Yellow. Wild. Cinders is an anthology containing 20 poems with common themes in hope, religion, love, political differences and a transition to a better life.
Précis
At first you were born, completely empty to the world’s vices and engulfed with beautiful happiness. After a while, the world snatched that naivety and turned you into a well of cynicism.
When this happened, who did you become?
A caricature of your colonizers? Or a person of your own? While the latter is almost possible, life with an endless feeling of the sun is in no competition with becoming a shadow of your past self.
As bright as yellow is, it holds dangerous brightness. What makes the brightness destructive? What makes its entire construction dangerous? What is the prerequisite of defining what is “too” and what is “less”? Hope, might be your answer but in the onion of hope is disappointment, anger, envy, anxiety, and the struggle for a better life.
The destructive brightness of the color yellow is the engine that births the ability to become. Who did you become when your hopes left? Who did you become once your activism was heard, and your oppressors’ ear open to your chants? That’s what the wild entails. You…being unafraid and ready to take on.
After the destruction of a city and all the rendezvous that comes with the reconstruction of one’s self, there is always a reunion. Just like cinders reunite with air and earth, so must you reconcile with what you’ve lost.
Love? Hope? Peace? Earthly connections?
Whatever it may be, you have to keep it alive at the end of the day.
The poem anthology “Yellow. Wild. Cinders” begins its activism with the first chapter “Yellow” and the political poem “Horror” which eats up themes on the Nigerian society, persecution and misogyny. It is followed by the religious rigmarole “God’s Little Children”, the feminist manifesto “Pessimistic Antagonist”, a didactic to helpless romantics “Like Chaff before the Wind”, a helpless but not hopeless poem “Desert Eyes”, and ends with social activism in “African Madness”.
The second part of the anthology “Wild” possess accountability across all spheres as it concerns this collection. With “I Blame You” as its opener, it is followed by “Gone with Winds Like Tears in Summer”, “Do You Still Sing in the Choir?”, “Twenty-Two Days”, “My Water Flows”, “Dancing in the Orange Sun” “ The Vintage Called Bush”, and the soliloquized ending “Alpha, beta?” which calls out the hate on marginalized people.
Cinders, the last chapter of the collection reunites the readers with the author’s relationship with God in “When Hope Was Lost, You Remained” and “A Psalm for David “. The chapter is continued with the vilification of the human relationship with anxiety and overthinking in “Voices of Troubled Souls” and the releasement poem “FIN” which marks a return to earthly connections. The chapter is closed with a title poem “Yellow. Wild. Cinders” and the devotional “By God’s Grace” which explores hope on a new solid foundation.