Negotiating Home in the Long Poem

In this paper, I argue that Amatoritsero Ede uses the long poem to negotiate the idea of home in an African diasporic context. As a form that carries the implications of length, time, and space, the long poem has been used by poets to interrogate the way we structure the world and to deconstruct grand narratives. The figure of the Black immigrant is one that destabilizes grand narratives of nationalism. This makes the form important in its capacity to ask important questions about nation and tradition even as it transgresses them. As a writer from the Niger Delta, a marginal location in Nigeria, and one who has travelled widely and called many places home, Ede writes poetry that speaks to his inhabitation of multiple spaces and produces a sort of ‘transpatiality’. This paper argues that in Ede’s Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children (2009) and Teardrops on the Weser (2021), the long poem form and its ability to negotiate belonging, home, identity, and the complex edge habitats that some diasporic subjects inhabit allows us to better understand and conceptualize Ede’s ‘transpatial poetics’ and the way diasporic writers make and negotiate home. I begin by exploring critical responses to Ede’s poetry to foreground the importance of form and then proceed to unpack the concept of home in the context of the new African diaspora and Afropolitanism. Ultimately, I read Ede’s long poems formally and thematically in terms of the way they represent and meditate on the complex concept of home.