While working on his collection Origins of the Syma Species, the poet Tares Oburumu did something unusual in African poetry: he named one of his poems for another young Nigerian poet he did not know personally. “A Long Walk on Endlessness, the City of J.K. Anowe, the Decembrist” is a one-page poem that evokes childhood and memory, but after those, the stanzas turn towards a figure, someone the persona recognizes:
I squint to see you scattered in grains,
head obliquely placed on your window
until I headline the photo: Brother, who are you living?
They say you have been mad all your life.
& I understand what they mean.
You have become a fine writer.
Oburumu’s choice of title is a lofty honour to bestow on someone of his generation, the kind of generous admiration of another’s talent that populates much of literary lore. But it is also a tribute, from one kind of survivor to another, to a voice that became a point of departure for many young Nigerian poets exploring the self and all that came with it: the trauma, the vulnerability, the mental illness.
Six years before that poem appeared, the man it is named for, JK Anowe, was on the brink of checking into a psychiatric hospital in Abakaliki, in southeastern Nigeria. It was 2017 and he was 23, and for most of his life had been trying to understand his mental state. Phases of happiness reversed by sudden dejection. He had read so much about clinical depression and major depressive disorders, how they affected artists, how some artists thrived on them, derived from them. He was wondering if he was simply going to keep writing poems about anxiety, if he was not meant to understand his fragmented way of seeing the world, the splinters from which his poems emerged. One splinter was in his decision to write as “JK Anowe,” a pseudonym.
The psychiatrist asked about his life history, the moment he started to feel that way. He was going to recommend institutionalization, but the young man said no. In an unusual response, the doctor listened to his patient and did what he requested. He called Anowe’s mother and opened a conversation about mental illness within their family.
“That was my mum’s first time of ever sitting with somebody to converse about mental illness,” Anowe told me. “She could not believe what she was hearing because she had these other ways of interpreting what was happening with me.”
Growing up in the northern city of Jos, he had a relatively sheltered life, which may have accounted for his introspective nature. His boyhood was a series of racing impressions: sprinting down the paths of Gada Biu to Alheri, goat meat bundled in his arms for his mother; darting home as stray dogs gave chase.
His mother was always near, vigilant. She worked as a typist at Command Secondary School before taking a secretarial job at the Ministry of Defence headquarters. She’d hand him newspapers and insist he copy paragraphs out by hand. He sat for hours, writing out neat rows of words, and in his head, the stories formed. His family was devout and true to routine. They attended St. Murumba Catholic Church, where he lifted his voice in the children’s choir. It was the place he made his first friendships.
These parts of her son’s life his mother knew; what she couldn’t understand was where the anxiety came from. The only source of fear in her son that she could trace happened in the year 2001. The Jos riots were at their peak. Their family lived in Angwan Rogo, one of the conflict’s epicenters. People were running, some for their lives. People were dying. Although her son could not have grasped fully what that meant then, she knew he would have felt the sense of urgency.
What Anowe felt was a kind of togetherness he hadn’t known before, born in chaos but solid, grounding. But by the time their family moved due to the riots, to Farin Gada, years later, the restlessness was deep-seated. His mother left for Abakaliki with his sisters. He stayed behind to finish secondary school, surrounded by relatives but alone in a way he’d never been. He was 16 when it occurred to him that a sadness had grown inside of him overtime, and he could not let go of it.
The psychiatrist helped him and his mother uncover these. “At the time, what he was doing was Fanonian,” Anowe told me, with hindsight. “Fanon believes that the best way for a depressive or someone going through mental illness to heal is within their community, not in a straitjacket, not locked in a room and given drugs. Go back home, live with the people you’ve always lived with all your life, the people who bring happiness into your life. Live with them. That’s how you recover.”
Not that he recovered. The psychiatrist had made him realize that he could “find clues in history — whether personal, familial or national.” In a poem he wrote years later, titled “psychoautobiography,” he placed each line as a door to memory, yet the “doors” lead to rooms without walls:
a baby cries on a doorstep
call it the lost shuffle of my exiled homesick feet
i am all i cannot accept the door gives in after
one deep breath my parents inside turning into
the strangers they have always spoiled to be.
In the unsettled self-image is an ongoing confrontation with past selves, a tension between alienation and belonging. Home, as James Baldwin wrote, was not only a place but a condition; and where one found happiness, one might call home. Until he could locate himself, Anowe knew that his lay in language — the English language, which he had a complex relationship with.

JK Anowe did not became fluent in English until well into his pre-teens. Where most of his friends began to read at the age of three or four, he only started after seven. The first time he stepped into a library, he was awestruck. It was a relatively small place, tucked into the side of his school, Redeem Academy, near Katako, but the books were so many that he thought to himself: I want to do this. He began to learn to speak English, alternating between it and Igbo, before leaving the latter behind in, as he put it, “a way that I do not find necessarily nice or romantic.” He listened more to his father who spoke in proverbs and learned to love their layered meanings.
By sixteen, he made his first attempt at a novel. One of his peers read the work and told him, “Dude, you’re such a good writer!” — a compliment he still considers one of the greatest he’s ever received. He transitioned into poetry because it felt “obscure.” He could write about feelings he didn’t really understand, avoiding the structure and clarity of prose. Still, when he applied to the University of Benin for undergraduate studies, he avoided English. He wanted History, but the school pushed him to the Department of Foreign Languages, to French. He joked that it was the Universe: “I didn’t want to study English so the Universe punished me with another colonizer tongue.”
On Facebook, he joined writing contests, and met other young writers, including TJ Benson, Romeo Oriogun, and Stanley Princewill McDaniels. They wrote poems on topics ranging from love to mental illness. He read mostly Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath but couldn’t fathom why he felt so alive and seen in their lines.
Then he read Things Fall Apart. He identified with Ikemefuna, the boy who was sacrificed. The tragic cry of Ikemefuna — My father, they have killed me! — stayed with him. It called to mind, he said, “Jesus Christ’s final call when being crucified: ‘My father, they have forsaken me.’ The archetype of the sacrificial figure.”
Personal and collective sacrifice became a spatial metaphor in his first chapbook, the ikemefuna tributaries: a parable for paranoia, published by Praxis Magazine in 2016. In Achebe’s novel, Ikemefuna’s story is only part of the background for the larger tragedy of Okonkwo’s life and eventual suicide — a victim in the blame game between the villages of Umuofia and Mbaino. Anowe, however, foregrounds Ikemefuna as a conduit for collective grief, seeking to uncover fractures in his identity.
In “ii. sheep,” the speaker invokes him with ancestral regard, as a co-sharer in the world’s suffering, to “intercede for us” as “naked gods/ cannot clothe us.” It speaks:
we are broken
Ikemefuna
like mother’s favorite china
in the sand.
Its kindred “we” dissolves the boundaries between the individual and the collective, foregrounding trauma as transgenerational inheritance. It opens a universal gateway to suffering, an all-encompassing brokenness for which Ikemefuna stands as archetype.
“I wanted to, in a way, deify Ikemefuna, or my speaker wanted to elevate him from that place of man into a place of god or chi,” Anowe said. “You could even look at the chapbook as a conversation between an individual and their chi, reaching for that voice that would instruct them on how to go about the mental or psychological squalor the speaker is experiencing.”
The chapbook put him on the map in online poetry circles. In a 2019 review, the poet Oka Benard Osahon read it as “a criticism of the politics of the day,” and its eponymous symbol as “a witness in some places, then an intercessor; a victim of fascist aristocrats who ruin the sanctity of life in their pursuit of power.” One reads in that an extended meaning: that, with the inadequacy of political and social systems, Ikemefuna is beckoned upon, once again, as the sacrificial lamb of redemption. To accompany each of its chapbooks, Praxis Magazine published a response series by other poets, and that of the ikemefuna tributaries drew the highest number of responses.
But even as his work gained some visibility, Anowe did not feel like he belonged in those Facebook groups and contests where hype mattered more than craft. He was a recluse, often keeping silent in group interactions. He wanted a community of people who understood him, who placed focus on the work. He would not find it until late 2016, when a close friend invited him to Nsukka.
Facebook was where Anowe met David Benson, a poet he recognized as “genuinely smart.” They became friends. Benson didn’t just edit Anowe’s work; he challenged him to sharpen his lines. He was, as Anowe recalled, “training me on the language level.” In Nsukka, Benson brought him to The Writers’ Community (TWC), a small group of undergraduates who gathered on Saturdays to read and critique each other.
Then Benson introduced him to Otosirieze. They were in Benson’s apartment and Otosirieze — “the tall dude who wouldn’t sit down” — read his poems and said, “You are good. You have something. It’s a gift, you cannot just let it go to waste.” The words were weighty, boisterous, and they drove him to begin taking himself seriously as a poet.
He admired the culture at TWC and joined their meetings in a small thatched-roof hut in the Children’s Library. Members read their works aloud, their voices filling the air. The feedback was raw and honest, and from a place of mutual respect and a shared commitment to each other’s growth. It was a different kind of camaraderie.
“I found myself surrounded by writers who seemed ahead of me, yet also approachable in a way that they quickly became my literary family,” Anowe told me. Even now, his partner fondly refers to his time with TWC as “his first MFA program.” Nsukka itself held an ambience that shaped his poetic vision; once, the hills looked to him like forests climbing the sky, and he wrote the image down.
Half a year later, Anowe’s poem “Credo to Leave,” published in the defunct magazine Expound, won the defunct Brittle Paper Award for Poetry. He had become part of a new vanguard of young voices in Nigerian poetry, alongside Brunel Prize winners Gbenga Adesina and Romeo Oriogun. His verses on shame, disgust, masturbation, sex, self-antagonism, and mental deterioration spawned admirers and imitators. Later, Otosirieze would describe his “self-centric, subversive poetry” as pioneering a sub-tradition of confessional writing:
preoccupied with the visceral, the personal, and the psychological — with digging into the oneself. Pegged in the psyche, its introspection — the focus on speaking into oneself rather than speaking out to the world — is an outlet for a confessional generation not afraid to voice its internal struggles and flaws, to make art of it.
Anowe explained to Gaamangwe Joy Mogami of Africa in Dialogue, “Poetry has been the only constant amidst the struggles with feeling displaced in a world largely built on the premise of identity. And I think what it has done is help me deal with my confusion, cartograph it best as I could. Nevertheless, I am still very much in the process of finding meaning. I believe we all are. At least, until we stop breathing.”
By then he had joined Praxis Magazine as associate poetry editor, later chapbook editor, working with the managing editor Laura Kaminski, an American. It was a different experience from his previous dealings with senior writers and editors in Nigeria, where the norm was often “seniority” as opposed to mutual respect. Kaminski treated him as an equal, even though he was less experienced than she was. She also taught him to meet each piece on its own terms. She had helped him arrange the ikemefuna tributaries, receiving drafts and guiding him to chisel the poems, line by line, into his ideal form.
“Working with Laura made me want to have that relationship with people in my own life as a writer,” he said to me. “I didn’t want to be seen as oga or superior. I wanted to engage with other writers as someone grappling with the mysteries of writing and life alongside them. [Laura did] that conscious work of leaving preconceived notions out and looking at the work because that’s how you can help the work.”
He wasn’t searching for works that adhered to a certain literary standard; he was drawn to pieces that were crazy in their originality, that defied the expected. When he first received Kanyinsola Olorunnisola’s In My Country, We Are All Crossdressers, which the magazine published, he remembered thinking: People are so brilliant!
For him, editing is not about simply assessing what is right or wrong in a piece — it is about understanding and honoring whatever a writer is trying to achieve. Care and empathy are crucial in critique. “When someone gives you their work, it’s a vulnerable act. The best way to get them to listen to your feedback is to first get them to understand that you see what they are doing. The responsibility falls on the editor to show the writer that they can trust them.”

All that while, as he worked through his problems with the psychiatrist, Anowe’s new poems fed off his depressive disorder. In bouts of existential dread, with a mind constantly in motion, listless and anxious, the compositions mirrored, in form, that internal chaos. They embraced disarray and unpredictable mobility, heavy leaps from image to image, and feeling to feeling. He took inspiration from the fragmented lyricism of the pop duo Twenty One Pilots — what observers have called “schizoid pop,” where one jumps from thought to thought, trusting that meaning will emerge — and called his “schizo poetry.”
It was a solution. “Rather than approaching mental illness from an edited, polished place, how can we lean into those small idiosyncrasies and let the poems emerge naturally, unrefined? Sure, you can later refine it at the syntax level and polish it if needed, but initially, it’s about embracing that fragmented quality. You can’t separate the way you see the world from your mental health. I was writing all these poems with my thoughts and anxieties spiraling. They’re wrapped in layers of metaphor, a bunch of things happening on the surface, but underneath, it’s really just anxiety.”
In that period, he wrote “Aubade with Notes on DNA,” one of the best examples of memory as DNA, a frequent device in much of the confessional work in contemporary Nigerian poetry. The poem treats memory as a physical, almost biological, entity. It is structured to trace the speaker’s DNA — not in the conventional sense of biological inheritance, such as the shape of a nose or the color of eyeballs, but as a repository of trauma and violence. It presents the speaker’s lineage as one steeped in war, a history that permeates the mind and body. The early invocation of violence situates memory as both curse and legacy, transmitted like a genetic marker:
hence i touched down midnight / of a mayday in ’94 / my mother could have passed / for any war woman [fed to the falcons] / she returned each time the falconer.
It extends this hereditary trauma to the father figure as well:
memory being my father—a youth wasted / turning the other cheek / for in his haste / to find shade / in the shadow of the cross.
“Shadow of the cross” suggests colonial Christianity, another layer of inheritance.
In 2019, another poem, “You Sing of a Leaving,” was shortlisted for the Gerard Kraak Prize. That year, his second chapbook, Sky Raining Fists, arrived from Madhouse Press. It has verses of raw immediacy and spontaneity, where meaning emerges organically from the chaotic intersperse of personal history and metaphor. It contains “psychoautobiography,” which resulted from his earlier diagnosis. Another poem, “Tender Crow’s Feet,” concretizes suicide as a dialogue between emptinesses — between the self and the non-being:
so you could grow
the nerve to complete the taking of your own life
because like touching your
self in pagan places suicide is but one void telling
another—now i
must leave this body & return from you
It considers suicide not merely an act of ending but an attempt to resolve fragmentation, to merge one void (self) with another (death). But the merging comes with tension, offering no guarantee of grace, only the ambiguous “telling” of one emptiness to another. And in comparing suicide to masturbation — taken here as an act accompanied by guilt — both ring as attempts to transgress the body and its boundaries, to escape it or to transcend it, even if for a moment.
At the Lagos International Poetry Festival, where he was a guest, Anowe met Kaveh Akbar, the Iranian American poet, who encouraged him to apply for an MFA in Poetry at his then programme at Purdue University. He was admitted, alongside another young consequential Nigerian poet, Logan February, and left Abakiliki for America. It was 2021.
But a year into life in Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue announced that it was shutting down the MFA, throwing students into panic. The uncertainty hurt Anowe mentally. Eventually, he was accepted at Northwestern University’s Litowitz program and moved to Chicago in the summer of 2022.
“I spent a lot of time in my head,” he told me at one point on our Zoom call. “I mean, I didn’t understand why. Now I do. I am more conscious of it now and I am more present. I have the kind of life that requires me to be present.”

Chicago was a fresh start, and the stability of the past two years allowed Anowe to finally push onto the next level in his work. But his impetus was not in America; it was back home in Nigeria. He realized that, even before his encounter with the psychiatrist provided insights into his private struggles, he had been interrogating an inherited public trauma. It was his native Igbo history and the shadow of the Biafran War, in which an estimated three million Easterners died from 1967 to 1970, most of them from the starvation by the Nigerian Federal Government.
“There’s this transference,” he explained, “what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. But the Igbo had ways of dealing with that long before colonization. Warriors returning from battle would be sent into the forest to recuperate. They had to relearn how to be human, to shed the animal instincts war imposed on them, before being reintegrated into society.”
This process of “relearning humanity” was something he strived towards in his craft. “As Igbo, we believe that a person isn’t born human; you have to learn how to become one.” He likened it to his own experience seeking psychiatric help. “I felt so disconnected from my natural body, from my sense of self, that I had to relearn how to feel human again.”
Leaving Nigeria was part of it. “[It] sounds cliché, but being far away from home, you start to long for all the things that are familiar. And then you start to look for ways to understand the new world that you live in because maybe the frameworks you’ve been using to understand the world haven’t been working for you. It’s like starting afresh.”
He stumbled upon this understanding by chance. He was writing an essay for class and read Chinwe Achebe’s 1986 treatise The World of the Ogbanje — “the only extensive scholarly work on the topic.” The author juxtaposed Ogbanje with Western psychiatry, a materialist interpretation of what is often viewed as cosmological. Anowe saw how much he had relied on Western notions of mental illness, enough to lose sight of his identity as an Igbo person in the world.
“Mental illness exists in Igbo cosmology, but we don’t call it that,” he said. “We talk about chi, the life force given by Chukwu when he creates a person, mmadu. When you’re separated from your chi, nothing goes well — financially, romantically, mentally.”
After all these years of confronting himself, here was what he was searching for: an Igbo way of seeing mental health. While Western frameworks offer useful language for it, Igbo ideology offers more: an acceptance of life’s mysteries.
“In Igbo cosmology, a person’s life is an epic,” he explained. “You form friendships, make enemies; some relationships just walk into your life unexpectedly. It’s absurd, and I want to bring that sense of absurdity into my poetry.”
Over the years, he tinkered with his full-length manuscript, never satisfied with what he had. With his new understanding, his collection would merge Igbo cosmology with the contemporary self. It would take in personal struggle but with the aura of a love story, as well as familial bonds and the sustaining friendships in his life. All of these took him into music, and he began work on a spoken word album. All would continue his infusion of self-mythology.
“Reading Sexton taught me I didn’t have to be so plain about these things,” he said. “I could create worlds, metaphors. I could take my reader on an adventure while showing them the fragmented parts of myself.”
When he first told me about living in Jos as a child during the riots of 2001, he said that everything around him was alive in a way he couldn’t account for. “I just could feel the overall excitement around me. People were on their toes.” That trauma was not necessarily the seed of “A Road’s Guide to Kill,” but the poem parallels that tension between beauty and unease, from consistent hurtling:
& the car breezes
towards another city that knows menot by my scent or face, my fate
nor sweat, but by my fear—that tragedy of arrival
to arrive to. & the sky came downin mild cloaks of rain
multiplied into puddlesof more sky. Trees outside raced us
nowhere, windows wound downonly to let in a whiff of deadness—
“Truth is context,” he said to me. “ ‘Eziokwu’ is the word for truth in the Igbo language. But, on a literal level, it means ‘good talk,’ ‘talking well,’ ‘good speech.’ Igbo people believe that when you speak well, you have spoken the truth. That is what I go for in my writing.” ♦
“JK Anowe Confronts Himself” appears in The Next Generation Series, an Open Country Mag project profiling rising African writers and curators, edited by Otosirieze. The groundbreaking first issue, featuring 16 voices from nine countries, was released in April 2022.
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Buy JK Anowe’s book from Madhouse Press:
- Sky Raining Fists
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4 Responses
Excellent exposition on JK. I like how you
introduced snippets of his poems to X-ray his style of writing and of course his mental battles.
I hope he has finally and truly found himself.
Incredible. I never knew JK was fighting all of that psyche-stuff. It [ the poem] would have come out better if I had known.
By the way, this is my email address: amirahoburumu77@gmail.com.
Could you please ask JK to reach me? I have got to a project to work with him.
Thanks.
JK Anowe, a poet I adore so much. He helped shaped my view towards poetry during a very remarkable workshop of his I was opportune to attend.
Never heard of him . Your writeup on JK was top notch, even revealing and inspiring. Now one could relate with all that zanzy style