Chapbook Chats: Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto Interviews If the Golden Hour Won’t Come for Us? Author Adams Adeosun
To celebrate KUMI New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is talking to poets whose chapbooks are included in the KUMI edition of the wonderful ongoing series. Enjoy this conversation between Chinua and poet Adams Adeosun.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Congratulations on the release of your chapbook, If the Golden Hour Won’t Come for Us, featured in the 2024 New-Generation African Poets series! Could you share your experience of seeing your work published in this acclaimed series, and what it means to you personally and professionally to be part of this important moment for African poetry?
Adams Adeosun: Thank you, Ezenwa-Ohaeto! The New-Generation African Poets series has, for the last decade, fostered a family of exciting poets, at least poets who I find exciting. There are chapbooks in the publication’s extensive catalogue that I re-read with the frequency of a ritual, especially in the foggy moment before I fall asleep at night, when things take on new meanings. I’m honored to make an appearance at the party, and in the company of people whose work I have long admired or have, since my copy of the box set arrived, come to admire.
C. E-O: How did you arrive at the title for your chapbook?
A.A: The more common understanding of the golden hour is as a visual concept, the bright time of day when images are at their most beautiful; but there is also the medical sense which is the critical period after an injury when recovery is most possible. So, the title, which comes from a question in the last couplet of one of the more vulnerable poems, is really asking: Will we be kind to each other even if we have missed our chance at pristine beauty, even if our wounds have festered? And that’s the ethos of the project.
C.E-O: Can you talk about the organisation and how you chose the poems included in If the Golden Hour Won’t Come for Us?
A.A: I suppose the two things that give the chapbook its shape are the figure of the mother and displacement. In the first few poems, the speaker is close to the mother-figure, both in space and emotionally, but by the middle pages, the physical distance widens and, naturally, so does the emotional distance, such that by the end the rift between them is so great that they are unable to sympathize with or understand each other.
C.E-O: The chapbook opens with a poem of declaration, showing a profound desire for cleanness, not just in a physical sense but more significantly in a spiritual or existential sense. The mention of baptism highlights this as a transformative act that goes beyond mere physical cleansing. What do cleanness and baptism mean to you and the poem?
A.A: Indeed, the form of the opening poem is liturgical, and while this religious chant is quite literally what it is, an earnest prayer for transcendence, I think if one takes the attitude of irreverence which the speaker takes or, perhaps, if one considers the physical and sensuous aspects of it—the fluids, the sounds, the choreography of its motions—it begins to appear erotic. What I’m trying to say is that I’m drawn to religious symbolism as a vehicle for more secular acts. After all, there isn’t much difference between religious language and the language of the erotic: desire, worship, love, devotion, surrender, and so on.
C.E-O: The natural elements, such as the sea, eagle, robin, sky, raven, moon, sun, stars, etc are depicted as conduits of association, revelation, and transformation throughout the collection. How and why do you find natural elements particularly inspiring or symbolic in your poetry?
A.A: I wanted the sea to remain the sea, the birds to be birds, the flowers only flowers, and the moon and sun and stars to be just what they are. But, apparently, the tragedy of my eyes is that nothing is ever as it seems, so I’m doomed to metaphors.
C.E-O: The concept of life being purchased and the presence of a puppeteer suggest a lack of control over one’s destiny in “An Elegy for the Tenderhearted II.” How do you view the balance between personal agency and external forces in shaping our lives?
A.A: I’m fascinated by the Yoruba philosophy of soft-determinism, which holds you responsible for your own destiny since you choose your personality and destinations and vices with your hands before you are born. You can, however, through certain acts of sacrifice and ways of being on earth, revise your chosen destiny as often as you want. I think this makes you god unto yourself, and I see no reason why this shouldn’t be, but the cost is prohibitive and manifests across the chapbook as distance and alienation from the people who love the speaker and cannot let go of the fixed image they have of him. “An Elegy for the Tenderhearted II” is the oldest poem in the chapbook and, perhaps, the inception of my curiosity about self-reinvention as a guard against all sorts of death.
C.E-O: “A Door into Absence” probes into themes of departure, memory, and the complex emotions tied to leaving home. What personal experiences or observations inspired you to write this poem?
A.A: I lived briefly with my mother during the lockdown, and we played Ludo every evening, and she was very good at rolling die but I had a bad hand, and she made these jokes that weren’t really jokes, and she had this habit of phoning my brothers to tell them that she had won yet again, and she’d laugh at me until I began to laugh at myself, too. Now that we live in different countries, I think about those evenings often, all of them stacked on top of each other, a singular image in my mind. This composite scene is what “A Door into Absence” tries to set to page.
C.E-O: How do you balance the feelings of nostalgia and the anticipation of future journeys in your work?
A.A: What terrifies me about poetry is that it leaves no room for hiding. My nostalgia is nostalgic and my longing longs for what it longs for. It happens sometimes that I try to write an aspirational poem, and it comes out wonky. The only balance I lay claim to, really, is that of form.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration and the complexities of existence. His full- length poetry collection, The Naming, will be out on December 1, 2025 with African Poetry Book Fund via Nebraska press. The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to familial ancestry and lineage.