Issue #3 | Àródan | Words-Empire Magazine

  

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Welcome to issue III of Words-Empire Magazine

Writing has always been an instrument of recollection, if not the closest thing humanity possesses to an archaeology of buried feelings and truths. With language, one is forced to unearth a set culture and carry it into the present in order to learn it, to question it, and sometimes to counterbalance it. Every moment holds the fragments of the past, and every period leaves behind its own lettering as if to say; “I was here”. In this sense, the writers’ job, is not merely to be the witness of history but to name and rename the unnameable.

 In the words of Salman Rushdie; “A writer's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep”. Likewise Ralph Waldo Emerson envisioned the poet as namer, when he says; “By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence…”. This is in fact a reminder that literature is not a passive account of reality but an active engagement with it. Sometimes the utmost responsibility of language is not invention but recognition, to look at wounds until the world recognizes and gives it a name.

The fact that no writer stands apart from the society that manufacturers them becomes even trite. By this I mean, the relationship between an artist and his/her world is much more like that between a snail and its shell: inseparable, and carried mutually wherever either goes. 

Words-Empire Magazine’s issues in the past have contained primarily pieces about the status of places, memory, nature, displacement and survival. This third issue continues that conversation, leaning much more heavily on the current situation of Africa, most especially Nigeria. In his poem, “Arodan” from which this issue draws its title, Olamoyegun Noah places childhood memory alongside national consciousness with incredible precision. By transforming his parental method of “Àródan” into a metaphor for his country's condition, it leaves one with no other choice but to see how intimate metaphors can illuminate public realities. The experimentation of a mother's method of patience becomes a lens through which betrayal, governance, and collective endurance are examined. Olamoyegun begins with: “She would press the word/ Àródan into my palm like a/ secret coin/ and send me beyond our gate” later arrives at “So I find myself again on that childhood stool. /Now the stool is the whole/ nation. 

This issue makes me think of the many ways in which literature entirely alters one's  perception. Writing does not merely describe the world; it retrains our attention toward it. Obilade Peiyi’s “Walking poetry”; beautifully emphasises this stance by stating that one doesn't really need deep, dark traumatic experience to see the world with intensity and nuance. She also states that; “Poetry is a way of paying attention. It notices what is usually overlooked and gives it weight: a silence, a memory, a question, a moment of beauty or pain.” Maybe that is literature's most enduring terrain. 

Finally, I hope that you enjoy the issue of poetry, fiction, non fiction, and interview with Rahma O. Jimoh. All examining important issues like social justice, complexity of human emotions, grief, ecological consciousness, and so forth. I am happy to finally witness the birth of this issue and even ecstatic to present them to you.

Above all, I hope it speaks to you the way it has spoken to me.

–S. Abdulwasi'h Olaitan 

Managing Editor