Contraband Bodies

Contraband Bodies is a debut to be reckoned with. Jide Salawu shines in this personal record of diaspora and a country lost to precarious politics. Mourning home, Salawu deploys gritty language, razor-edge imagery, decolonial poetics, and granular details to highlight the diverse circumstances of being a Black migrant in Africa and beyond. Salawu meditates on the agony of Atlantic memories and dispersal, confronting new forms of digital kinship. He creates a unique catalogue of images that map the migratory routes from the village to the city, within continental Africa, and across different diasporic landscapes. He builds on a solid canon of migration and mobility in African poetry and brings forward a powerful, new, diasporic poetic voice.