Alain Jules: Hey Confidence. How are you?

Confidence Jideofor: Hey!

Alain Jules: As soon as Portia let me know you were the one I’d be in conversation with, I quickly searched your name on Google. I found many beautiful poems by you. Most of them touch on colour and identity, on Black and White and grey. With your work touching on the politics of identity, I’d like to ask, what does being an African poet mean to you?

Confidence Jideofor: I did the same for you. You’re the full package. Imagine slaying poetry and fiction at the same time.

I think being an African poet is an identity you think you have until you leave the continent. For so long, I have claimed Africa as a mother, claiming all she had to give. I have a sharp understanding, for instance, that everything I create should come with a function, and I consider this a very African view.  I am an African poet too because being from this place and this continent, I have been blessed to learn a lot from poets like Christopher Okigbo, J.P Clark, Gabriel Okara, Tanure Ojaide, and many others like them who have gone before.

Alain: I too like Christopher Okigbo. There’s this little excerpt of his poem on his Wikipedia page. When I was starting to write, I used to read it over and over, always thinking that this was the kind of poetry I wanted to make myself.

Confidence: These poets have had a significant impact on my craft. I understand hem better than I do, say, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, and other White writers I’ve read and studied at different points in my life. Okigbo is the best for me. Too bad he led a short life. Coming back to your question, I’d say that the most striking thing about being an African poet is language and how it shapes my stylistic choices when I write. 

Alain: I like how you use language. You are very conscious about its construction. You’re an architect. Take this excerpt from your poem, “A Definition of Life in Seven Parts” where you write :

A woman shuu love love
without inhibits (nominal) 
she and other women,
sisterhood is a call to arms.

I see a construction genius at work, and I think of two things: vernacular English and deconstructivism. I like the architectural style of deconstructivism because I see in it something applicable to language, something that can allow me to make language my own, disrupt style and out of total madness create something beautiful, like psychedelic lines and colours, which is my main goal with language. I guess what I’d like to ask you is, do you see your Nigerian dialect influencing your style in any way? Pidgin English is peculiar to Nigeria, “broken” English, if I may. Does this brokenness influence, say, that repetition of the word “Love” from “A Definition of Life in Seven Parts,” or is it something totally different?

Confidence: Thank you for your kind words, Alain. As a poet, language is the cornerstone of my craft.  Before I started my MFA, language was the only thing I paid attention to whenever I wrote. But now, I’d say I’m learning to be more intentional about everything I incorporate into my writing. By the way, I love, love pidgin. I believe I speak it more than I do any other language. I think 80% of the time in either pidgin or Igbo and only then do I translate these thoughts into English. Pidgin or Igbo works for me because it captures the intensity of my thought more aptly than any other language could. In a line like “a woman shuu love love,” I foreground the emphasis that repetition in Igbo/pidgin is designed for. For example, if I say “osiso osiso” in Igbo, in pidgin it becomes “fast fast.” But this urgency gets lost in translation if one writes that in English. The English word “swift” or “quick” just doesn’t make the cut.  So, pidgin most certainly influences my writing. Of course, I read slower in Igbo, and I still feel very inadequate in translating my thoughts. But I’m not sure I think in English, and sometimes the language feels poorly suited for expressing exactly what I feel. It’s more like I’m in a handicapped situation. Not too long ago, I told myself that maybe the key to solving this was to get more words into my vocabulary, but so far, it’s not working.

While we are on this topic, would you agree that the whole idea of deconstructing English in speech and writing is an innovation that has grown out of the heritage of colonialism? By this I mean our tendency to bend and distort English until it feels weighty and adequate enough to carry our realities.

Alain: Yeah. I think so, and my early school life best illustrates this postcolonial influence on the language. Rwanda was a Belgian colony until 1962. So, our education system was Francophone until 2008 when the government made English the official language of instruction. Prior to this, I’d attended École Française, which became Regina Pacis Primary School in 2008. When it was École Française, we only spoke French from when the bus picked us up from home to when it dropped us back home. And then, suddenly, we shifted to English. I think that most people who experienced that shift write an English that is dominated by Francophone words, like “route” in place of “way,” which portrays a long history of colonization and decolonization. Even our English accent is a mix of American, British, and French accents. 

Anyway, I hope you keep using the literal translation of pidgin in your work; it’s so authentic and beautiful.

Confidence:  Thank you, Alain. But it is a dying dream – writing in pidgin. Unless a writer is courageous enough to write in the language they find authentic regardless of the opinion of others, of course. When I write, I’m continuously trying to displace language until it fits together with the weight it is intended to carry. For instance, I write mostly about the familiar things around me. I love high life and Afrobeats, and even as a scholar, I try to bring in the ordinariness of things. But ordinariness for me doesn’t mean low class or low art. Everything is poetry, and I believe the best lines are found in ordinary places, like bus stations, markets, and everywhere else people are not caught pretending. We fault simplicity a lot. And that’s ironic. I believe written language conforms more to this high art rule. I’m Nigerian, there’s a variety of English called Nigerian English, which is entirely different from pidgin. People speak it. I do too. But it’d be unthinkable to write it down. It feels like the incorrect version of English; the variety of English that someone struggling with the language would speak. It’s funny how we prioritize rules/grammar over genuine communication.

Alain: I love it when I encounter pidgin. Even though I can’t understand it, I’m always interested in the idea of using street language, vernacular English, in all my writing, intentionally as a sort of rebellion. Virgil Abloh (may he rest in peace) made streetwear part of high fashion. I too want to make street language, vernacular language, part of high art. Cussing is the freedom of any language. It is the state of mind in which language is off balance, free from control and rules. So, I want to proudly incorporate this into my work. I want to use “you pretty” in place of “you’re pretty” because it remains correct. The verb should be replaced by a comma, but the comma too can be replaced by emptiness as it is done in our everyday colloquial language. What line do we draw between spoken language and written language? Is spoken language a simplified version of the “high art” rule-conforming literature? Why do we simplify it when we speak? Who simplifies it? I read Kiese Raymon’s memoir Big. In the memoir, he recounts his mother teaching him to not use contractions when speaking to white people. His mother did not want him to be seen as ghetto. To her, and probably to most of those within her social context, contractions were only used by the lower class. Meaning it was not part of “high art.” Why can’t we make it high art now that we have the power to?

Confidence: This turn in our conversation towards language, its postcolonial bearings, and how we use it in writing takes me back to your earlier question on what it means to be African. Let me proffer yet another response. Being African, essentially, means that I was born in Africa, grew up there and that I will casually reveal all these through the thick accent I have to show as proof. This accent and language pour forth in my writing. What about you? What does being African mean to you, Alain?

Alain: Apart from Africa being the place that homes my childhood memories, apart from the land and its people being my first-love kind of place, Africa doesn’t have too much of an influence on me. Being a Gen-Z, I belong to the generation of kids raised by the rise of the television age, at least in East Africa. Being raised by the television means in my teenage years I watched only Hollywood movies and listened to American music.  Rihanna was a favourite. Also, having owned a phone earlier than was usual for many, I read Wikipedia so much it is another thing that had a big influence on my identity. So, Africa to me means the motherland, just that, since I belong to the lost club, kids who don’t identify strongly with any place at all.

Confidence: Makes sense. I feel this way somehow. Especially when my African American friends start with the whole you are African, you have an identity blah blah blah. I wish I could find the words to explain to them that identity is much more complicated than they make it. But I believe being African reflects in our day-to-day activities, how we see the world, how we interpret events, our approach to friendship and people in general, to food, to music. I know, for instance, how a typical African would feel about wasting food. I believe all these things come together in their own little ways to form who we are.

Alain: I think a fascinatingly positive thing about Africa is how we still have some privacy in our interactions. Of course, there is the frequent nosy neighbour, aunt, and cousin. By privacy, I mean privacy of language.  I can’t remember the exact occasion where she said it – or was it in her novel Flights – but Olga Tokarczuk once said that people who speak English are naked, in the sense that they are understood by almost anyone. This nakedness contrasts with Africa, and I like to think of this as the continent’s wealth. We have languages that are still our own and nobody else’s. We have a traditional culture that is still very much our own. We have a musical sound that is still traditional, and I think that is what Africa means to me. It means I belong to a uniqueness. On the negative side, Africa means a place where the older generation remains trapped in archaic mindsets and beliefs. Most of them allow no room for globalized youths to exercise their newfound forms of freedom, leading to a constant wish for flight by youngsters in search of more freedom. 

Talking about leaving, how are you liking your MFA program? How is it going for you?

Confidence: I love the program. I love that I am being exposed to amazing writers. But this semester has been overwhelming. I’m currently swamped with engagements.  Where’s your school located? How is the town?

Alain: It’s Texas State, in San Marcos. It’s a small town. Most of the inhabitants are students. The infrastructure is quite dominated by university buildings. And we have some bars on the fun side of the town. What about you? Where is your school, and is your place any different?

Confidence: My school is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a small university town with no sidewalks. That’s an inside joke.

Alain: Hahahaha.

Confidence: What are your thoughts about craft books, did you read any as a writer?

I ask this because in your formative years as an African writer, people often do not recommend craft books. They only advise you to read and read more. Most African writers would tell you that writing cannot be taught. Kindly share your thoughts.

Alain: Actually, I don’t like rules, and that’s what craft books are about. It’s true, I agree that no one can teach you to write. I think that it’s something that one cultivates slowly through the reading of good books. I think that if one reads an artsy book, they will likely write artsy sentences. And vice versa. In my experience, I’m a lazy person. I know it. I own only one book, Elissa Washuta’s My Body Is A Book Of Rules. I’ve read a bunch of books that I stopped reading midway and returned. But when I read MBIABOR I thought here’s my holy book of a religion of breaking rules. So, I cherish it. It sits on a corner table surrounded by a bracelet I got from my crush and some weed and a lighter. It’s sacred that way.

I can’t lie, when I started to write, I read a variety of stuff. I was searching for my taste, for what I like reading, and consequently what I’d like to produce as a writer. At college, in a study hall, I discovered Romeo Oriogun’s chapbook Burnt Men and knew this was it. I had discovered the style I liked. To be honest, I’m not a poet. I’m just a dreamer trying to make beauty out of words. So, another confession, I hate a bunch of books that are getting published these days. We were talking about Donika’s Bestiary. I don’t like that style of poetry, yet it’s what the world labels as high art poetry. I couldn’t understand a single poem. Yes, they say poetry asks the reader to take time and think through an image and stuff, but duh I’m looking for beauty, not for a challenge. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m extremely selective in my reading.

What are your thoughts on that, on craft books, on the complexity of poetry, and so on?

Confidence: Well, I started off just like you. I was (still am) a dreamer with many weird thoughts. I just wrote what was on my mind. But as I started writing more and more, I got worried about not writing the right way. I believed there was a right way to write, and that all those soul-searching autobiographical poems I wrote weren’t giving. I struggled a lot with finding my voice. It was so bad that when I read a new poet, I immediately started to sound like them. In my confusion, I reached out to a writer, someone highly respected and recognized within the world I existed in then. I needed help, anything. I asked for a guide, craft book recommendations, and just anything that could help me. This person wasn’t of much help. The only firm thing he told me was that writing cannot be taught. I left feeling more miserable than I was at the beginning.

I don’t like rules myself but having a craft book would have helped someone like me. Maybe I shouldn’t have said craft book, seeing that it sounds like a rule book. But if there was a book that reassured me that I didn’t need to write in a white voice, or even assured me to lean towards the learning process as an individual writer, I’d have been thankful. I believe the emphasis on craft books here should be on their being tailored to fit one’s context. I have never seen a craft book written by an African. I would really appreciate that even if I know I’d probably disagree with 75% of whatever the book says unless the said book was written by Okigbo.

Alain: The idea of there being “a right way” brings me to the fact that we are both in MFA programs. There’s something I hate about poets. There’s this claim poets make that they break rules, forgetting that line breaks themselves are rules. In workshops, we tell each other stuff like “oh you can break this line here,” as in we are constantly giving each other rules. “Oh, you can replace that word with this one.” It’s so weird how everything we see is an edited version of the truth. I just think that true poetry is like dreams. You see how dreams are always fragmented and confusing and unedited and nonsense but make sense when one is dreaming – I think that poetry should be like that.

I understand your early need for a craft book, but for me, I feel like even a craft book that is telling me how to break rules is creating that rule at the same time, the rule that I must break rules. As in, a craft book that is telling me that I don’t have to write in a white voice is already giving me a box. I mean, even when I say dreams are what poetry should look like is me creating a rule. Maybe even our constant choice to keep our bodies alive is a choice to fit in a box, say the universe. That’s why freedom is so difficult to define. Maybe it shouldn’t be defined. Maybe we shouldn’t define anything at all. Maybe if some kid writes one word and says it’s poetry no one should tell them it’s not. Do forgive my madness.

Confidence: I feel like you’re against conventionality and a general sense of acceptance, especially within poetry. The beautiful thing is that poetry exists by how it speaks to you. Also, using the definition of freedom as an example is highly insightful. But would it still mean anything if a thing is devoid of context? I wholeheartedly agree that wanting to break rules is an artistic choice and a sign of growth. You must grow into your being as a writer to feel so confident in refusing labels. I also hate labels too, but sometimes labels become important.

Alain: How? I’m curious.

Confidence: For representation.

Alain: Ok, I get that. You ask if a thing being devoid of context means it’s devoid of meaning. Like is someone with no name (by the way I like the artist Noname), no nationality, no job, a nothing? Do they become nothing? Isn’t nothingness itself something, a statement?

Confidence: Even no name itself is a name. Even nothing is named. So, a person with no name, no title, no nationality, isn’t nothing. That makes sense.

Alain, I was reading your piece published in Lolwe “Dear Moon, I am the colour of Water.” It’s beautiful. And it made me laugh because it’s mostly African writers who live to create pouches that carry myths within word arrangements. Like in this line:

Yet, some of us left the seminary with no faith left in the bucket they took to the river. Maybe, we found the water muddy.

That was awesome.  And the line “belted him,” really got me laughing like a goat.

Alain: Thank you!

Confidence: So, tell me, while writing pieces like “Dear Moon, I am the colour of Water,” what do you prioritize?

Alain: I don’t write prose that often. I don’t like how it requires a lot of clarity. I told you I’m interested in deconstructivism, and as soon as one applies this to prose, the work becomes poetry. I love me some poetry. But recently it has started to feel like a prison cell, like a comfort zone I have to break out of. If I were the 20-year-old version of me, having the kind of money I have now, I’d have already bought myself a camera. Back then I did not care about anything, only art. Now that I’m out of my parents’ house and have responsibilities to take care of, I find myself hesitating to put my money into stuff like photography. That’s something I hate about poetry and writing in general. That it gives birth to so little financial gain, at least for me. It has made me quite lazy when you compare the energy I have for writing to the energy I have for other ventures that bring in money.

Confidence: Ha-ha! I absolutely see your point.  But don’t you think you need to feel excited to write? That perhaps this is why you might have stopped writing prose because it is becoming laborious for you? I used to write prose a long time ago. But I stopped.

Alain: True. I guess I need to find the excitement of writing again. Why did you stop, if I may ask?

Confidence: Sincerely, I’m not sure I know the answer to this. I just stopped writing. It was like leaving and never going back. No regrets there.

Alain: Anyways, I’ll still be a huge fan of your poetry.

Confidence: Thank you.

Alain: I was reading a poem called “Omission” by Rabha Ashry. In it she writes,

if i wrote a poem
about your yellow hair
you would know

in my dreams you understand

here’s a messy recital
of everything i haven’t learned to say

For me, these lines say a lot about what drives different people to writing, to poetry. Poetry gives us a voice to channel sentiments and hopes we cannot channel through any other medium. I’m curious, does poetry play any role close to this for you? Also, what are your thoughts on poetry being used as a weapon in, say, social or political terms?

Confidence: For so many years, I didn’t exactly know why I wrote. Even now, when asked this ultimate question, I’m always quick to change the topic. But I think it’s getting clearer for me now. I was a child with a terrible stutter, a child who couldn’t talk without stamping her foot and hitting her thigh. Speech was a battle, and it was a mere struggle getting the words out. People always told me to shut up. I hated that. I did though, after concluding that humans were stupid and didn’t deserve to hear what I had to say.

Alain: Fuck “other people.”

Confidence: Yes, fuck them. Then I started writing. I started writing prose. Then I got economical with words. I started thinking of codes when I write. At the core of my craft is that unspoken urge to give voice. I write because it is the worst I can do. When harassed on the streets by a policeman or a soldier, I’m utterly powerless. But I go home and write about it. I’m not sure if that makes me powerful or not, but I have done the worst I can do. Generally, most of my poems focus on real life concerns involving humans. I write about women a lot. Even the poem you talked about the last time – the one about black and grey – is about how we box people within gender expectations, within roles, within sexuality. I assume creating art with a function is part of my need to give voice to the things around me.

Alain:  I like that. I like that poem, however short it is, curating the beauty of non-binaries that lie in the grey area between black and white binaries.

Confidence: What are you working on right now?

Alain: Currently, I’m trying to write poems centering on the theme of politics, from government to religious, with a vision to documenting in a full collection all the different political identities I was exposed to growing up, how they shaped the person I am now, through what I fear and what I’m rebellious to.

Confidence: This sounds great. I love the idea.

Alain: Thanks, thanks! What are you currently working on?

Confidence: I’m working on a poem titled “Beautiful rain.” It was inspired by a song of the same title by The Cavemen.  I’ll share it with you:

assuming overcast sky
announces
falling rain
pray, pray for
washing rain
rain in
beauty
flooding out
the ugly things
captured rain
beautiful rain
is rain even
captured?
is there beauty
here
recollecting
raining gently
corrugated zincs
absorbing this
self-sustained—
momentous sound of
daylight,
or nighttime,
or hours after school
there is tucked calm
be sheltered
while it rains
wet cats and dogs
are outside
sloshing in mud
unlike humans
dying of cold
while craving bodies
like what is scorned
like coverings
of floating bags
& or what drenches
while we search
or find home
for it rains heavens
while on earth
surrendering
pursuits, houses, forms
and final destinations
settled rain
down on me
wash me
my beauty
with beautiful
pellets falling
wash taut skins
muscled drums
passive glasses
and beautiful trails
on glasses
wash while you come and
go, a gift and a thief
to want so much

Alain: I like it a lot.  “Is rain even captured–is there beauty here.” Oh my God. 

Confidence: Thank you. I’m trying my hands at new things. I have a playlist I’m experimenting with. I’m trying to write response poems to the songs. Like reactionary poems. I compiled a small collection of poems, quite similar to this. I’m still adding and removing songs. I have a bit of interest in high life. Do you think it’s possible to write poems that embody high-life vibes?

Alain: Personally, I think it possible. If high-life is fusion of jazz and blues and guitar and stuff, I think trying to attach the culture and subcultures behind high-life and its sounds can make poetry that is not only culturally important but also musical, lyrical.

Confidence: I have always been a language poet. I don’t know how to infuse musicality into my poems. At least how to do it intentionally.

Alain: I think it’s quite the same with me, but when I approach a stanza not as a poem but as lyrics, having a melody I’m trying to fit lines in, it usually comes out musical. I mean rhyming and having almost the same meter.

Confidence: I’ll try this. Thanks so much.

I like the architectural style of deconstructivism because I see in it something applicable to language, something that can allow me to make language my own, disrupt style and out of total madness create something beautiful, like psychedelic lines and colors, which is my main goal with language

– Alain Hirwa Jules

Alain: Back to your poem, the phrase “is there beauty here” means so much to me. The questions ask me to make it my own, pose the questions to my body, to my house, to everyone I meet on the sidewalk, to the country I reside in. It’s so enormous.

Confidence: You can write a response to the poem. The song I’m writing a response to is “Beautiful Rain” by The Cavemen.

Alain: Ok. Here goes:

Rain (after Beautiful Rain by Confidence Jideofor)

a small boy is rushing out of a deluge—the wind is violent to a woman’s skirt—I who watches this through the window of my apartment—I pray the rain to return where it comes from—does the rain come from the sky—or it comes from the ocean—violence is an uninvited visitor in this party of wounds—and I swear I’d shout all birds outta my throat if I could—the problem remains to see whether the rain will ever hear my birdsongs—

Confidence: Damn! This is good! You’re terrific.

Alain: Stop that! I like the song, the African sound. The video is a compilation of beautiful visuals too.

Confidence: Yes, it is!  Tell me, Alain, what is your writing process like?

Alain: Most times, while listening to music or sleeping (dream poems), I imagine a good line or image or metaphor, then I write it down on my phone. Whatever I wrote stays in my mind until there’s more lines or images or metaphors that can connect with it to tell a story or something. I say “or something” because some of my phrases are fragments. What about you? What’s your writing process like?

Confidence: I used to do this before I moved to Tuscaloosa. But now, I amuse myself by keeping a journal in my bathroom, my room, and in my bag. Most of my poems start from lines, from ideas. But I also actively try to push myself to write on the spot. I’m not used to that, and it seems that all the classes I’m taking this semester come with prompts. I’m most excited when I’m working on a new project from the scratch.

Alain: I guess that comes as a good challenge, to be taken to places you didn’t see coming, and have to make beauty out of. I mean, prompts come with that.

Confidence: Yeah. The first two weeks were tough. But now, I go to class prepping myself to write. And I’d say it’s getting easier.

Alain: I like that. I guess I need that training myself. The great poet Naomi Shihab Nye often gives us amazing prompts in her workshops, but lazy ass me always avoids them since she leaves room for not going with her prompts. I’m going to do them and see.

Confidence: Naomi is your professor? That’s so cool.

Alain: Yeah, she’s a blessing.

Confidence: Yeah. Try it and see if it’s your thing. We’re all different, even as poets.

Alain: I like your relationship to your diary. Mine is sort of the same. My professor Laurie Ann Guerrero encouraged me to keep a diary next to my pillow as I sleep so that I can record my dream poems instantly before my poor brain forgets them. I’ve been doing just that for about two weeks now. Most times I forget the poem I dreamt and remember no more than a single line. Which, in the moment, is usually frustrating. Do you get poems in your dreams?

Confidence: Yes! And being too lazy most times I fail to write them down. Then I wake up the next day and forget.

Alain: If you will talk a little politics with me, as a creator of culture, which I think, however small it might be, every creative is, what do you think of Black History Month aka Black Future Month? What does it mean to you? What do you think it means to the global Black community?

Confidence: This is a profoundly serious question. Well, I find myself unconsciously aligning with anyone or anything black.

Alain: “I’m rooting for everybody Black” – Issa Rae.

Confidence: I am. Excluding the rapists and badly behaved baby daddies

Alain: I agree.

Confidence: Back to your question, I hold a lot of unpopular opinions about this that’d likely get me lynched or cancelled.

Alain: I think cancel culture is flawed when it comes to people wanting to cancel others for their opinions. People should be free to say whatever is on their minds, otherwise we will live in a hell disguised as nirvana. Just my opinion. Criminals should of course be cancelled, but people shouldn’t be cancelled for saying what is on their minds.

Confidence: True. So true. I feel like cancel culture denies us all room for healthy discussions. I love the whole idea of Black pride, which I see as the celebration of everything unique about Black communities. It shouldn’t just be about Black excellence or Black achievement. Everyday should be Black history month. And within the global Black community, I feel sort of alienated. Mostly because I do not know who I am supposed to be or what my function is. I say this because the larger community seems to be out to prove a point. I’m not for all of that. I mean if it’s your thing then go for it. But I’m more concerned with addressing issues that intimately affect Black populations of the world. Saying this, I have been thinking more about Haiti. About those former French colonies who still pay reparations to France.

Alain: Wow! I love what you’re saying so much.

Confidence: It baffles me how the first Black republic in the world till today is still plagued by Eurocentric greed and poverty. People do not know how much of a treasure Haiti is. And how much we ought to speak for them. I mean look at Africa. Africa is fucked!

Alain: Real fucked. And it’s so sad that some governments have convinced their people that what they have is the best, causing their people to settle for what is obviously mediocre. Take my own country, for example.  Our president Kagame, however good he might be, has been in office for more than two fucking decades. I’m always thinking: what the fuck? If a kid in school gets say an A, should they work to maintain that or challenge themselves to get to an A+, a challenge that includes allowing oneself room for experimenting with new stuff. Which of course will come with the risk of failure. But that’s what we call growth. Facing your fears. The president of my country works hard and uses that “I brought you so far,” “everyone likes me,” and “Africans should be able to decide what’s good for them” – his reaction to the idea that democracy or limited-terms-in-office is a Western idea – to pursue his own agenda. He uses his own rebellion against neocolonialism to decolonize himself, turns around and colonizes his own people. Ever since I was born, I’ve lived under the rule of only one president. It fills me with so much rage.

Confidence: I still don’t understand why Africa is the home of despots. We’ve had our fair share of them. And as a cruel twist of fate would have it,  these people stay alive long enough, only abdicating their power after their death.  I felt this same rage when the Nigerian army shot and killed innocent citizens who were protesting police brutality.

Alain: The political class are after power and money, nothing else.

Confidence: I agree. they only remember the masses exist during elections.

Alain: Yeah! At 19, I made a decision to never enrol in any political party. That’s how the young version of me used to fight back.

Confidence: Do you talk about such issues in your poems? Would you like to?

Alain: Yeah, I have a small number of those on my laptop. What about you?

Confidence: I do. I had a couple of them in a manuscript I sent out.

Alain: My best to the manuscript.

Confidence: Thank you.

Alain: Poetry is a free country.

Confidence: It is! Exactly what we mean when we say we’re citizens of the world.

Alain: Citizens of poetry?

Confidence: Yes!

Alain: In “my president” Danez Smith says:

colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children & vets
                                & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summits
                                with wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in gold
                                to dust our faces into coins

And I say “Hallelujah!” to this poem.

Confidence:  That’s a poem I support!  

Alain: Something interesting caught my eye. I’d like to hear what you think about it. In her poetic essay “Healing and the Poetic Line” writer Emmy Perez says,

I can’t build poems faster/Than The wall’s construction

She also says this:

The poetic line of social justice will not be improved until more poets get up from their computers.

These lines remind me of 2020 when people all around the world took to the streets in protest of police brutality. Among them were creatives of all kinds. Though we believe poetry and many other creative practices are free countries, can we agree that at some point those practices can fail us, that we sometimes need to walk out of the poem and go into the real world to fight the real war?

Confidence: I’d say this: poets and creatives are real persons, with real personalities and interests. “Poet” is more than an abstract designation. We have homes. When our homes are threatened, we come out to fight too.

Alain: That’s so true. I couldn’t have said it better. Here’s my last question for you. When you write, do you have an audience in mind?

Confidence: Previously, no. The intention then was to keep them out because I saw my poems as mine. I had a talk with my professor today, and I relayed my fears to her. She said that part of being conscious as a writer is acknowledging your readers at the point of writing, but not to the extent that it interferes with your craft. But now, I am becoming conscious of my readers. More like I am more informed about shared connections and the need to speak nearby. I would say sometimes having that in mind gives me a foundation to launch from. There was a time when that was all I wanted.

Alain: Confidence, this conversation has been eye-opening to me. Talking to you, to me, is proof of the power of poetry, two strangers easily bonding over a craft of documenting lives and experiences through the beautification of language. I am so grateful I met you.

Confidence: The feeling is mutual. Thank you.

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Alain Hirwa Jules is the author of the poetry pamphlet, Godspeed (Akashic Books, 2022). He has works in Wasafiri, The Carolina Quarterly, Lolwe, Jalada, 20.35 Africa, and Welter. He is a student at Texas State University.

Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor is a queer Nigerian writer. She is currently a first year MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at The University of Alabama. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Minnesota Review, Rigorous, Versification, Ghost Heart, and elsewhere. Also a self-taught illustrator, she has worked on several book covers and is currently an in-house digital artist at Arts Lounge Literary Magazine.