Remembering Gboyega Odubanjo (1996–2023)

I first met Gboyega at a reading in a community center in West London in the autumn of 2019. We had been booked to read together and, after the reading, chatted while walking the five minutes to the underground station. Obviously I had loved his reading, but talking to Gboyega was magical. It’s hard to explain. As we walked and spoke, I felt my life changing. Like: here was this person I had never met before, and here, now, before me, was the rest of my life. The feeling of a door opening into a room I never knew existed.

We chatted mainly about editing; we were both at the beginning of our journeys as editors. At the time, Gboyega was guest editing an issue of Magma, and I, along with Mariah Whelan, had started bath magg that summer. It was exciting and terrifying. We agreed that, with this business of editing, we were grasping around in the dark. But, doubtless, we were onto something important. It was during this chat, halfway down that terraced street in West London, I first heard Gboyega’s laugh. Damn. The laugh of laughs. A singular laugh. A sound so true it lifts beyond grief. As I write this, I can hear it ringing from the corner of a pub.

Again, it’s hard to explain. Before we dipped underground toward our separate lives, I asked Gboyega if he fancied joining  bath magg as an editor, he accepted, and that was that: we walked through the door.

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When a person dies, especially so young, they’re often mythologized, lifted beyond the everyday plane of the living. And it makes sense: a person has died too soon, we must tell the best of them, hold them, raise them aloft. But I don’t want to mythologize Gboyega’s life, because he was my friend; he was so much more than a poet, let alone a poet who died young. His talent is one aspect of him, and to describe his poetry feels oddly voyeuristic, like it misses so much of the person he was, like I’m standing on stage describing him while he can’t speak. As I write this, I can hear him asking, What are you doing, bro? And then he says words to the effect of, Obviously I’m not dead. How can I be dead? Because even now, six months on, I still don’t understand it. I still don’t think of Gboyega as a person who could die.

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Gboyega had an ear for sound, for the musicality of dialect and everyday colloquialism: his poems are full of real and golden noise. They listen and speak in a mechanics that feels entirely their own, as in “The Lyric Adam,” one of the poems published in this issue of   Poetry:

because now emerging from the thames—after adam—comes every beast of the field and every bird of the air and every man on the block to seewhat adam would call them.

Gboyega’s poems make me think of light, the way it fills space and touches things and names them with that touch. There’s a sense of time that begins with light, cobbled too, perhaps, with all that is lost in the process of becoming.

but adam—emerged and still wet—has already moved on—however slightly—from the actual boy and is looking back from this distance—however miniscule—so that home is no longer so much home andthe boy is no longer so much a boy.
—From “The Lyric Adam”

I believe wholeheartedly that Gboyega’s poems couldn’t have been written by anyone other than him. Gboyega was his own specificity. His poems were heading somewhere totally new.

As in: anyone meeting Gboyega for the first time might ask, Who is this person rocking two (or three) shirts at once? How on earth is he making that look work? And his cut jeans? Swinging around his calves? OK, OK, I’m listening. A moment ago we were talking about mortality and now we’re talking about Arsenal Football Club. Oops, we’re listing our favorite rom-coms. OK! He has a ranking system for rom-coms. OK! It’s my round. Two pints of Guinness please.

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The majority of my time with Gboyega was spent in pubs, namely Molly Blooms in Dalston where he was a regular. It was in this pub, beneath the many wall-mounted TVs playing a combination of football and horse racing, that he first told me about the idea for a book he wanted to write. The book, based on real events, would center on a Nigerian boy who was trafficked from Benin City in 2001, through Hamburg, arriving in London. Between Hamburg and London, the boy would be murdered and dismembered. His remains would be thrown into the Thames. When the police found the boy’s torso, wearing nothing but a pair of orange shorts, unable to identify him, they would name him Adam.

I remember Gboyega telling me how the boy would have been roughly his age. I remember the silence after he said that. I remember us, in unison, reaching for our pints of Guinness.

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At the beginning of summer 2023, Gboyega and I met up in central London for a friend’s birthday party. The party wouldn’t start until 7 pm, but we decided to meet at 2 pm at a pub around the corner. I had been out of London for most of the year, completing a fellowship at the University of Manchester, so I hadn’t seen much of Gboyega. When I arrived twenty minutes late, there he was posted up in the sun, a half-empty pint of Guinness before him.

We talked about our books; mine had come out in January, and his, titled Adam, was practically finished. He’d sent me a draft a couple of weeks before. A “close-to-final draft,” he called it. He said Adam would come out with Faber (“Different sauce,” he said, and quite right, too: Faber is the pinnacle of  UK poetry publishing) in 2024, most probably summer, which would be a year from that sun-filled beer garden.

I saw Gboyega a number of times that summer, but it’s that afternoon I think of most. Our books were finished. All the work we do in the dark. I remember us laughing, banging the table, shouting, The poets have emerged! The poets have emerged!

I’m thinking of light again. The feeling of squinting into light. The impossibility of all of this.

Gboyega should be here. He should be here to do the lifetime of things he still had left to do, one of them being to bring his incredible book into the world, to see Adam.

I think about the beginning of a poem called “Tuesday” from his second pamphlet, Aunty Uncle Poems: “here we are fat/as husbands/a bag of peas between us.” It’s funny. I never told him so, but I often imagined us old together. Going about my life, Gboyega would pop into my head, and I’d picture us ancient and broken and cantankerous at the back of some pub, the world long since forgotten, our bodies hunched under the weight of our living. Perhaps we still wrote poems. Perhaps we didn’t. It’s impossible to say.