks away at several junctions, because, as you have rightly put it, “it is a very difficult read for anyone with a heart,” but isn’t the work of the poet to present the most truth, however hard it is to say? After the almost-final draft, I shared the collection with Remica Bingham-Risher, one of the most impactful writers in my life, and she said, “This book is loaded with grief, and there is no rest for even the poet.” She then suggested I add new poems where the poet can rest. “Ileya,” “Boys Who Never Die,” “Prelude Christmas,” and some other poems were the last to enter the collection. But I think what the Midwest landscape does with its weather and smallness is that it pushes you farther from itself, toward memory. The first poem I wrote for the collection was “Ibadan.” I was on a flight en route to Chicago. It was the first time I sat with that memory of Ibadan. Until that flight, I thought I was going to work on a different collection but at once, in flight, I was flushed with the memory of the city I loved so dearly, that the Nigerian woman who sat beside me in-flight offered me her handkerchief. She asked if it was going to be my first time in the US, and I said yes. She saw I was writing as I wept and asked if I wrote songs. I lied and said yes.
At O’Hare, I realized the poem was lost. I sat outside the men’s toilet, crying as I waited for my connecting flight to New Jersey. The poem didn’t come back to me until my first night in Iowa. That evening was oddly chilly and incredibly lonely. KÁNYIN, it’s almost impossible to create such a collection without knowing you are held. I wrote “Arrival” a few months later, in Tracie Morris’ class, and as I read to the class, I realized that as my voice shook, the class ached with me. As I started to cry loudly, the class cried loudly. Although no one in the workshop had an entrance into that trauma as they would like to, we grieved together through the work—how then, suddenly, people are also witnesses to the silence of a recursive taking in Nigeria. A snatching, a scratching away from the public record. How so easily we move away, how it takes you an exile to finally arrive at the poem that breaks you, as if you have been trying to write that all your life. My first chapbook, “For Boys Who Went,” opened the conversation, although it hadn’t yet figured out how it sought to achieve that unbecoming, that loss. In The Years of Blood, the embodiment of such harrowing silence had come fully formed, and the world, including the couple who found me at TruCoffee, who asked to read my poem, held hands and wept as they read “Ghost of a Boy Writes from Soka.” I wrote the collection about the collective, yet the world has consistently proved that they can grieve what they do not understand, and that’s okay.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
I’m glad you mentioned Ibadan because there is a sense in which the collection is also psychogeographical. It links these emotional experiences with various parts of Ibadan. From the militaristic air of Òkè-Àdó to the deathly streets of Sókà, I read it as a vivid, emotional portrait of a city. Even “Boys Who Never Die,” one of the “rest poems,” as you put it, ends on a devastatingly morbid note. How important was it to you, Adedayo, for Ibadan to be featured in this way?
Adedayo Agarau
In JP Clark’s canonical poem, “Ibadan,” he writes: Ibadan’ / running splash of rust / and gold-flung and scattered / among seven hills like broken / China in the sun. I think in a sense, it is almost impossible to replicate, on such a level, the consciousness of origin and innocence that punctuates JP Clark’s definition of this city. However, there is something broken like china in the sun, there is a splash of rust, and there is scattering too. So perhaps, these are some of the things The Years of Blood is probing. Why has this literary capital of Nigeria suddenly become the boom for a scattering that is forceful, deepening, and unsettling hand of grief? What rust have we arrived at that there is a forest of horror? What new poverty has the city met?
We grew up in this city, a few kilometers away from apart. Ibadan is the first landscape we learned to read, talk, and the first community we knew, so the city had to be the cornerstone of the collection. You attended Nickdel College, and I attended the Ibadan Boys High School (IBHS). From Foko to Oke-Bola, there was this fear that slapped itself against our consciousness and I wonder if it was the same for you. I remember a mother coming to school and disrupting the morning assembly as we sang the national anthem because she wanted to know where her son was. He had not returned home from school the day prior, and with glances, we knew he was gone, forever. How this beautiful city, even today, still takes and takes but never offers. See? There is a cemetery beside Obafemi Awolowo’s Oke Bola residence, the building resting against the fence of IBHS. There was a popular madman who resided in the cemetery. He was often ignored, because what threat does a mentally ill person pose to society? And what business does anyone have with high school boys? However, on our way back from school, this man was apprehended by the timber merchants whose long stretch of workshops was adjacent to IBHS. They recovered school items, books, school uniforms, etc, from him. He confessed that he’d murdered students from schools around the area and sold their body parts for money, and that being a madman was a disguise. KÁNYIN, similar stories sprang across the city.
The Years of Blood, in its wake, agrees with Clark, but when beauty is shrouded in blood, the blood is what speaks. I am admitting that violence is a residence, and to let the child witness in the book assume the role of a cartographer, mapping loss and absence across the city is to say that the city is emptying and no one is saying anything. The blood spoke in the collection.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Our experiences of the city of our childhood do overlap in certain ways, yes. But I wonder, what does it mean for you to write about these things as someone whose material and geographical realities are now far removed from the place and topic you write so passionately about?
Adedayo Agarau
I think people generally think of escape, exile, or even migration as linear. Or as simple as a removal of self from one landscape and installation elsewhere. I don’t think it’s that simple, and perhaps this might address the callous allegations that writers who have left Nigeria are “performing trauma” for the West. There is a sacred numbness in the air in Nigeria that prevents you from accessing your own trauma. The physical demands of survival barely give room for the self to reflect, process, remember, or write. The political situation, as you know, is also tense. Perhaps what critics miss is that exile doesn’t grant you objectivity. I think more than not, it offers subjectivity. Distance makes your relationship with home more honest.
While the body leaves, the body stays. I think this is one of the pieces of wisdom I was pulling from “Entrance,” where I say: because the body does not listen / it ends. because the body listens / it ends. Distance, then, becomes translation. Not abandonment. Not escape. You are translated from one place, like language, to another, like language, holding the same memories, the same meaning. The child playing soccer on Ogunleye Street was the man freezing in -17°F one December evening in Iowa. Writing toward these memories shifts into the space where this embodied archive can finally unfold—where the numbness thaws because there is finally room for it to breathe.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Speaking of translation, I was also curious about your decision to infuse so much Yoruba into your poetry. We even get a five-page glossary explaining all these non-English references. Is this just a function of your natural linguistic tendencies? Or is there a specific intentionality there, perhaps an artistic statement?
Adedayo Agarau
I think the question of ‘natural’ versus ‘intentional’ assumes a false binary. For those of us who are multilingual, code-switching is how thought moves. When I’m reaching for the precise emotional register of a memory, sometimes only Yoruba carries the weight I need. For instance, ‘Àṣẹ’ doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘so be it;’ it carries cosmology, spiritual authority, and the breath of ancestors, some of which I am moving through in “Arrival.” You’ll agree with me that to write it as ‘so be it’ would be to perform translation for an imagined reader whom I’m not sure I want to center. Yoruba also belongs to the canon of global literature, and publishing at a University press is an opportunity to platform the language.
However, that is a tertiary excuse. I cannot imagine my poetry without the first breath of Yoruba. But let me be honest about the glossary. It’s a compromise, and perhaps a necessary one. I included it because I know the realities of publishing, of readership, of who gets to remain opaque and who must constantly explain themselves. However, the glossary is both an act of hospitality and an act of resistance—I am simply saying I will not edit my wholeness for your comfort, but I will provide you the tools to meet me where I am.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Just like your earlier work, this is a book of tributes. In this collection, we have persona poems, eulogies, words dedicated to lost souls. Do you see your poetry as a form of mediation between the disappeared and those of us who remain?
Adedayo Agarau
This question reminds me of Professor Matthew Shenoda’s kind words: “You weave through ritual so intimately.” I have been thinking about myth-making, kinship, ritual, and Yorubaness. There is almost no window for me to escape elsewhere. There is always a dying so my poetry is, also, always, providing a sanctuary, through language by the verdict of proverbs, through repetition which takes its root from incantations and ìjálá, eulogies and pangyerics, for the dead to sleep. I am writing toward the lost craft of praise singing and incantation, making poems that ring, so intimately, the cultures of our fathers. But beyond preservation of tradition, when I write these persona poems, these eulogies, I’m attempting to create a space where the dead can speak through me. The poem becomes a threshold, a crossroads where the living and the departed can meet.
In Yoruba cosmology, the boundary between the living and the ancestors is porous. The dead don’t disappear—they transform. What they become is very dependent on the nature of their death. In the case of The Years of Blood, the dead are kidnapped and used for ritual, so perhaps the consciousness of the dead is unsettled. The dead move everywhere, not at peace, through the unsettled persona. This is why the repetitions feel so necessary. In several of the poems, I repeat a name, a phrase, a memory, because I’m summoning. I’m saying: Come through these words, come into this moment, let your presence be felt. In most of the poems, I’m not writing about the dead; I’m writing with them, asking their soul to move through the language.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
In the acknowledgement section of this book, you refer to the failure of memory. To what extent did the limitation of memory hinder your execution of this book? Or was it an asset in any way?
Adedayo Agarau
How do you even begin to contend with this kind of memory, which your body refused to acknowledge? I think of [Romanian poet Paul] Celan’s notion that poetry is language “set free under the sign of a radical individuation”—that when experience exceeds the capacity of ordinary discourse, poetry becomes the form that can hold what cannot otherwise be held. Adrienne Rich’s idea, too, that we must learn “the geography closest in”—that the most intimate territories are often the most unmappable, requiring a different kind of cartography altogether. In The Years of Blood, the poet is everyone’s consciousness. The poet is writing for the dead, the living, the lost, and the stranger. The poet is sounding a gong in the village of the numbed. Maybe, maybe through language, someone who had forgotten their own story might remember, might come to the knowing again, that this happened. This happened when I was a child.
And this is one of my criticisms of the traditional poetics of witness, which doesn’t allow us to fit ourselves—although we belong to the story—into the story. The conventional witness poem positions the poet as an external observer, bearing testimony to others’ suffering. What happens when you are both witness and witnessed? When the story you’re trying to tell is not happening to someone else, but happening to you, through you, around you, in the very community that raised you? The classical witness stance creates an artificial distance that denies the poet’s implication in the events being documented. It asks us to be objective about subjective wounds, clinical about our own bleeding. So I witnessed against the guilt of witness and appropriation. I witnessed as the self.
Again, I am grateful to memory and its limitations because the unreliability of memory is both the undoing of the poet and the poet’s doing. Billy Collins captures this perfectly—how even our most cherished texts slip away from us, how forgetting is perhaps the most human act of all. But for the trauma poet, this forgetting is not only a natural decay; on Linn Street in Iowa in October 2021, when memories arrived, I sat down in the snow pile and wept that morning. How much taking would it take for everyone to hear about a generation of forced disappearance? Beyond the lyrical aesthetic necessity of memory, the invention of language that fills the void is a survival mechanism. The body forgets in order to continue; the poet remembers in order to make meaning. We exist in that impossible space between amnesia and affidavit. In The Years of Blood, I am making again a whole from the fragments of memory.
KÁNYIN Olorunnisola
Congratulations on the upcoming release of the book. What are you looking forward to next?
Adedayo Agarau
Thank you. It’s been so generative to talk to you about this collection. Right now, I am at work on a second collection, The Morning the Birds Died, which is under contract and slated for 2027. I am now, finally, arriving closer to self as I consider the familial loss of my grandmother in the book. I am thinking about the dramatics in poetry—how do we make a play from the lines we write, what holds the stage of the page when grief becomes performance?
I’m also pursuing my PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where I’m exploring the intersections between African oral traditions and contemporary poetic form. The academic work is directly feeding into the creative practice—I’m particularly interested in how praise poetry and lament can be reimagined for the diasporic experience. As for The Years of Blood, I’m excited for readers to encounter it when it releases this September. It’s a book that demanded to be written, but now it needs to find its readers—especially young Nigerians who lived through these experiences but may never have seen them reflected in literature. I hope it opens conversations about these historical moments and how we carry collective trauma. African literature needs to be part of the global literary discourse, and I am glad that teachers, writers, and poets are turning their gaze to the critical poetry voices emerging from Africa right now.
POETRY
The Years of Blood
By Adedayo Agarau
Fordham University Press
Published September 2, 2025
