Poetry on the move: 'Writing was like therapy'

Poetry on the move: 'Writing was like therapy'

Amaka Obioji says her poetry has changed in her three years in the UK.

“Yes, it has changed greatly, because most of my poems right now are from the angle of migration.” 

As a child in Eastern Nigeria, she says, she didn’t talk much but read and wrote a lot: “I was a shy little kid while I was growing up. I loved reading.”

Like all her siblings, she attended boarding school: “Writing was like therapy, a place to find joy, to be myself.

“The only way I could communicate was through writing. It was, is, my safe place. I experimented with a lot of styles. At the end of the day, poetry was the style I was looking for.”

She wrote about herself, her emotions, how her environment affected her. She calls her work “mindfulness poems. It’s the poetry of the heart.” 

Now “I write from the angle of someone in a foreign place, an outsider, in London.”

Migration, she says, has good and bad sides. Some of her siblings live in the UK, but she misses her parents: “I'm spending so much credit calling home … I’m missing so many activities.”

She points to the many difficulties migrants face.

As a student, for example, she and others were for a time blocked from attending classes and using facilities such as the library because the university said it had not received tuition fees on time as a result of delays in money transfers from several countries.

“I wrote so many emails as the student leader for my class. The university insisted, ‘This is the policy.’ Many students were affected. Ultimately, the ban was lifted when the money came through, but there should be a little more understanding in such situations, especially from a university to which individual students have already paid over £10,000. It was very ugly.”

And though Obioji says that “when I’m writing it is my soul. I don't know what else i would do if I wasn’t writing”,  she also has a day job — working for an organisation that finds accommodation and help for asylum seekers — and has co-founded Diaspora Africa, which documents African migrants’ stories and publishes policy papers on immigration issues.

Whatever comes next in her life, Obioji will continue writing. So there may be a sequel to her first poetry book, Mother, Did You Call My Name?, published in Nigeria in 2024. And Britain may be in the spotlight.

       Réfugiée prière

If the ocean swallows me today,

let it be known that I fought for my country,

I bared myself, wringing her off of every water,

leaving her out to dry

in the cold harmattan.

Let my soul take refuge in imagined cities,

filled with mosaics hanging above its walls

and the flickering lights at night and

salt bread and mashed potatoes.

Not drowning in my tears

before the rising turbulent

takes the leftovers of my body.

And if the universe pleases,

may she grant me passage to this place,

where I might call home,

may our broken vessel in these turbulent waters

fight for us who have lost hope and give us peace.

       Homecoming

Home calls me everyday,

in between dusk, reminding me of love.

The glory I left behind, mocking my taste in

places where I chose to settle.

Home calls me in my mother’s tongue saying,

do not settle for less.

       For immigrants with tears for breakfast

This is for the sad mother on the train

who left her 5 months old, fleeing,

to provide her a future

The cleaners in opera theatres with chiseled hips

but hide them well to stay on the job

The black taxi man hums to the rhythm of

the African drum playing from his radio

The young girl who drags her feet

from work to work to walk through med school

The little boy in a turban who turns up on a boat

on the border fleeing the war at home,

hoping to find a new life away from his people.

With every struggle comes renewed hope