In August 2023, the McDougall Creek Wildfire tore through the Okanagan region of British Columbia, forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes and pushing the city of Kelowna into a state of emergency. Among those evacuated was Sakiru Adebayo, Nigerian scholar, critic, and now poet, who turned that experience of displacement and dread into Wildfire Verses, a debut poetry collection forthcoming from a Canadian press.
Adebayo is better known in literary circles as a critic. He is an assistant professor and the James and Eva Good Chair in English Literature at Western University, the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa(University of Michigan Press), and the winner of both the Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism (2022) and the Amílcar Cabral Prize (2023). Wildfire Verses marks his arrival as a poet.
The collection moves between the personal and the planetary. Beginning from the moment of evacuation, the poems explore what it means to feel like a climate refugee in real time, documenting what Adebayo calls “the trauma of fire and the fire of trauma.” But the collection also pushes outward, pressing readers on the unequal distribution of climate vulnerability, the colonial lines that droughts and hurricanes are now exposing, and the need for eco-collectivism in an increasingly burning world.
We share two poems from the collection below.
Wildfire Recipe
When warmer-than-average temperatures
meet dry vegetation
and lightning strikes,
what you get is a dangerous fire action
When global warming
kicks your dryly forested buttocks,
what you get is a theatre of disasters
. . . A theatre of environmental disasters
Fuelled by careless campers
and their wild bonfires
and nonchalant hikers
who would die for a touch of cigarette
in the woods
and the sadist arsonist
who doesn’t give a hoot
if we all burn to ashes
and the anything-for-the-profit business tycoons
in whose book of bad behaviours lies
an additional crime of slow violence
and the slow government
that only thinks of solutions after the disaster
***
The Climate Refugee
(After Warsan Shire)
No one leaves home unless
home is held hostage by flames and floods
No one leaves home
unless home is a plague of desiccation
No one leaves home
unless home is the mouth of green squalor;
Climate wars have replaced civil wars,
but the calculus of displacement remains the same;
This fiery wind of environmental changes
has blown millions of species into the planetary unknown
The maps and borders created by the colonialists
have now been cracked open by ambitious droughts,
and implacable hurricanes are starting to expose
the illogical logicality of the nation-state
Wildfire Verses is available for pre-order on Amazon. Pre-order here.
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