If the Golden Hour Won't Come For Us

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration and the complexities of existence.

Two things that give the chapbook its shape are the figure of the mother and displacement. In the first few poems, the speaker is close to the mother-figure, both in space and emotionally, but by the middle pages, the physical distance widens and, naturally, so does the emotional distance, such that by the end the rift between them is so great that they are unable to sympathize with or understand each other. 

The form of the opening poem is liturgical, and while this religious chant is quite literally what it is, an earnest prayer for transcendence, I think if one takes the attitude of irreverence which the speaker takes or, perhaps, if one considers the physical and sensuous aspects of it—the fluids, the sounds, the choreography of its motions—it begins to appear erotic. What I’m trying to say is that I’m drawn to religious symbolism as a vehicle for more secular acts. After all, there isn’t much difference between religious language and the language of the erotic: desire, worship, love, devotion, surrender, and so on.