RASAQ MALIK GBOLAHAN
Nigerian poet and translator. Cofounder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ.
My Books
Origin of wounds
Winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s “The Origin of Wounds” exhumes fragments of historical accounts that bring us face-to-face with the brutality of national and global wars. Malik’s pivotal poems address personal and global grief through the loss of homeland, the loss of beloveds, and the continuous search for a sanctuary. He presents to us diverse ways we can engage moments steeped in unrest and conflict, while weaving poems that honor both the living and dead. In poems that startle and astonish, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan shows unflinchingly the excruciating lives of children in war-torn homelands,...
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African Urban Echoes
For more than two decades, poetry anthologies in African literature have navigated the shared world of African identity or living in the continent of Africa without capturing comprehensively the lifeworld of African cities. African Urban Echoes is a gathering of poets, including notable Canadian poets such as Jumoke Verissimo, Uchechukwu Umezurike, James Yeku and the Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Tolu Oloruntoba, that seek to contribute to the echoes of resistance, hope, and anxieties all produced simultaneously by African urban centers in their polyvalences and unique characters. Poets from different African countries evoke detailed portraits of lives as cities and cities...
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The Other Names of Grief
"Rasaq Malik in The Other Names of Grief dwells on these plaintive memories, turning the anguish into an epiphany in his new collection. In The Other Names of Grief, we are not only sifted through harrowing narratives of our time, but also we are given an alternative prism through which we can perceive griefs and calamities of this century. We are summoned to identify new names of grief and signifiers of agony. This choice opens new meaning for us wherein we can locate humanity and avert future catastrophe. Rasaq bears witness to this awful trajectory of our time. The poet’s persona...
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No Home in This Land
"Without any iota of doubt Rasaq is a revelation, and so his poetic spirit and artistic presence. He’s a revolutionary necessity at the time the utopian dream of Nigeria has been consistently challenged by the long presence of acute leadership failure and less regard for the laws, security and dignity of human life. For this we need to give him the credit for archiving major stories and incidents we may tend to forget due to the deluge of other looming calamities. It should be said that in Nigeria, calamities and displeasure do not have a long epochal presence. They come...
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