An Interview with Adedayo Agarau

Adedayo Agarau’s debut poetry collection The Years of Blood invokes dreamscapes with oneiric lyricism to meditate on communal loss and grieving. Confronting histories, social and personal, he contends with the costs of inheritance, including the afterlives of ritual violence, in a series of elegiac poems whose ululations echo beyond the borders of the page. – Won Lee


JK Anowe: As an African poet writing in America, one thing I continuously contend with in my poetry is treading the line between re-perpetuating western stereotypes of African communities and critiquing/commenting on the systems inherent to these communities. The poems in The Years of Blood, published under the auspices of postcolonial studies, are a moving exploration of ritual killings in Nigeria. I wonder, considering their delicate subject matter, if you had similar concerns while writing these poems or gearing to publish them within a context where the phenomena of ritual killings is foreign and relatively unknown. If so, what were the nature of these concerns? How do you see the poems in TYOB attending to them?

Adedayo Agarau: 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.

Won Lee: A noteworthy poem in your collection for the way a Nigerian setting is oneirically superimposed over an American one is “Springfield.” It is perhaps the book’s most explicit articulation of your positionality as an expat writer. It reminds me how James Baldwin famously wrote about American life from Paris and Istanbul. As a diasporic poet who wrestles with the problematic of depicting the ‘motherland’ from a distance, I am wondering how your perspective on Nigerian ritual killings shifted in writing many of these poems “in the heat and cold of Iowa.” Did this distance enlarge or clarify these horrors, and to what degree have you applied a hybridized lens to both these countries in your work?

A: 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.

JA: Your speaker, a kind of ghost-possessed serenader, centers an elegiac approach throughout most of the poems but also shapeshifts across the book, inhabiting invented or “reinvented” personas/voices. When I think of the elegy in actionable terms, I like to think lament, as in the verb. And it is this verb, it seems to me, that is the possessing force of some of the speaker’s most striking observations. I am thinking of the poem “Portent” and how it enacts lament as a narrative and structural device while examining grief through a socio-cultural lens. This opens up within the poem (and the book at large) a discourse on the intersectionality of critical theory and a poetic form of personal consequence. It’s left me wondering about what the socio-political implications might be. Are there possibilities for the critical within the lament? What was your process of writing this particular poem?

A: This is interesting, JK, as I often think of lament as the engine of my dramatic impulse, moving the poem toward performance. The Years of Blood moves through ritual practices that can wound or protect, depending on the night’s weather, or the god, or who is spilling the blood, and what request follows this blood. In “Portent,” the ritual functions as prayer, and in Nigeria, prayer often travels in call-and-response with lament—you plead, you mourn, you plead again. The poem keeps that sequence, and so does the entire collection.

Victor Turner’s liminality describes the threshold where a community tests its fate, and here, the poem stands at that small gate by the pool, between vow and aftermath. If Turner’s critical text about the feeble and how it centers the community is critical, so is the admittance of lamentation. But why do we lament, and to whom, are some of the questions I hope the collection answers. A prayer aims to do something in the world. A lament does the same work—holding a body, a name, a night in the mouth. Felman and Laub’s “witness to the witness” clarifies the relation the poem builds between speaker and reader without inviting spectacle. The Years of Blood, whose speaker is alive, dead, onlooking, close, kidnapped, found, or lost, solidifies the many possibilities of critical witnessing.

WL:  In Western traditions of elegy, there are such features as the claim of a relation to the dead, an exclamatory declaration of grief, and a ritual action or procession. In poems such as “Unfound,” “Empty,” and “Boys who never die,” a number of these features make an appearance, whether in the panting of a mother for her son, the solemn burial of a friend, or the litanic remembrance of boys lost to ritual murders. Drawing as you do from your Nigerian experience as much as from your tutelage at such places like the Iowa’s Writers Workshop, how were you thinking about elegy as you conceived The Years of Blood? Were there features of classical Western elegies you found useful and others you let fall away? And were there aspects of the Nigerian elegiac mode that you could not reconcile with a Western one?

A: Having lived in places where I’ve watched people navigate grief, I’ve come to see elegy as a universal language, much like poetry: even when it is written in another language, it remains poetry. Elegy is a multifaceted set of social technologies for commemorating the dead and organizing the living. The lines are blurred now. What we call the Western mode of elegizing has entered our ceremonies through borrowed and colonial belief systems, so that at funerals here—even where death may be ritually amplified as in parts of the Nigerian south—the elegiac is already hybrid across Nigeria. To avoid overgeneralizing, I’ll add that my lens is shaped by Yoruba family structures that allow multiple belief systems to coexist, directly or by association. If a man who is both a Muslim and an Ifa priest dies, he may receive multiple burial rites: one to honor the gods and another to honor God. That convergence can generate friction after death. To borrow your language, we are not reconciling—it’s been reconciled for us by the impacts of colonial definitions of what is barbaric, which desacralizes most of our traditional beliefs.

I think, ultimately, I am resisting the notion that living or writing from the west, especially as an immigrant, does something to the perception of culture, in this case, the funeral. The Years of Blood documents a past that feels very familiar, both physically and metaphysically, and as such, the poems draw almost all their influences from the conditioning of home, which the poet can describe with great intimacy. The book might have taken a different approach if it had either focused its attention on Iowa or California, or heavily borrowed traditions distant from the children the book eulogizes or invokes.

I am aware that traditions meet and alter each other on the page, and I actively resisted that reconciliation because it does not entirely serve this particular collection.

JA: The book loosely imitates a four-act structure. Can you talk to us about how you came about this narrative structure and how the poems (and book by extension) have evolved or transformed since you started and finished the project?

A: I began the collection on a flight from Nigeria to Chicago. I submitted it in August 2023 after working closely with Remica Bingham-Risher, whose insights helped me sharpen the manuscript. An earlier version—my MFA thesis—leaned toward a spiritualist, surreal vantage. Elizabeth Willis’s comments moved me toward a four-part scaffold: investigation, descent, vigil, return.

I chose that structure for function. I wanted discrete rooms so a reader could recover between intensities, and so the materials of witness—voice, image, naming, silence—could rotate without fatigue. Early drafts sought continuity through explanatory transitions; later drafts eliminated those bridges when the poems could convey meaning on their own. I reordered pieces to manage breath, removed scenes that edged into spectacle, and added intervals where the page could hold quiet without retreat. The acts remain porous. They pace attention and stop short of resolution.

I opened the collection to many readers, including Hua, Danielle, Steph, DāShaun, Joe, Adams, Wale, O-Jeremiah, Patrick, and Fatimah, and I am grateful for their care.

WL: “Entrance” closes with the line “i form a performance of waiting” only for this thematic of waiting to open a later poem “The Dark”: “A bridegroom stands at the altar of waiting.” I am interested in this temporality wherein a subject occupies an anticipatory middle ground. Though your book is very much located in the aftermath of ritual sacrifice with all the repercussions of loss and mourning this entails, how are you thinking about futurity in a context so weighed down by what has already taken place? What future did you imagine your book as writing towards?

A: This is a fascinating question, and I appreciate you asking. Yoruba cosmology resists, with several proofs, an agreeable meaning for “future” as a concept of time. What it provides instead is time as a relational device. The collection heavily relies on these ideologies, as the tenses intentionally move, within and along the lines, between past and present, silently questioning and probing the unknown, the unsaid. In Yorùbá thought, ọ̀la names “tomorrow,” and the living, the ancestors, and the not-yet-born occupy the same field. Destiny sits in orí, chosen before birth, yet it is worked out through ìwà, obligation, and corrective acts. Ifá divination does not predict a single outcome, often it lays out paths with conditions, taboos, and remedies, and invites you to act. Àtúnwá, the possibility of return, keeps futurity close to cycles of care while also grounding, although silently, that there had been a past. Àtún means “repeat” while “wá” means come—explaining that the dead children in my collection are possibly fathers now, elsewhere, living a different life where the consciousness does not remember the violence in their first life, although their head or body—through scars—may bear a memento.

The collection itself is considered a framework for transcending and enrapturing, as a means of arriving at a safe future or one that reveals the past and its dangers—the head, orí, showing you what it has saved you from, which was why the collection ended with a disruptive arrival, however, an arrival. In some poems, the speaker is dead and speaks from the future, while in others, the speaker is alive and looks back. There is a gaze within the collection that looks down, with an obvious sense of survivor’s guilt, into what is present but existing on a different plane. In practice, I am writing toward accountable memory, safer ordinary, and language sturdy enough to be used when and where action is possible—where an archive is necessary.

Adedayo Agarau is the author of The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks “Origin of Name” (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and “The Arrival of Rain” (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).

JK Anowe (he/him/they) is an Igbo-born poet and MFA+MA candidate in poetry at the Litowitz Creative Writing Program, Northwestern University. Anowe has served as Assistant Poetry Editor at The Nation and currently serves as Interviews Editor for 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019) and poems have appeared in The Chicago Reader, Gulf Coast, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. Anowe is a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow & a Gwendolyn M. Carter Fellow at Northwestern University.

Won Lee is a Korean-American poet based in Chicago. He is a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University. His writing appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Bear Review, and elsewhere.