Interview by Uche Umezurike
In Where the Baedeker Leads, James Yékú explores in language precise and mellifluous the particulars of longing and love, home and diaspora. He takes the reader along routes of memory and immediacy, traversing time and space, mapping geographies far and wide—geographies of belonging, intimacy, loss, and alienation—all the while revealing what connects, what severs, what roots, and even uproots us—whether we live in Africa or North America, or elsewhere. Yékú finely weaves the personal and the political in this debut poetry collection.
Uche Umezurike: Where the Baedeker Leads touches upon home, migration, diaspora, and identity. It also considers intimacy, sensuality, and love. What drew you to these themes? And what insights did you get while writing your book?
James Yékú: This is a great question, and I am glad you raise it. Actually, those themes took on a life of their own as the collection grew and matured over a ten-year period. But the poems that speak to conditions of exile, migration, and diaspora were the means by which I sought to make sense of life in North America—first and mostly in Canada, and later in the US where I live in Lawrence, the former home of the American poet Langston Hughes, a major leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Of course, the migration poems can be plugged into a long tradition of literary sensibilities that cater to the estrangement and hardships of a life elsewhere, but I like to imagine them as an archive of my own journey through seasons and spaces. The intimacies of these times and places are worked into the poems that grapple with love and sexuality.
UU: Can you speak to the inspiration for these lines: “Here / is where the Baedeker leads: / this doorway to arcane futures.”
JY: I have had this question repeated to me in different forms, whether it’s from people who are curious about the title, or even the lines you quote. My first encounter with the Baedeker was in A Room with a View, E.M. Foster’s beautifully romantic novel of the Modernist tradition exploring the epiphany of its protagonist, Lucy. The Baedeker for Lucy is a cultural technology of restriction, one that limits her to her Victorian education and norms. Like those around her, the Baedeker undermines her agency, but she eventually discovers her true self and feelings when she abandons the Baedeker. What proceeds is a full experience of the marvels, magic, and Beauty of Italy’s Florence, as she gains a necessary self-awareness. Unlike Lucy, however, my collection imagines the Baedeker differently. Rather than a travel instrument of spatial and cultural confinement, it manifests as a tool for navigating and making sense of the complex routes and labyrinthine paths of life. I admit, though, that the Baedeker never actually leads anywhere, since arrival is always in flux. That’s the whole idea of a futurity that is arcane and cryptic.
UU: Some of the poems in the collection excoriate the African political elite, while others contemplate the deaths of African intellectuals such as Chinua Achebe and Nelson Mandela. What did you find challenging in blending personal and political themes?
JY: I should probably have left out those political poems and focused instead on migration and its intimacies, but isn’t it the case that you may leave Nigeria, but it never truly leaves you. Nigeria feels like a perpetual space in your soul which, as its shadows deepen around you, warrants the invocation of poetry as the way the writer screams meaning into the inexplicable, the constantly amorphous and inchoate. At least that was my sense of it, and while living abroad, I still needed to perform my disenchantment through those poems that respond to the country’s political and economic turbulence. And the feminist idea that the personal is political, therefore, suggests in this context that the individual articulation of a poetic voice of society is deeply entangled with the precarious intensities that constitute our collective fate as Nigerians at home or abroad. So, celebrating ancestors such as Achebe and Mandela is one of several ways through which the collection does the work of excoriating Africa’s prebendal political class. You hold up the intellectual achievements of the former in order to harangue the political elite—if at all they still have the capacity for effect.
UU: There are echoes of Olu Oguibe’s “I am Bound to this land by blood” and Claude McKay’s “If we must die” in your poems “Hot Spots” and “If we must sing.” What connections did you want to make in those poems? Which other writers have most influenced your poetry?
JY: With Oguibe’s poem, I was inspired to rethink the idea of land because of my interest in unpacking our deep connections to the digital—a theme I explore in several poems in the collection. Also, drawing from McKay was one way of using the tragedy of racial violence to think through the horrors of ethnic conflicts in Nigeria, and even genocide in Rwanda. Of course, Olu Oguibe and many other writers who have come before me, and who continue to inspire in different ways, make it possible to discover new creative ways of seeing. I am grateful I can read the works of many of these writers because in a way, to go back to the Baedeker, their works serve as some kind of guide for one’s creative journey. At some point, you will need your own literary epiphany like Lucy in Foster’s novel, but as a literary and cultural studies scholar, to be able to engage the works of other writers and scholars is super helpful. But to be precise, several African writers such as Christopher Okigbo and Niyi Osundare have shaped my poetic sensibilities. I remember being confronted as a teenager with Osundare’s work and thinking about the ecological aesthetics of his “Ours To Plough, Not To Plunder.” That poem was my portal into literary criticism.
UU: In “Transition,” the speaker says, “Arrival is the home of a poet.” Likewise, in “Traveler,” the speaker remarks that “a poet is not to be trusted with words.” How has poetry helped you to grapple with notions of home, considering that you live in North America?
JY: That’s a tough one, but I think in the first reference from “Transition,” where the speaker avers that “Arrival is the home of a poet, / despised and beloved, / who emblazons Lawrence’s hills with pride,” I actually refer specifically to my relocation from Saskatoon to Lawrence. Hence, you have the line about “Mount Oread,” where “the stars above tell tales of freedom.” Anyone who is familiar with the history of Kansas—the free state—and knows a thing about Lawrence, will immediately recognize the allusion to Hughes and ideas about slavery and its intersection with settler politics in Kansas. Also, making a new home in Lawrence was not easy, but knowing the important contributions of those who had come before me was empowering. But the concept of home itself for the exilic subject, as many have noted, is always shifting and prone to displacement, and this is what I try to show in poems in which, for example, speakers abjure the community and sunshine of Lagos and welcome the alienation and frigidness which occasionally rain upon the Prairies—in Saskatoon and Kansas. Unfortunately, when, through my North American eyes, I dare to cast a glance at the state of the home left in Nigeria, it actually does recede into shadows, with the beautiful allure of a place not sufficiently redolent to draw you back because home also reaches you thousands of miles away with a violent stench that threatens to suffocate. Sadly, then, home emerges as a metaphor for a past that haunts and a present that barely tolerates you.
James Yékú trained as a literary and cultural studies scholar at Ibadan and Saskatoon. He is an award-winning writer who currently teaches as an assistant professor of African digital humanities at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Where the Baedeker Leads is his first poetry collection.
Uche Peter Umezurike holds a PhD in English from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), he is a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. Double Wahala Double Trouble (a short story collection) and Wish Maker (children’s book) are forthcoming from Griots Lounge Publishing, Canada, and Masobe Books, Nigeria, respectively.