Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    If I Gather Here and Shout
    If I Gather Here and Shout
    If I Gather Here and Shout
    Ebook91 pages27 minutes

    If I Gather Here and Shout

    By Funto Omojola

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance—informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body. 

    If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical “figures” of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNightboat Books
    Release dateNov 26, 2024
    ISBN9781643622491
    If I Gather Here and Shout

    Related to If I Gather Here and Shout

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Vowel Play

      Dec 7, 2020

      Vowel Play
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Form Can Hold

      Jan 1, 2024

      If poetry is, at least in part, a quest for form, then form is a poem’s architecture. The words of a poem may be its raw materials—the wood, the stone, the glass—but form is the magic that makes it possible to enter inside those word shelters, to fin

      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Travelling Artist

      Feb 10, 2022

      The Travelling Artist
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Who Has Seen The Wind?

      Sep 17, 2024

      Who Has Seen The Wind?
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Finding Your Audiobook Voice

      Jun 5, 2017

      Finding Your Audiobook Voice
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Grandmother Mind

      Jun 7, 2022

      Grandmother Mind
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Versed class

      May 12, 2021

      Versed class
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Little Love

      Apr 5, 2023

      A Little Love
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Listen To The Story Of The Drum

      May 1, 2023

      Listen To The Story Of The Drum
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Me Aro Koe Ki Te Hā O Hine-ahu-one

      Mar 22, 2022

      I recently overheard my husband teaching an online group a whakataukī (proverb) that speaks to the enduring importance of hard work: “moea te tangata ringa raupā” which, as my husband said, “is sometimes translated as ‘marry the man with calloused ha

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Old Gods. New Tricks

      Apr 1, 2022

      Old Gods. New Tricks
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Service We’re Pleased To Be Of

      Sep 1, 2021

      Service We’re Pleased To Be Of
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bruce Pascoe Rewrites History

      Feb 7, 2019

      Bruce Pascoe Rewrites History
      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Vaulting to New Heights

      Jan 2, 2023

      On the morning of February 12, 2021, the silence outside my room was deafening as the lockdown approached its one-year anniversary. Though I could hear the tell-tale pop of firecrackers exploding from far away, it was a lonely sound that reverberated

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Meet Aseel Tayah

      Dec 2, 2021

      Meet Aseel Tayah
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lucky Were the Bodies

      May 3, 2022

      Lucky Were the Bodies
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Selections from Journal, 1996

      Jun 5, 2023

      Thought about how describing a dream immediately shows up its symbolic value—“I was ineptly taking part in a production of his and he did not give me any help …”—and realized (over again?) that that is what writing does: an incident, once it is descr

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘Africa Month Should Be About The Revival Of Knowledge For Self’

      May 16, 2021

      ATTENDING a Mbuso Khoza performance should be on the bucket list for many South Africans. He takes you on a journey of some of our well-known traditional songs and hymns, gives them context, expands on their history and then gives them a facelift. He

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Baton From The Baltic

      Feb 16, 2020

      Baton From The Baltic
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Robert Andrew

      Jul 1, 2022

      Robert Andrew
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for If I Gather Here and Shout

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      If I Gather Here and Shout - Funto Omojola

      Ceremony

      pa sad today

      pa before pa been sad. today,

      pa is a tailor: stitch whole

      village. pa scrape

      inside of pa’s pa’s mouth, found whole

      village blood underneath white coat tongue

      stone down pa’s pa’s throat. nothing

      gets put back where it belongs

      Fig.

      for a while, it’s only me: i put on mourning jacket wherever i can fit it, peel skin, shave, meet the girl of my dreams. but then this psychic tells me my twin daughters are gonna love me really love me be obsessed with me.

      and so, in the midst of decorating womb the elder uncoils unvessels i prepare the entirety of the oh she glows cookbook and we both sugar our lips.

      maybe wọ́n ń ṣe oògùn, but it only takes a handful of guests to tap on something

      swelling before you realize raw can’t go through you the same way anymore.

      what a silly thing it is to not really be able to shit!

      by the time they found my mother, she had rolled under the bed. they found my mother rolled, under the bed screaming, my child!

      pa’s pa lives on palm-shaped portion of land on compound they built for themselves

      at morning they dry maize in center of palm, at night they thread blouses on edge of palm

      Fig.

      what is this tumbling place where only i am center unmoving? what is this tumbling stage around me and around me where there are jesters and sticks curved toward my chest? in a different time time we are gathered in perfectly-shapen basins in a different time time a worm croaks around us and around us and we are preoccupied with where the croak will land not with its projection or mouth.

      in a different time time someone is shouting about a fissured egg and men who fissured egg and egg sac. what is this sirening place where i am edges cascading? croak us your mouth quickly not soft. in 1943 grandpa ado rode his motorcycle to èkìtì and broke his arms on his way back. the people at st. gregory on basiri street covered him in plaster of paris and he spent january with arms outstretched like jesus.

      pa’s pa’s palm is big enough for ceremony

      pa’s pa teaches pa how to do ceremony in center of palm

      center

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1