Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds (Anhinga 2025) stands in the lineage of African poets who approach tragedy as photographs for remembrances, capturing lived experiences as image-driven moments that preserve memory. In this sense, he works in a tradition similar to Niyi Osundare, Jack Mapanje and Kofi Awoonor, whose poems often function as snapshots of real-life events. What distinguishes this approach is the emotional precision with which he locates grief in the domestic sphere and the body itself. This collection, the winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, is a searing and compassionate meditation on grief, displacement, and the fragility of ordinary life in contemporary Nigeria.
From the first pages, the collection situates itself in landscapes shaped by war, migration, and domestic rupture, drawing readers into a world where memory and mourning coexist with resilience. In “Elegy for the Drowned,” Gbolahan opens with the haunting image of a sea that contains the residue of loss: “On the vast body of water / there are waves heavy / with the final prayers of the drowned.” This line encapsulates a central concern of the book—the transformation of natural elements into repositories of human suffering. The poet’s drowned migrants represent real Nigerian tragedies, from the Mediterranean crossings to the steady displacement of families in the Northeast. This is a poet’s effort of bearing witness while preserving tenderness.
The poem’s central question—“How do we measure the depth of water / that claims our loved ones?”—transforms the sea into an active agent of disappearance, exposing the experiences of countless Nigerians fleeing conflict zones in the Northeast or embarking on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean. The metaphor of the sea as both archive and grave gestures toward real Nigerian tragedies: the Mediterranean migrant crisis, the mass drownings of refugees from Borno and Yobe, and even domestic disasters such as boat accidents on the Niger and Ogun rivers. Gbolahan’s poems refuse to let these deaths dissolve into anonymity:
How do we track the footprints
of the drowned on water?
In the register of drowned bodies,
there are names of forgotten children:
Mahmud, Abdullah, Zabair, Hashem,
Uthman, Kabir, Hakeem, Hassan . . .
All of them children who will not wake up
again to the sky laden with stars . . .
His insistence on the naming of children—“Mahmud, Abdullah, Zubair, Hashem . . .” creates a counter-archive to the bureaucratic lists of missing persons. These children are more than statistics; they are presented as presences whose absence haunts the poem. In a country where state recognition of victims is often insufficient, poetry is used as a means of restoring dignity.
To render these losses concrete, he goes on to describe “women holding a vigil / on behalf of all their drowned loved ones,” a scene painfully familiar in some Nigerian communities, where mass burials and uncertain disappearances result in mourning that persist indefinitely. He names “mothers cradling the photographs of their drowned children” —a scene that reflects the kind of public grief frequently witnessed among internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps in Maiduguri or Yola after attacks by insurgents.
Another remarkable strength of Gbolahan’s work is his ability to place catastrophe within the intimate spaces of home and marriage. In “What They Remember,” a woman is portrayed as a conduit of a story larger than herself. She stands “in the dark, her whole life / unfolding into aches.” This is a portrait that may resonate with some Nigerian women whose lives have been shaped by conflict, terrorism, and patriarchal violence. The poet’s women are repositories of national trauma, carrying the weight of displacement, widowhood, and memory. The line “She remembers her husband’s open eyes / in death, his body drenched in blood” evokes private loss and the imagery of mass killings that have become everyday headlines: the aftermath of bandit attacks in Kaduna, Maiduguri and Zamfara, herdsmen-related conflicts in Benue, Imo and Plateau, or the Boko Haram massacres in Borno and Adamawa. Gbolahan refuses abstraction. He situates this grief in the body, the face, the memory of tenderness. The framing question, “God, why have you forsaken me?” in the aforementioned poem shows how personal mourning takes on a theological dimension. This exemplifies a cultural reality in Nigeria, where trauma often intensifies, rather than dissolves, religious inquiry. Therefore, faith offers both solace and interrogation.
One of the poet’s strongest techniques is his insistence on returning, again and again, to the children as both symbols of innocence lost and as full participants in the narrative of national suffering. He treats them as subjects with memories, dreams, and fears. He writes of children in sleep who “remember their homeland . . . dream of a new playground, schools without bombs.” This reflects the experiences of Nigerian children in the Northeast who have grown up amid raids, gunfire, and school closures. The reference to “schools without bombs” resonates with the memory of Chibok (2014), Dapchi (2018), and countless more abductions and attacks on educational institutions. The poet’s children dream of normalcy—a desire so fragile and profound that it becomes one of the emotional hearts of the collection. The poet’s decision to focus on the interior lives of widows, mothers, and children prevents the work from becoming a catalogue of disaster; instead, it becomes a study of how individuals live with the memory of violence. However, Gbolahan refuses to exploit suffering.
His language is sparse, precise, and respectful. Even when depicting horror, he avoids sensationalized imagery. Instead, he relies on the somber, heavy dignity of mourning. For instance, he writes of “dreams dismantled by the tide of water.” The metaphor is soft, almost gentle, but the devastation is unmistakable. It shows the poet’s maturity: he trusts the weight of loss without embellishments. His imagery often returns to domestic labor—grandmothers feeding goats, mothers planting flowers—to show that the dead are both mourners and former participants in the ordinary beauty of life.
Water flows through the poems as a multi-layered symbol: the sea of migration, the river of memory, the flood of violence. For some Nigerians, water represents both sustenance and danger. Yearly floods displace thousands; poorly regulated boats capsize; the Mediterranean turns into a grave for young Nigerians fleeing unemployment and instability. In the collection, water is never passive. It is depicted as bodies who lift their palms “into the sky to ask God for mercy as their boats capsize,” a striking image that merges the physical weight of water with the spiritual weight of loss. Water is also portrayed as a listener, a keeper of secrets. In a country where trauma accumulates faster than documentation, poetry is used as a vital witness. Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s language is gentle but unflinching; his imagery intimate but expansive. Through naming, through elegy, and through the everyday gestures of domestic life, he recreates the human stories behind national crises.