Description:
Contraband Bodies is a debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of migratory travails and a country lost to precarious politics. A conscious elegy of displacement and home regained through the tribute of roads, evoking diasporic conditions by highlighting syncopated language through pixelated imagery and lapidary details the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa, Europe, and America. Contraband Bodies is a cogitation on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal. It confronts new forms of digital kinship activated through social waves across diasporic landscape. In Contraband Bodies, Salawu performs a poetic remittance on current exodus within Africa and outside of it as a form of resistance against all forms of oppression against Black migrant subjects in the world today.
Brief description:
Jide Salawu is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes published by Griots Lounge Canada. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Walrus, Poetry Pause, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Transition, and so on. He was a Yosef Wosk Fellow and the recipient of the James Patrick Folinsbee Award for Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Salawu grew up in Shao, Nigeria, but currently lives in Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches as an assistant lecturer at the English and Film Studies program of the University of Alberta.
Review Quotes:
"One of the pleasures of reading Contraband Bodies, the first book of poetry by Jide Salawu, is the sense that the conversation has been interrupted. Another delight is the happy eccentricity of the language: the poems sound unlike much of what is published in Canada today." --The Walrus"Salawu's enthralling collection populates the evolving canon of migration and diasporic the matizations in African poetry. It offers an enduring insight into the many facets of migrants' experiences."--Ifésinàchi Nwàdiké, Black Boy Review