Adedayo Agarau

Adedayo Agarau (born 1994) is a Nigerian poet whose work explores themes of ritual violence, memory, and African spiritualism. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press, 2025), which won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize for BIPOC Writers. Agarau is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine, a journal dedicated to African literature and art, and serves as Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. Quotes I was not preoccupied with how the collection would be received by the western audience since my writing is seeking to serve a global audience—and honestly, the purpose of this body of work is to pinch alive the sleeping Nigerian consciousness to grief, or national tragedy. It appears that we do not know how to mourn or move through grief as if it were the normal state of being. The collection should serve as a fidelity to the people whose lives intersect the poems, and perform its obligation as a resistance to the appetites that turn the open wound of Africans into spectacle. Apart from misreading, which I wasn’t much worried about, I often think of what Gayatri Spivak names “epistemic violence,” where frameworks erase the terms by which a community knows itself. Our issues are sometimes metaphysical, yet we live through them with a tangible knowledge of their existence. And this is hard to explain, easy to dismiss. I think a framework I often think of as I write is Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity,” which informs my decisions on what to name and what to keep. If you lived through an experience, I am not sure physical distance can do so much in shifting the imagery—if anything, it provides an audacity with which you enter the poem without fear. In my physics class in secondary school, I learned about the parallax error, but unlike physics, immigration does not automatically misalign the paradoxes of memory. In the parking lot with my father, we were referencing Nigeria, but he never spoke about the years, although I remembered it. In his own forgetting, or refusing to speak, the poet is assigned to think for the collective, to carry through the mileage, what the body has survived. Right now, while living and writing in America has opened the world to me in fresh new ways, I cannot credit it to have changed the way I see Nigeria, experience it, on the metaphysical level, although it does help think of the spectrum of spirituality the world carries—how African spirituality is on a different level from the American idea of spirituality, which often explores the connection with the body rather than an outer force.