Loic Ekinga is a Congolese writer. He is the author of the poetry chapbook How To Wake A Butterfly (Odyssey Books). His works of fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Type/Cast Magazine, Ja. Magazine, Poetry Potion, A Long House and Kalahari Review. His experimental mini chapbook Twelve Things You Failed at As A Man Today was an honourable mention by JK Anowe for Praxis Magazine Online. In addition, his short story ‘Loop’ has been adapted into a short film by Vivanation. He is a finalist of Poetry Africa’s Slam Jam competition 2020 and the Fiction Editor for TVO TRIBE.

Precious Okpechi: Hello Loic, it’s great to have you as our featured poet for the month. I would like to begin with a question I often ask because our experiences and understanding are different and unique, what does poetry mean and is to you?

Loic Ekinga: Hi, it’s an honour, really. Thank you. I think I have been asked this question countless times, and every time my answer is a variation of poetry being the magic of resurrecting anything. I think language has the ability to revive everything around us and within us and poetry, for me is its most potent and efficient spell.

Precious: In your poem “Communion” on Poetry Potion, you write: Yesterday I showed so much kindness to a spider / before it poked a hole in my body / & I took its life. I am drifting away from God… I can’t help but notice the underlying reverence for God and wonder how religion has affected your approach to writing?

Loic: Yes. It seems when I write, especially lately– and I look for a word or concept to bind my poem together, my mind runs to God almost immediately as the bonding agent. Is it reverence? Maybe. But I think it’s mostly the result of me choosing a specific version of God for myself and reaching out to it. A kind and soft God, a God I can fall in love with. I was raised Christian and was a practising Christian for most of my life and when I stopped I deeply grieved that severing. And so, in my poetry I try, in a way, to rekindle anything, really with this soft God, I chose for myself. 

Precious: What is urgent at the core of your writing and how do they come alive in the poems featured here?

Loic: Grief. But grief as memory and displacement. Someone I really admire, once mentioned how grief displaces us, and I’ve been shaken by that ever since. I think in these poems, I’m looking to go home, to go back to a state of belonging spiritually, geographically, or otherwise. I tend to romanticize the times I felt at home a lot, and that’s mostly when I was still a child, before my parent’s divorce, or before I left the DRC as a teenager, for instance. I’m trying to heal from grief by relocating myself. 

Precious: You are the fiction editor for TVO TRIBE. Tell me, when reading a work, what are you looking out for, and what piques your interest?

Loic: I’d say, musicality. A story doesn’t have to be overly inventive for it to be good, forcibly. I think a lot about how it’s written, and how it sounds in my head when I read it. Rhythm is important to me and I think that has a lot to do with my poetic background.

Precious: Terry Eagleton said, “the most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it.” What are your thoughts on craft and how does it affect your reading and writing of poetry?

Loic: Excellent question. As I mentioned earlier, I am very drawn to poetry or literature that is rhythmic but also honest. We’ve been trained from our early contact with poetry to dissect it technically, which is fine, but I think that the beauty of the structured and the scientific in poetry is found in its rhythm, ultimately. I grew up listening to classic Rumba legends like Papa Wemba and Reddy Amisi and their poetry is in the musicality of what they speak about. The lyrics aren’t cyphers, they’re just honest and land well on the ear and the heart. I think poetry needs to make us feel. Sarah Lubala-Smit, a Congolese poet, I admire once said that poetry is the education of the heart, and it really is. Poetry needs to reach the heart before travelling to the brain. 

DISPLACEMENT 

My youngest brother smiles and says:
Your father taught me how to play Sudoku,
We had a bonding moment.
I say good but what I meant was
I, too, am looking for home still
you magnificent lost boy
You can’t be in two boxes at once,
father must have told you that.
Fifteen months after Van Gogh cut off his ear, 
he found home
But I don’t want you and me to find it the same way
Twenty years after mum left, father learned that love
could also be a dragonfly –  
Wouldn’t you rather find love that stills?
Or journey home on a familiar road
without blood trails on its path? 
Don’t you wish the violence of night 
found you already tucked in and asleep?  

But where is home, boy? 
Not here, not here.  Nowhere near this place.

IF MY FATHER WERE TO SPEAK, AT LAST

Son, 
I never imagined anything I planted 
On my way here would grow as tall as you did
Let glory return to God—

What is your poetry about, 
I don’t think I understand most of it; 
teach me language, son
So I may show you behind the curtains of my life. 
You say you’ve let go of love recently 
After your mother took you, I looked for God
for twenty years 
Something in our blood is an ever-spinning compass
– I can’t tell you how many times 
I returned to that moment, how many times
Losing you was a barrel held between my teeth

On your way to Lusaka, you tell me that even termites 
Are building toward heaven
I want you to look for God the same way,
I want you to look for home the same way.