Adedayo Agarau - Entrance
Intersemiotic translation of Entrance by Adedayo Agarau from The Years of Blood — a meditation on ritual violence, disappearance, and witness in Nigeria.
- Date
- April 5, 2026
- Source
- Guernica Magazine
- Poet
- Poet site (external)
Process Note
A note from Ade on the poem and the process:
"Entrance arrives as a negotiation between the head and the body, the dream and the journey, the prayer and the curse. In the poem, the body is the evidence but also the vessel. So what if the vessel is broken, what if the body has been kidnapped, ready to be used for ritual? What does the head say of the condemned body? Whose body is damned? What is the dream this condemned body harbors? The poem exists only inside the ontologized world of this poet, this book, The Years of Blood, where everything is possible, where even the window of escape is a nestling.
Perhaps the answer to the mystery of the poem is to investigate the invocation of the self. In the video, we enter into the liminal space where family appears not as a shifting theater of tenderness and grief. We follow montages of unexplainable disaster, vultures over vast seas, children in afternoons playing soccer, and this boy, searching for answers everywhere amid unspeakable disappearances." — Adedayo Agarau
"Entrance," first published by Guernica Magazine, should be understood within the larger achievement of Adedayo Agarau's The Years of Blood, a debut collection that has been recognized as the winner of the 2023–24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer and later named by the New York Public Library as one of its Best New Poetry Books of 2026. Fordham University Press presents the book as an unflinching confrontation with ritual killings and child abductions in Nigeria, especially in and around rural Ibadan, while reviewers have repeatedly described it as a work of witness: documentary in impulse, shaped by collective trauma, and formally marked by restraint, precision, and silence.
That larger context matters for Entrance. The poem is not only about disappearance and death in Nigeria; it also belongs to a collection critics read as balancing reportage with lyric and visionary pressure. Reviewers have emphasized how Agarau writes from the unstable position of both observer and survivor, and how the book turns Ibadan into more than setting: a site where everyday life, fear, memory, and ritualized violence coexist.
In the video, the body becomes both evidence and vessel, but also something vulnerable to seizure, rupture, and ritual use. Rather than offering straightforward testimony, Entrance works through a surreal and ontological logic consistent with the book's broader world, where violence is real but also symbolically charged.