Autobiomythography of (PB) (2024)

Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nationhood.

In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject--a person, yes, but also a literary subject--in the wake and afterlife of colonization. Intimate and personal, it is interested in figuring out how to wrest subjectivity--one's notion of self--from this failed project of modernity.

As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. Amidst myriad speakers in the collection, there is a prominent speaker who, in search of his self/voice, tries on multiple voices--including Frederick Lugard's--and other personas: some closer to who/what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite.

Tangentially, this is a book about a son's relationship with his father. Poem after poem, the speakers interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and in the pursuit of Truth they erode the boundaries between fact and fiction to show us the fragility of the lines we draw in service to these abstractions, of the beliefs we hold about them, of the acts we perform in service to them.