Remi Raji is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser and cultural activist. Raji’s first collection of poems – A Harvest of Laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition. A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine (all U.S.A.), University of Cape Town (South Africa), and Cambridge University (UK), Raji’s scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Raji has presented his poems in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm (Sweden). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian and Latvian. He has been an “Alexander von Humboldt”-Scholar to the Humboldt University to Berlin (Germany).
Tonight my verse will find you dancing alone
a hurricane of desires will pass me, unknown.
And I the anchor, martyr to your trance,
draped, in the absolution of your absence.
...
As sure as the deceptive day
you're the only cell in my stem
the stomata of unending songs,...
...
when the locusts come, will you greet them
with tears and blood, in the aftermath of fractured years?
when the termites come with fangs of iron
can you be the grit stubbornness of rocks?
...
I
Sometimes a man gets tired of going to sea as now
when the voices I hear speak nothing but shame, and silence.
When the calabash goes to the river and never returns
The carver is drenched in tears, the drinker is famished.
...
no water runs where the Niger flows
no fish swims where the Benue berths
my spirit is grieved, my grief is long like the rivers
i will not forgive i will not forget
...