2000 Blacks

“A is for Atlantic, Africa, of course, Ancestor, America, too. B is for / Bashenga: first man, depending on who I’m lying to,” writes Nigerian poet Ajibola Tolase in a masterfully crafted abecedarian poem titled “Transatlantic.” The poem, which appears in Tolase’s debut collection, 2000 Blacks, considers the ways in which the conditions of immigrant life are defined by the codification of laws based on fear of the other. The poem speaks to the irony of those in power claiming ownership of a land that was never theirs to begin with:

Home. It is not hate. That has no place here either. It is the
Immigration laws. I could go on and on about their ignorance
    but I
Just avoid bars and dinner parties. I enjoy time alone in my
    kingdom, I mean
Kitchen. I eat a pound of steak then contemplate my position on
    stolen
Land.

In the first of six poems titled “Refuge Sonnets,” the speaker refers to the “shame” he has inherited due to his father’s ancestors being overpowered by “The men who travelled along the Niger river from the Guinea / highlands,”  who “took from the Tuaregs what they were not given.” This sense of disempowerment has echoes in the speaker’s present life as a Black man living in the United States:

Sometimes I believe I’m in a dream until a cop approaches me
in a grocery store with his gun drawn. Glory to the days I don’t
    die.
I think about the Lagos that I may never see again where the
    dead
migrant might have arrived without welcome.

The book captures the author’s reflections on what it means to be a Black man in a country where, on entering one’s living room, one finds that “another black man was dying / on the TV screen.”