This exchange happened via email in the second quarter of 2026 between the poet and editorial assistant, Isaiah Adepoju; edited by JK Anowe and Precious Okpechi for 20.35 Africa.
20.35 Africa: Hello, Michael. Thank you for speaking with me. I loved reading your chapbook (The Smell of Absence) and your collection (All That Refuses to Die). Their thematic preoccupations – the absence of the father, and the subject of nationhood – speak to me more closely. Before I lost my father, I wrote about his death for years, as some twisted prophecy. Now, without his presence, I seem poised to experience the crudity of the Nigerian nation-statehood.
I read your works twice, first as a younger poet needing education, then as a fellow citizen of the same State. You engage the works and the ideas of your contemporaries and near-contemporaries almost in the same light, so that it seems that we read ourselves to re-member what we have lost, acknowledge what we have now, and the many unacknowledged suffering in this State.
Could you please talk about why it seems the young poet needs to be educated by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries? And why is nationhood and feeling an important aspect of this education?
Michael Imossan: Hello Isaiah, thank you for choosing to do this interview with me and sorry for your loss. When I wrote The Smell of Absence, I was questioning the kinds of loss and how they affect an individual – to lose someone you’ve never had, to lose someone you’ve had to death or to lose them to life. These were the kinds of loss I was negotiating with while writing The Smell of Absence. And I find that that negotiation of loss still exists – though in a different way – within my collection All that Refuses to Die. And to answer your question about poetic citizenship, lineage and ancestry as I’d summarize it, I like to think of the affair of poetry, of writing as a living lineage where we are bound by language just as one is bound by blood to their family.
This would mean that, as poets in general, and as African poets, the same poetic reflexes that existed within our “bloodline” still exists/flows within us and to understand such reflexes, we must trace our poetic genealogy, we must look around us, we must study the works of contemporaries as this wouldn’t just be an act of service to the community but a ritual of belonging, of continuity or as you put, of “re-membering.”
I think when Constantine Cavafy wrote the lines “To stand in this step/you must be in your own right/a member of the city of ideas/and it’s a hard, unusual thing/ to be enrolled as a citizen of that city/its councils are full of legislators/no charlatan can fool” in his poem “The First Step” which was a poem for a young poet, he understood the concept of citizenship, of membership – the pertinent part of it being the interaction with past and present citizens of that city of ideas.
About your question on why nationhood and feeling are an important aspect of the education of the young poet, I like to call on Robert Frost here who believes, just like I do, that “to be a poet is a condition, not a profession”. And in conditions, we are prevailed by the emotional weight of such conditions. This means that the young poet does not have a choice in feeling rather he is prevailed by it, moved by his innate disposition towards emotions, and because the poet is a member of the society, of the nation, their writings – whether personal or public – are necessitated by the fact of his membership hence the politics of their writing, hence the role of nationhood in their education.
20.35 Africa: Decades and decades of Nigerian poetry have examined nationhood, chiefly because, through it, they defined their identities. All That Refuses to Die is a dismantling of that national identity.
In the absence of the nation as a measure of constructing one’s identity, how else should one do so? One can hardly say one is a citizen of the world as the Afropolitans and the Afropeanists do, especially now when the West is radically conserving its autochthony, the most pointed example of which is Trump.
Michael Imossan: Thank you for your question, Isaiah. This is a wonderful question. I appreciate your close reading of All that refuses to Die and your interrogation of the book within the framework of national identity, which is exactly what the book is preoccupied by. I am reminded here of Udenta in Art, Society and Identity who recognizes that “the imperative of black re-humanization as a redemptive project, in matter and mind, is an inevitable outcome of an organic process: affirmation of being, restoration of heritage, search for Identity and recognition of a collective humanity and ethos” which means that “Black consciousness is essentially a reaction against race, egoism and institutionalized inequality, and reaction against centuries of ossified consciousness which has created a social psychology of falsehood.”
In the face of the kind of complexities and falsehood that preoccupies what we – as African writers, and as Nigerian writers – would recognize as national Identity, I wasn’t seeking to, as you put, dismantle National Identity but to question it, and in questioning it, redeem it. You’d find that in the poem “Three Nigerias”, I question the place of ethnicity in the ongoing discourse called Nigeria, which was my way of pointing to the injustices meted on other ethnicities, while also pointing to the role of colonialism in shaping such Injustices. This identity theft through colonization is prominent in the poem “A Lineage of Water: IV” where I mention how colonialism only leaves the colonised with a fickle reconstruction of what they were and the faint imagination of what they could have been.
V.Y Mudimbe in his book “The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge” iterates this by stating that “the colonists (those settling a region), as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs” thus one can hardly argue that there was ever an identity that wasn’t constructed for us. Still, I recognize the place of Nigerian poetry in shaping whatever we can grasp onto as national Identity and in the absence of a nation – as is the case of Nigeria, which is clearly painted in All that Refuses to Die – one can always go back to Udenta by which I mean, one can always be in the constant search for an identity absent of the nation, which is an Identity in itself. That one can always recognize oneself as an autonomous unit, an “other” whose duty is to always question, to react against anti-syncretic institutional tools like race, religion, ethnicity and many others.
Though, I am not the savior or a savior in any sense, in the way Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17), I am saying, I did not come to dismantle national identity but to redeem it.
20.35 Africa: I am thinking of what Mary-Alice Daniel said in her interview with us about her use of the structural narrative in her book. “As you compose a series of poems,” she writes, “the first line of the first poem performs a double duty. It stands as both the first line of the first poem as well as the first line of the sequence as a whole.” Your chapbook and collection seem to do this. They start by affirming the self. They end on a tragic anti-strophe. Put together they construct a narrative of fatality for the self and the nation. How did you build this double-duty narrative into the architecture of the chapbook/collection?
Michael Imossan: Thank you for your question, Isaiah. Any discourse on the self often reminds me – because the self in poetry is represented by the “I”, whether metaphysical or not – of Nietzsche’s quote “every name in history is I.” However, there is a distinction between the “I” in the The Smell of Absence and the “I” in All that Refuses to Die. The “I” in The Smell of Absence is not concerned with the nation, rather he is just a man tracing the origin of his ache until he arrives at boyhood, that is, if you are reading the chapbook from the end to the beginning, which I would advise.
It is easier to track the “I” in The Smell of Absence because it is just a boy or a man – depending on where you choose to begin reading – visiting and revisiting his several selves. So here, the narrative focus is on reinventing the boy, the “I” by probing his several selves, his past, his present and what he prognosticates for his future, and in doing so, arrive at what you call “architecture”.
Like Mary-Alice Daniel, I also believe that the first line of the first poem performs a double duty, it is for this reason that I chose to begin the first poem in The Smell of Absence with an “I” and the word “story” because in doing so, I sought to establish the idea that the collection is a poetic narratology where the boy and the man are the central character upon which all fatalities, sadnesses, sorrows and beauty belong to.
Unlike The Smell of Absence, The “I” in All that Refuses to Die is more like Nietzsche’s “I.” It is an embodiment of all the names swallowed by history. I think that the duty of the poet to history is to reimagine it and by reimagining it, reconstruct it in a way that beckons emotions so much so that the fatality becomes his and that of his readers. I think the way architecture is achieved here is through the narrativization or channeling of the many experiences of the names in history through the self, through Nietzsche’s “I.”
I like to think of the affair of poetry, of writing, as a living lineage where we are bound by language just as one is bound by blood to their family.
– Michael Imossan
20.35 Africa: As a title, The Smell of Absence signals the major paradox the chapbook concerns itself with. In “How I Choose to Begin the Story,” the mother says, “you look like your father / …do not be like him.” Isn’t it logical that the persona becomes the father, since a child knows nothing except what they inherit from their parent, including their rebellion? Can there be a middle ground at all, where the self is differentiated? Where both the presence and the absence of the father absolutely diminish without a trace/smell?
Michael Imossan: This is a wonderful question, Isaiah, especially because of how close to home it is. As I had formerly mentioned, The Smell of Absence is an attempt by a man to trace the origin of his ache – visiting and revisiting his several selves, performing autopsy on his experiences with the one goal of deciphering the etymology of his sadness. This makes the chapbook some sort of psychoanalytic endeavor, an attempt to unravel life within the context of the speaker. And I think life, like most things, is paradoxical. We live so that we may die, thus life is only made true by the presence of death, just as the presence of the speaker in the collection is made true by his father’s absence. To answer your question, I cannot tell you exactly whether or not the speaker has been able to differentiate himself from his father since the collection is an active paradoxical negotiation but if we go to the last poem in the collection (“I Fear I May Hurt Everything I Touch”) where it says “I do not plan on running into the dark, on wearing disappearance as a skin but I am scared my father’s legs belong to me, his hands are my hands,” we may find that the question raised in the first poem of the collection has been given some sort of answer – the speaker always in constant negotiation of his affiliation to his father, always living in constant fear of not morphing into his father. The difference or middle ground here, then, may be that of knowing, the acknowledgement of the possibility of becoming the father and the constant, conscious effort to prevent that from happening.
20.35 Africa: My last question prefigures this, because I think your chapbook and your collection share the same outlook. For instance, the chapbook builds this dialectical relationship between the father and the son, where the father is the son’s essential part, and the son is constituted as negation. For the collection, this dialectical relationship also holds between the individual and the nation. Mutual dependency of opposites is in the nature of dialectics, and their eventual unity is anticipated. The reach towards the synthesis of the individual and the nation is what I think your collection is about. The last poem in “All that Refuses to Die” creates this possibility.
Is this resolution possible in fact? Is pacifism probable – in the sense James Baldwin once spoke of America – that he criticizes it because he loves it?
Michael Imossan: True, Isaiah, my chapbook and my full-length collection are premised on the dialectics of mutual exclusivity and mutual inclusivity, where the “I” in the chapbook seeks to have his father but not be like his father and the “I” in the collection wants to belong to the nation but not of the nation. This constitutes some sort of parallelism; the self vs the self; the self vs the father; the self vs the nation. Regardless, there is a negotiation towards syncretism, one borne out of love despite the hostile antithesis. I think the duty of the poet is not only to sing about what they witness but to predict, to prognosticate. The correctness of their prediction is not, in fact, necessary. Instead, what is necessary is that they dare to predict, to dream because one cannot achieve what one has not yet dreamt of achieving and that is what the poem “All that Refuses to Die is Dead” does – it provides a place where the readers can dream, and in dreaming, construct the possibility of achieving pacifism.
20.35 Africa: Your work has its own share of sentimentality. The ordinary diminishes under the weight of the grand. Survival is hawked on a tray. Stones of Uganda are scattered across hectares of suffering. A child wants to sit inside the mouth of knowledge. The collective eroding the specific. The persona forces himself into situations where he is mere spectator. He becomes epical. “When the city slept…I, wanderer, awoke.” “Michael, [you will find inside your name] a shrine of men/chained to a ship like strings of black beads.” “Everywhere I stand.” I am curious here about the choice of your epical persona, especially when knowledge of any subject always seems elusive.
Michael Imossan: This is a brilliant observation you have made here, Isaiah. I will refer back to Nietschze’s quote, “Every name in history is I”. I think the flaw in your observation is that you view every “I” in the collection as a single, individual person, an incarnation of the speaker/author, a static, unchanging persona, which isn’t a fault of yours. The modern era has made it that all “I” in poems are viewed as the author or that “single, unchanging persona” (Stanley Plumly argues for this).
But to borrow from Hoagland, there’s no point attempting to identify whether or not the “I” in a poem is the author “because to read a poem as a work of art, we need to enter the poem as a created, imagined world not as factual report or a memoir.” So here, I am only a vessel through which all the “names in history” speak. And they are not concerned with knowledge/specificities of Nigeria nor are they interested in it. What they are interested in is the ability to communicate their experiences and feelings for which they do.
Also, I do not think a poem or a collection is a place to exude the arrogance of knowledge, we can leave that to the critics. As Lucille Clifton said, “we come to poetry not out of what we know but out of what we wonder,” so what you may term a “failure of the epical persona” is actually what brings us to poetry.
20.35 Africa: “Collector of Hurt” is my favorite poem because of what it does with the epical “I.” I love how the persona’s mother describes the relationship of the grandfather to the sea: “How her father, now dead, rode every wave like a horse.” This duo, the poem and the metaphor, strike me as moments of unprecedented insight into personal and collective history. Are there poems or expressions in either your collection or your chapbook that strike you as such?
Michael Imossan: Thank you for referencing the poem “Collector of Hurt”. I find that the “I” in the poem “Collector of Hurt” embodies well the idea of several selves, several names echoing their experiences, screaming into the present and into the future, hoping we can listen. There are expressions in the collection that I consider unprecedented as they offer, not just truth, but interiority. For instance, the lines “The colonized can never truly know what they’ve lost/And like a child whose legs were cut off before it could/learn to walk, we are forced to sit with the memory of what we had and the imagination of what we would have done if we were allowed it” (“A Lineage of Water: IV”) reveals the present condition of Africa which is borne out of a collective history that we share. Looking back at the intimacy between the speaker and the subject, I am forced to think that such intimacy could not have been achieved without the proximity between the personal and the public. The speaker arrives at that rote moment of historical truth, only because he is sharing a moment with his mother, one that is both enlightening and personal.
20.35 Africa: Lastly, who are the writers or what are the books or essays you think any poet, serious with their craft, could turn to for sound doctrine?
Michael Imossan: For essays, I would ask every poet to read Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town, Elisa Gilbert’s The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry, Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness, An Apologia, James Logenbach’s Lines and Syntax. For poets, I would recommend Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, TS. Eliot, Edgar Alan Poe, Sylva Plath, Emily Dickinson, Romeo Oriogun, Samuel Adeyemi, Jakky Bankong-Obi, Divine Inyang Titus, Marvellous Mmesomachi, Ridwan Fasasi, Roseline Mbodichidinma, Pamilerin Jacobs, Kaveh Akbar, Carl Phillips, Li-young Lee, Ocean Vuong and many more.
Thank you for this wonderful interview, Isaiah.
Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet and editor. He is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, 2024. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection All that Refuses to Die (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) and the Chapbook The Smell of Absence (Akashic Books, 2025). He is a 2x recipient of the PEN International Writers’ Grant.
