Tolu Oloruntoba

Tolu Oloruntoba is a Nigerian-Canadian poet and physician, whose debut poetry collection The Junta of Happenstance won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2021 Governor General's Awards and the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. Quotes Yes, it’s a shift! I’ve had a lot of shifts in my recent life so I guess it’s one in a long series of seismic shifts. But it also comes with a lot of scrutiny so that’s different. I feel exposed. I’m no longer in my little corner just enjoying my own obscurity. There’s the additional burden of being somewhat in the public eye. I know that this is a wonderful problem to have as a writer, and I understand the privilege in being able to complain about scrutiny and so forth. So I guess I’ll shut up and just stop complaining! Initially, “home” was a house, a place where we had our meals and ate and slept. But having lived in so many cities—perhaps over six cities in the last 10 years—and having lived in three countries… now that I have a family of my own, I think home is wherever my own family is. And wherever I have decided it is. I lived in Baltimore, I lived in Pittsburgh, I live in Surrey now, I lived in Lagos, I lived in Ibadan… I’ve just lived in so many places and tried to make each one a home as much as possible. But I never really displaced that feeling of transience, that feeling of impermanence and it has more or less become hard for me. A side effect of that is that I have become a bit unable to form very strong and deep connections. I have an underlying assumption that I could be in this country next year or not. I could be in this city next year or not. And so it’s like, “Nah what’s the point?” But in the last four years, I did get tired of that nomadic life. In the last four years I’m so grateful to have lived in the same place, in the same accommodation. And for the last two years I’ve had the same job. That’s amazing! To be able to decompress and just stop jumping from place to place. But that’s where I came from, you know, “falling halfway across the planet.” Being on the West Coast of this continent, having moved from the West Coast of Africa, it’s quite a journey. And there are so many contextual and cultural shocks that come as part of such a move that are kind of hard to explain. Yes, that’s an existential question on the level of the human species. And I think it’s a question we all need to answer for ourselves. But I was speaking with my therapist recently and I was telling him about how terrified I am of impending climate collapse and so forth, and he told me something that I found comforting. This is the sixth major mass extinction event that we’re in, and humans have historically proven themselves to be extremely resilient. Humanity might not necessarily survive in the form that it is in today, but I believe that our species will find a way to survive in some form. I mean, will it be a pleasant existence? I don’t know! But I do not believe that we will entirely exterminate ourselves.