Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé’s debut poetry collection, My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body (2026), was published by Moon City Press at Missouri State University after winning the Press’s poetry award in 2024. He is also the recipient of the 2026 Pink Poetry Prize from Great River Review at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His poetry has been shortlisted for the 2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers, the 2025 Glass Chapbook Series, the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize, the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Poetry London, Callaloo, Magma, Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Àyàndélé earned his BA in English from the University of Lagos and his MFA from Florida State University, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. A fellow of the Obsidian Foundation (UK), he serves as the Assistant Interviews Editor at Southeast Review.
Here, Àyàndélé sits down with literary scholar Kayode Odumboni—his close friend and former UNILAG classmate. Together, they explore the core themes of his new collection and look back at the literary foundations that took root during their time at the University of Lagos.
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Kayode Odumboni: As I read your book, three words caught my attention because they occurred so many times across multiple poems that it is almost impossible to not notice them. Body. Owl. Ghost. I said “words,” but they are actually recurring images that function as tropes in this collection. I want us to start with you unpacking what each of these motifs does in — and, for — your poetic imagination. Let’s start with “body.” I took the time to count how many times the word “body” (or “bodies”) appears in this collection, and I counted at least 60. What is your interest in the body? Why is the book so engrossed, almost obsessively invested, with the body?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: I see the human body, especially the Black body, as an archival site. In the book My Father Paints, I was interested in the body poetics, that is, how physical embodiment shapes language, perception, and experience. The Black body carries memories, a historical configuration of lived experiences, and everything in between. Besides, as a poet, it is easy for me to enter into my creative process with the word “body,” and I usually use it as an entry point into my poetics. In this collection, I was truly obsessed with that word, but the word has helped me to see myself, my family, and those that are close to me through the body poetics, like I remember how their bodies have gone through life’s challenges without breaking, without losing their battles; and the body, for me, is the carrier of hope, and an identity that cannot be erased. The body holds cultural memories and childhood memories. Hence, bodies in this collection are a marriage between the personal and the collective history and memory of our being, our journeys through the Atlantic Sea that divides us from what we are, and the memories that we have left behind when we left home.
Kayode Odumboni: So, the owl is another prominent motif in your book. Many of your poems have the word “owl” in their titles: “Invitation to the Gathering of Owls,” “The Boy that Carries the Eyes of the Owl,” “White Owl on the Tombstone,” etc. And even in poems that are not explicitly about the owl, you have lines such as: “I have the eyes of the owl and I see / how my grandfather’s grave opens its mouth / to swallow my glory” in the poem “Carved in Ìyáàlù Bàtá.” In “Falling from the Sky,” you compare the “white owl in your dream” to your grandfather. It seems to me that you’re making a subtle reference here to blindness or some sort of visual impairment, but I’m curious to hear why you are so fascinated with the owl — other than the fact that the owl is your “family bird,” as you state in “The Fog is the Ghost of my Grandfather.”
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: Yes, the owl was another obsession in this book, especially in the first part. Let me say I was writing my obsession with the owl bird. Here is a back story: I was strolling through Instagram a while ago, and I was mesmerized by the photograph of an owl in a tree. In the picture, the owl and the tree were in sync, and I couldn’t differentiate the tree from the owl. I had to look intently to see the owl on the branch of the tree. That singular picture was the beginning of my obsession with the owl, and I explored it in several of my poems. The owl, for me, became a vision of sight, light, wisdom, and traditional beliefs, knowledge in its truest form. It is also my fascination with the natural world, an ecopoetic kind of thinking. Oftentimes, pictures are the gateway for how I see things. I think in pictures, and I carry those pictures into my poetry as images that hold my poems together.
Kayode Odumboni: Speaking of owls, did your grandfather lose his sight after the Biafra War? That’s the impression I get from “Falling from the Sky.”
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: Yes, he did lose his sight and got a bullet wound in his right shoulder.
Kayode Odumboni: In Part II of this book, titled “Ghosts at the Door,” a pervading eeriness haunts the pages. There are ghosts everywhere. There is death. There is suicide. There is a lot of grief and mourning. It is almost as if this part of the book (and the book in general, really) is grappling with the trauma of death and the many ways in which we die. In “To the Ghost Father Tried to Bury,” you depict the suicide of someone whose identity is not disclosed. As a reader, I was haunted by this lack of clarity. I kept wondering who it was who committed suicide — even though I have my suspicion — but the poem intentionally (I assume) withholds that bit of information. Talk to us about the many things that ghosts signify in this book.
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: At the time I was writing the poems in this section, a lot of Nigerian youth were grappling with suicide because of the deteriorating condition of Nigeria. Some Nigerian youth were jumping into the Lagos Lagoon or drinking an insecticide, called Sniper, taking their own lives. Those times were traumatizing for me, and I began to write about them. The Nigerian youth became ghosts, people whose dreams are a broken leg of a chair, and hopelessness, because they aren’t meeting societal expectations, was a national song for many. Did I have a particular person in mind while writing the poem? I am not sure anymore. Maybe I did at the time I was writing it, but over time, the poem has taken on a life of its own, and it is for every person who has suffered loss, in one way or another. The ghosts in this section of the book could be many things for different people. It could mean being unseen, especially as an alien in a foreign country.
Kayode Odumboni: I think of this book as a collection of poems that are aching with loss, aching with longing for that which is irretrievably lost. In your interview with Ernest Jesuyemi, you said: “The poems, at the time I wrote them, were just written from a heart that was longing for something that was lost permanently. It is an outcry for what is lost, for what we cannot hold anymore.” What are the specific losses that you were thinking about when you said that?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: The losses are multifaceted in a way for me. At the time of writing this collection, My Father Paints, I have lost my grandfather, who was an integral part of this book in relation to the Nigerian Civil War. I have lost my personal cordial relationship with my father because of distance, which is what I explored in “First Spring.” You lost your father while you were in America and you could not make it home for his funeral because of the lockdown in 2020. Solomon, a friend from high school, also lost his father, whom I wrote about briefly in “How I Remember.” Even leaving Nigeria at the time was a kind of loss for me, because I remember weeping on the British Airways airplane as it departed Lagos. There is a kind of permanence to loss, whether through death or through distance. Even losing a friendship because of migration is a personal loss for me, and I have experienced all of these in my journey. Besides, there is this cold silence that this loss brings, and sometimes I cannot describe it, but we just have to keep going, keep doing what we are doing.
Kayode Odumboni: For what it’s worth, I must say that “Drowning,” the poem you wrote about my experience with grief, is perhaps the most significant thing that anyone has done for me since the passing of my dad. So, thank you, really, for that gift. Other than “Drowning,” another poem that I was pleasantly surprised to see in your collection is “Weight of the Rod.” I remember this poem very clearly. You wrote it in our first year at the University of Lagos. You had returned from a trip to Àgọ́-Àrẹ for break, and when you came back to campus and showed us this poem, I still remember that I was in awe of it. Since 2011 when you wrote this poem, the problems of herdsmen and insecurity have become a full-blown national crisis of politicized violence. Did you imagine, when you wrote this poem, that things would degenerate to this point?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: I can’t believe you still remember how the poem, “Weight of the Rod,” came to be. At the time I wrote the poem, I never imagined that the problems of herdsmen and insecurity would be a national crisis in Nigeria. The problem of herdsmen has been a major issue for many of us who came from Òkè-Ògùn, that is, the northern part of Oyo State, Nigeria. There were times my mother and my siblings narrowly escaped the herdsmen on the farm. I was just writing about the issues in a small way at the time, and it was a little bit troubling for me, seeing farmers calculating their loss of farm produce because cows had eaten their crops. After my trip to Àgọ́-Àrẹ, I wrote that poem in just a sitting in our room in Lagos. The poem was a breakthrough for me at the time, and I had an obsession with alliteration, which is evident in the poem. I am sure you remember that the poem was first published in the student journal of the Department of English at the University of Lagos, The Shuttle, and later in African Writer Magazine, with the title, “Cows Graze on Our Green Grasses.”
Kayode Odumboni: Of course I remember! I know your journey with poetry started in secondary school. And in UNILAG, we fervently honed our writing skills. Those were the beautiful days of spontaneous writing sessions at The Weavers’ Club on Friday evenings in the Arts Block. Needless to say, you’re now the most accomplished writer from that UNILAG cohort. Well, you and D.M. Aderibigbe. When you look back on this journey, how do you feel? What does it mean to you to have come this far in your writing career?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: I always look back in gratitude. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think my poetry could get the recognition it has gotten. I remember in one of The Weavers’ Club meetings, I wrote a spontaneous poem, and Dami (D.M.) loved the poem and asked me to find places to submit that poem to international magazines. That poem was accepted in a now-defunct journal in the US, Kin Poetry Journal, and that was my first publication ever in an international journal. I’m blessed with the cohort we had then at The Weavers’ Club. Also, it took me some time to accept that I can write poetry. I didn’t believe in the power of my poetry at the time, but when I accepted the gift of poetry, lines filled my notebook, and I am happy I yielded to it eventually.
Kayode Odumboni: One of the points of criticism against contemporary poets, especially poets of your ilk who are based in the West, is that they are preoccupied with issues that do not really bear on the sociopolitical realities on the ground in Nigeria. Critics who make this argument claim that your generation of poets have made Nigerian poetry too fixated on themes that are deemed “saleable” to the Western literary industry. I imagine that such critics would not be able to make those allegations against your collection, because it is very much invested in Nigeria and what is going on there. Were you thinking of these issues when you were working on this collection? And did you intentionally decide to ensure that your work does not fall into that genealogy of contemporary Nigerian poets that those critics push back against?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: In this collection, I was writing the truth of my being, and I wasn’t fixated on what the critics would say. I know critics will always find something to say about contemporary Nigerian poetry, but my preoccupation in this collection was writing something authentic to people around me and me. That is why I put a lot of people and places that have shaped me into the book, because I want the world to hear about those places and people that are truly mine. Some people were even surprised that I write about places like Àgọ́-Àrẹ and Tedé, places a lot of people have never heard of. My Father Paints is an authentic life about the dreams, the myths, and the inescapable condition of living in Nigeria. It focuses on ordinary people and places.
Kayode Odumboni: This is a question about diction. There is a line in “First Spring” that I found curious: “It made me miss / the laughter I shared with my father / on the bench outside the porch / back in Lagos.” In Nigeria, we say “balcony,” not “porch.” Why did you choose to go with the word “porch” here instead of “balcony”? Also, I believe you used “porch” in another poem, but I can’t recall which one exactly. Do you know the poem I’m referring to?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: Honestly, I wasn’t even considering that word while I was writing. Maybe it was one of those words I picked up in America, writing and teaching in an American classroom. I think the word I was even thinking about is “verandah.” I think I wrote the poem while in the US, and that may be part of the linguistic assimilation into the American vocabulary. I think the second poem is “Invitation to the Gathering of Owls,” which I wrote in the US, too.
Kayode Odumboni: Your book is overtly about war in the literal sense, especially the trans-generational impact of the Nigerian civil war on your family lineage. But it is also about war in the metaphorical sense — the many kinds of battles that define the human experience. From an existentialist standpoint, how do you make sense of the human condition as one of being at war?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: The poems, “Our Wars,” and “My War,” come to mind. I have always seen war as an integral part of the human condition. Humans are inherently greedy, selfish, and always wanting more and more from others, and they are always getting those things through wars, eroding the peace of others around them. Besides, we are always at war with ourselves; there is an internal war everyone is fighting with themselves, and mostly we are constantly faced with an inner choice whether to do this or that, and that constant war, some people die while fighting with themselves, and others keep struggling with it throughout their lives. Do we ever win this war? Well, I don’t have the answer for it. Maybe at our deathbed, looking back, we will know whether we win the war with our inner self or not.
Kayode Odumboni: You write a lot about home in this collection. But, really, what you’re writing about is homelessness. It is almost as if you’re saying that to feel at home in a place is to make peace with being displaced from another place, either because of a literal war or a metaphorical one, which is a form of homelessness in itself. Why are you interested in this subject — of the dialectics between home and homelessness?
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: It was the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, who says, “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” I have also been interested in the definition of home and what makes a place a home. I realize that wherever you find peace, laughter, aren’t constantly thinking of leaving because of insecurity, aren’t asked to leave, aren’t referred to as an alien or a foreigner, and identify with the people there, that is home. From time to time, the idea of home changes, and sometimes I’m forced to believe that there is no home here in this world, which is daily ravaged by uncertainties like war, identity crises, political issues, etc. There is this acute desire to find a home, a true home, far away from the constant challenges, which most times are man-made, and that is why I am always musing about a home in my poetry.
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