Alice James Books, paperback
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Publisher Marketing: Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nations. Poem after poem, the speaker tries to define and find what the self is, and, in a tangential way, it is also about a son's relationship with his father alongside his country of birth, Nigeria. 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, in an attempt at decolonization. There is a speaker in search of his self/voice and in the process, tries on multiple voices and personas-some which are closer to what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite. As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, myth, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. The poems interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and 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.
