“you enjoy me” - a poem
Admirers who knew Afopefoluwa Ojo, from her high school years at International School of Lagos, say she used to be a very quiet student. As a child prodigy of the arts, only family and a few close friends ever heard her speak at length. While she studied as a Systems Engineering undergad at the University of Lagos, she co-founded, Arts and Africa, a now discontinued publication and platform for writers, poets and artists. The community around Arts and Africa made her a celebrity of sorts in the Lagos’ art scene before her 20th birthday, but she also tells ARTISH, that era ended abruptly due management problems and sustainability issues. Now, in 2020, Ojo is based between Amsterdam and Lagos and more recently, Berlin, where she works as a writer, creator, artist, and engineer in her words “just generally exist".
She just had a show at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, titled "an afrikan poet cries at the wind", which was a showcase and installation of an archival project on african poetry and the process of creating an autonomous system that subverts the current publishing system of publishing and readership of african poetry or at least poses new questions. The project is part of a Lagos-Berlin exchange program Afope recently completed and has been on-going for 3 months in collaboration with Ghanian freelance artist and writer Hakeem Adam. "We plan to make the website go live soon and I'm really excited about it” she tells ARTISH.
During a recent 3-month residency in Berlin, Ojo showed a short video essay text installation on wood at ZK/U Berlin, co-created with Dutch visual artist, Bo Bannink. "We titled it "the bearable lightness of being" inspired by an essay I wrote titled "the madness of good thoughts", which will be published soon by a journal on the continent".
Despite her spread across a range of formats, writing is still Afope's favourite medium. Her latest short story, "untitled dreams of my father," was recently published by spreadmag, an independent magazine out of Rotterdam, Netherlands. But like many storytellers, she is also adapting to the rise of short-video formats by experimenting with film. "A lot of my mediums I find can come together seamlessly through film” Ojo says, adding “Generative art is very random and the challenge in that for me would always be infusing meaning into that randomness".
Hew new poem, “you enjoy me" is a conversational musing over digital lover, who in Afope's words "ghosts a lot”
You enjoy watching me learn
To become a woman when I
Don white heels to the grocery store
You enjoy when I call us two strange-
Necked birds hiding from our courage
After a poem By Milorad Pejić
I enjoy eating Monday dinners with
People who don’t want you saying too
Much lest they turn their heads from you
I enjoy reading books, stories so neatly
Done they transpose you like
Music You become othered
I enjoy recording poems made
Because they had to be The requiem
for poetry is holding back I thought
Someone told me to say more
I enjoy putting [my] politics aside to
Deal with the people as the people as
The people as flesh, spirit, soul, vomit
As blood, as meat
I enjoy trying to be a plant finding
Ways back to language and to spirit
And to a poem thick with the Holy Spirit and
A sudden thickness in my thighs that morning
You enjoy all these and
You enjoy my strut, me walking away from
The camera, bubble bum pointed in your face
You enjoy a poem about the courage of
Mandela which frightens even the greatest
Intellectual or maybe I enjoy that
You enjoy conversations about “african poetry”
That is not really poetry or pretty, prose
That ought to do more metamorphose or metaphorise
I read my life in the bush of ghosts and sometimes
I disagree on the african story, or plight, our
African love, which is like any other
You enjoy stars, prophecies in rhymed quatrains
You enjoy me, I guess you
Do enjoy
Patterns repeating
Sex, three ferarris the same colour
All lined up
Call It a poem I enjoy
The grace on me, enjoy understanding
What cities offer themselves
To prose, to poetry, what
To both or neither
I enjoy mapping histories
Leaving marks on people laughing
Heartily into the cold streets of Berlin and the
London of my dreams
I enjoy things that mean
Nothing, come as you are Infuse yourself into this space
“You” meaning, can’t
You tell, what do you mean?
I enjoy things that exist without the “I”
If they are without an “I” want to meet them
If there is language banished from the “I” want To speak it
I enjoy saying mo, mo, still “I”, no lesser
I enjoy stars, Nostradamus
Grandmother, two of them
My father, transposed into
Light I saw him
You enjoy the day
I wore a tampon for the
First time at 25 Pushed it deep into my
Urethra with my forefinger
No more red stains on
My white blouse, you
Enjoy the stain of blood, same blood
I begged God to take away
No constant reminders
Is it the same one on the flag, one wonders, the
Blood of a foetus transposed into many things,
Into politics, into pro-anything
Do you enjoy seeing me suffer?
Like god, he thinks it Builds character
You enjoy me squirming underneath GO NKD lights
Wax yanking skin off skin
You enjoy the day I made you smile
Just as much as
You enjoy the day I made you cry
You enjoy
Me I guess you
enjoy
Me.
